For the First Time, a Cell Built From Scratch Grows and Divides
For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life. The lab-made synthetic cell...
View ArticleHow the Bird Eye Was Pushed to an Evolutionary Extreme
When an optometrist shines a bright light into your eyes, a vast, branching tree sprouts in your field of vision. This is the shadow of blood vessels. Though we normally can’t perceive them, these...
View ArticleA New Type of Neuroplasticity Rewires the Brain After a Single Experience
Every experience we have changes our brain, the way a ceramicist reshapes a slab of clay. Every corner we turn, every conversation we have, every shudder we feel causes cascading effects: Chemicals are...
View ArticleDisorder Drives One of Nature’s Most Complex Machines
At the dawn of complex life, evolution created a container for DNA, its most treasured item. A few billion years later, 20th-century microscopists looked at this container — the nucleus — up close and...
View ArticleHow Animals Build a Sense of Direction
On a remote island in the Indian Ocean, six closely watched bats took to the star-draped skies. As they flew across the seven-acre speck of land, devices implanted in their brains pinged data back to a...
View ArticleHow the Brain Moves From Waking Life to Sleep (and Back Again)
The pillow is cold against your cheek. Your upstairs neighbor creaks across the ceiling. You close your eyes; shadows and light dance across your vision. A cat sniffs at a piece of cheese. Dots fall...
View ArticleHow the Brain Balances Excitation and Inhibition
From Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s hand came branches and whorls, spines and webs. Now-famous drawings by the neuroanatomist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries showed, for the first time, the...
View ArticleHow We Came To Know Earth
Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history. This series from Quanta Magazine guides you through basic climate science — from quantum effects to ancient hothouses, from...
View ArticleHow Smell Guides Our Inner World
When Thomas Hummel gets a whiff of an unripe, green tomato, he finds himself in his childhood home in Bavaria. Under the tilted ceilings of the bedroom that he shared with his two older brothers, there...
View ArticleScience, Promise and Peril in the Age of AI
An exploration of how artificial intelligence is changing what it means to do science and math, and what it means to be a scientist. The post Science, Promise and Peril in the Age of AI first appeared...
View ArticleAI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK
In 1943, a pair of neuroscientists were trying to describe how the human nervous system works when they accidentally laid the foundation for artificial intelligence. In their mathematical framework for...
View ArticleIntelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals
Humans tend to put our own intelligence on a pedestal. Our brains can do math, employ logic, explore abstractions and think critically. But we can’t claim a monopoly on thought. Among a variety of...
View ArticleConcept Cells Help Your Brain Abstract Information and Build Memories
Imagine you’re on a first date, sipping a martini at a bar. You eat an olive and patiently listen to your date tell you about his job at a bank. Your brain is processing this scene, in part, by...
View ArticleFish Have a Brain Microbiome. Could Humans Have One Too?
Bacteria are in, around and all over us. They thrive in almost every corner of the planet, from deep-sea hydrothermal vents to high up in the clouds, to the crevices of your ears, mouth, nose and gut....
View ArticleHow the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero
Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers...
View ArticleThe Cellular Secret to Resisting the Pressure of the Deep Sea
The bottom of the ocean is cold, dark and under extreme pressure. It is not a place suited to the physiology of us surface dwellers: At the deepest point, the pressure of 36,200 feet of seawater is...
View ArticleHow Colorful Ribbon Diagrams Became the Face of Proteins
Jane Richardson never considered herself an artist. Then, in the late 1970s, the structural biologist found herself in need of some colored pencils, pastels and sketching paper. Richardson, a professor...
View ArticleWhat Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images
Two years ago, Sarah Shomstein realized she didn’t have a mind’s eye. The vision scientist was sitting in a seminar room, listening to a scientific talk, when the presenter asked the audience to...
View ArticleHow AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It
In December 2020, when pandemic lockdowns made in-person meetings impossible, hundreds of computational scientists gathered in front of their screens to watch a new era of science unfold. They were...
View ArticleElectric ‘Ripples’ in the Resting Brain Tag Memories for Storage
György Buzsáki first started tinkering with waves when he was in high school. In his childhood home in Hungary, he built a radio receiver, tuned it to various electromagnetic frequencies and used a...
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