Why the Human Brain Perceives Small Numbers Better
More than 150 years ago, the economist and philosopher William Stanley Jevons discovered something curious about the number 4. While musing about how the mind conceives of numbers, he tossed a handful...
View ArticleIn the Gut’s ‘Second Brain,’ Key Agents of Health Emerge
From the moment you swallow a bite of food to the moment it exits your body, the gut is toiling to process this strange outside material. It has to break chunks down into small bits. It must...
View ArticleShe Studies How Addiction Hijacks Learning in the Brain
Erin Calipari comes from a basketball family. Her father, John Calipari, has coached college and professional basketball since 1998, leading six teams to the NCAA Final Four, and her brother coaches...
View ArticleNew Cell Atlases Reveal Untold Variety in the Brain and Beyond
In the 16th century, the Belgian cartographer Abraham Ortelius created the world’s first modern atlas — a collection of maps that he called “The Theater of the World.” The maps, drawn by Ortelius and...
View ArticleNew AI Tools Predict How Life’s Building Blocks Assemble
Proteins are the molecular machines that sustain every cell and organism, and knowing what they look like will be critical to untangling how they function normally and malfunction in disease. Now...
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...
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 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 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 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 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...
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