An army of free-floating minibrain clones are heading your way!
No, that’s not the premise of a classic sci-fi brain-in-jars blockbuster. Rather, a team at...
In the late 1800s, Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal drew hundreds of images of neurons. His exquisite work influenced our understanding of what...
Stem cells are finicky creatures.
With the ability to generate any type of cell in the body, they’re constantly bombarded by chemical, hormone, and other...
The origin of consciousness has teased the minds of philosophers and scientists for centuries. In the last decade, neuroscientists have begun to piece together...
The last woolly mammoth roamed the vast arctic tundra 4,000 years ago. Their genes still live on in a majestic animal today—the Asian elephant.
With...
In September, scientists at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health announced they had successfully grown “humanized” kidneys inside pig embryos.
The scientists genetically altered...
Trying to understand consciousness calls to mind images of pensive philosophers in a thinking pose. Soft rock and freestyle rap with lyrics based on...
The human brain is a master of computation. It’s no wonder that from brain-inspired algorithms to neuromorphic chips, scientists are borrowing the brain’s playbook...
Nearly a decade ago, mini-brains shot onto the neuroscience scene with a hefty promise: understanding the developing brain and restoring injured brains.
Known as brain...
Ten years ago, a little-known bacterial defense mechanism skyrocketed to fame as a powerful genome editor. In the decade since, CRISPR-Cas9 has spun off...
ROBOTICS
These Autonomous, Wireless Robots Could Dance on a Human Hair
Devin Coldewey | TechCrunch
"The competition to create ever smaller, ever better robots is a fierce...
Childhood home videos can be heartwarming, hilarious, or downright embarrassing. But the tapes contain an invaluable resource: snippets of a child’s journey as they...
NEUROSCIENCE
Does Life Flash Before Your Eyes? Brain Scan of Dying Man Suggests It's Possible
Nicola Davis | The Guardian
"The team says analysis of recordings of...
Our mastery of biology has improved dramatically in recent decades, but we are still largely restricted to nature's repertoire of forms. That could be...
ENERGY
Laser Fusion Experiment Unleashes an Energetic Burst of Optimism
Kenneth Chang | The New York Times
"Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported on Tuesday that...
It’s not often that a twitching, snowman-shaped blob of 3D human tissue makes someone’s day.
But when Dr. Sergiu Pasca at Stanford University witnessed the...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI Has Cracked a Key Mathematical Puzzle for Understanding Our World
Karen Hao | MIT Technology Review
"Partial differential equations can describe everything from planetary...
NEUROSCIENCE
The Most Complete Brain Map Ever Is Here: A Fly's 'Connectome'
Gregory Barber | Wired
"Researchers like Rubin believe a physical blueprint of the brain could...
I rarely use the words transformative or breakthrough for neuroscience findings. The brain is complex, noisy, chaotic, and often unpredictable. One intriguing result under...
2019 was nuts for neuroscience. I said this last year too, but that’s the nature of accelerating technologies: the advances just keep coming.
There’re the...
Neurons are a collective bunch. Although each neuron receives, processes, and passes on information individually, the electrical spikes only make sense when melded together...
COMPUTING
A Carbon Nanotube Microprocessor Mature Enough to Say Hello
Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum
"It’s the most complex integration of carbon nanotube-based CMOS logic so...
There’s a very un-sexy view of consciousness: our rich, meaningful inner experience of self and other is nothing but electrical and chemical chattering inside...
COMPUTING
Racing Against China, US Reveals Details of $500 Million Supercomputer
Don Clark | The New York Times
"Lab officials predict it will be the first American...
2018 was when neuroscience made the impossible possible.
There was the dazzling array of crazy neurotech: paralyzed patients shopped and texted using an Android tablet...
Development across the entire information technology landscape certainly didn’t slow down this year. From CRISPR babies, to the rapid decline of the crypto markets,...
He isolated DNA from Egyptian mummies. He discovered the Denisovans, an extinct ancient human species, by sequencing DNA from a tiny bone fragment. He...
Brain organoids look like something between a malformed human brain and a character from Monsters, Inc.
But don’t be fooled by their grotesque appearance. Ever...
Brain balls sound like something straight out of a Tim Burton movie: starting as stem cells harvested from patients, they eventually develop into masses...
Aging insidiously leaves its mark on our brains.
With age, our well-oiled neuronal machinery slowly breaks down: gene expression patterns turn wacky, the nuclear membrane...
In Lyon, France, cosmetics company L’Oreal is growing human skin.
Each year, some 60 scientists cultivate 100,000 paper-thin skin samples in nine varieties simulating different...
There’s something almost alchemical going on at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Scientists there have genetically transformed skin cells into heart cells...
