Our memories are the cornerstone of our identity. Their importance is a big part of what makes Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia so cruel and poignant. It’s why we’ve hoped so desperately for science to deliver a cure for Alzheimer’s, and why it is so frustrating and tragic that useful treatments have been … Read more
Carbon can arrange itself into one of the hardest materials in nature, or into one so soft that children inscribe trails of it on paper. Several decades ago, scientists started wondering: Aside from diamond and graphite, what other crystalline forms might carbon take? In 1985, they had their first answer. A group of chemists discovered … Read more
Nature, red in tooth and claw, is rife with organisms that eat their neighbors to get ahead. But in the systems studied by the theoretical ecologist Holly Moeller, an assistant professor of ecology, evolution and marine biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the consumed become part of the consumer in surprising ways. Moeller … Read more
Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were thought to be active only during sensory perception are also active during the recall of memories. “It started to raise … Read more
Many years ago, I learned to program on an old Symbolics Lisp Machine. The operating system had a built-in command spelled “DWIM,” short for “Do What I Mean.” If I typed a command and got an error, I could type “DWIM,” and the machine would try to figure out what I meant to do. A … Read more
There are times and places in the universe that experiments cannot reach, and may never be able to reach. What exactly goes on inside black holes, and what happened in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, are matters of pure theoretical speculation. For two decades, Silke Weinfurtner, a physicist at the … Read more
It’s often subtle at first. A lost phone. A forgotten word. A missed appointment. By the time a person walks into a doctor’s office, worried about signs of forgetfulness or failing cognition, the changes to their brain have been long underway — changes that we don’t yet know how to stop or reverse. Alzheimer’s disease, … Read more