Quanta
Articles written for the GLP list the source as Genes and Science. All other articles were written for the sources noted with excerpts provided by the GLP.
Our heartbeat shapes how we process fear and perceive the world
As the heart, lungs, gut and other organs transmit information to the brain, they affect how we perceive and interact ...
Infographic: COVID-19 herd immunity threshold likely varies from region to region
[A] lot of nuance is involved in calculating exactly how much of the population needs to be immune [to COVID-19] ...
Estrogen slows down adult bone growth, leading to generally taller men and shorter women
Human sexual size dimorphism, the difference in height between males and females, is often touted as a classic example of ...
Stimulating brain waves prompts immune cells to fight against Alzheimer’s disease
Discoveries that transcend boundaries are among the greatest delights of scientific research, but such leaps are often overlooked because they ...
Brain organoids becoming ‘more human’, forcing researchers to grapple with ethical concerns
Though no bigger than a pea, organoids hold enormous promise for improving our understanding of the brain: They can replicate ...
Can computers develop human-like intelligence by imitating our own evolutionary path?
Evolutionary algorithms have been around for a long time. Traditionally, they’ve been used to solve specific problems. In each generation, ...
Machines now read faster than we can. But do they understand the words?
In an April 2018 paper coauthored with collaborators from the University of Washington and DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence company, [computational linguist ...
Inherited learning appears to be real, through epigenetics. But we still aren’t sure how it happens
[S]ome researchers have found evidence that even some learned behaviors and physiological responses can be epigenetically inherited. None of the new ...
Why your brain filters out things you don’t need to see
Scientists have long known that our sensory processing must automatically screen out extraneous inputs — otherwise, we couldn’t experience the ...
When it comes to vision, computers are beating us at our own game
Does computer vision need inspiration from human vision at all? In some ways, the answer is obviously no. The information ...
‘Are Neanderthals just another version of us’?
As scientists peer further back in time and uncover evolutionary relationships in unprecedented detail, their findings are complicating the narrative ...
How math could explain the ‘great mystery of human vision’
This is the great mystery of human vision: Vivid pictures of the world appear before our mind’s eye, yet the ...
‘Wild theory’: Can aggressive cancers evolve into new species?
Aggressive cancers can spread so fiercely that they seem less like tissues gone wrong and more like invasive parasites looking ...
Environmental DNA offers glimpses of the ‘ancient world in a few grains of sand’
Somewhere in a remote cave in western Georgia, a few dozen miles east of the Black Sea shore, scientists on ...
Our powers of perception are boosted by our brain that guesses what’s about to happen
Imagine picking up a glass of what you think is apple juice, only to take a sip and discover that ...
Using genetic data to examine differences between populations just ran into a problem
Various innovations in the field of genomics over the past few decades have given researchers hope that resolutions to long-lasting ...
Glowing squid’s genome sheds light on how animals and microbes evolve to work together
Every evening, nocturnal Hawaiian bobtail squids ... emerge from their burrows in shallow waters of the Pacific to hunt for ...
We know how the brain perceives shapes and colors. But what about time?
Marc Howard, a cognitive neuroscientist now at Boston University, and Karthik Shankar, who was then one of his postdoctoral students, wanted ...
‘Arrival of the fittest’: Fragile DNA ‘hot spots’ play key role in mutations, evolution
Against the odds, separate species and populations independently evolve the same solutions to life’s challenges, and the same genes are ...
How the brain maps out ideas and memories
As the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it, the concept of space serves as the organizing principle by which we perceive ...
What jellyfish can show us about complex evolution through simple genomes
You might expect that as bodies became more complex, genomes did as well. But a recent study appearing in Nature Ecology & Evolution ...
Computer scientists turn to evolutionary biology for inspiration
Creationists love to insist that evolution had to assemble upward of 300 amino acids in the right order to create just ...
‘Stemness’ and the downside of limiting our definition of stem cells
As more sophisticated technology has revealed just how plastic and heterogeneous cell populations can be, some researchers have transitioned from ...
Are our microbes part of us? ‘Radical upgrade’ of evolutionary theory
Look closely enough at any plant or animal and you will discover a riot of bacteria, fungi and viruses forming ...
Stem cells’ ‘memories’ of past injuries may contribute to chronic inflammation
Stem cells, famous for replenishing the body’s stockpile of other cell types throughout life, may have an additional, unforeseen ability ...
Evolved adaptation: Challenges to Darwin’s belief that mutations are random and neutral
When Charles Darwin articulated his theory of evolution by natural selection in On the Origin of Species in 1859, he ...
Your brain has its own unique ‘functional fingerprint’
The physical links between brain regions, collectively known as the “connectome,” are part of what distinguish humans cognitively from other ...
Explaining hallucinations through math
[Researcher Heinrich Klüver] classified [hallucinogenic patterns he experienced] into four distinct types that he dubbed “form constants”: lattices (including checkerboards, ...
