By Suhanee Mitragotri
When your infant wakes up from a nap, all you want is to be able to hold them close and give them all of your love. While…
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SECOND PLACE WINNER!
Policy Memo by Erin Morrow
INTRODUCTION
Within the last decade, consumer technologies have become increasingly capable at recording and analyzing physiological data. For instance, smartwatches can now…
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By Justin McMahon
Around 1 in 4 people will be affected by a mental illness at some point throughout their lives (World Health Organization, 2022), and unfortunately up to 60% of…
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by Rebeka Popovic
To operate properly, each cell relies on thousands of proteins performing their function at the right time and place within the boundaries of its membrane. The function…
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By Lauren Wagner
Thirteen years after the first Avatar movie came out in 2009, director James Cameron invites viewers to journey back to the faraway, lush exo-moon of Pandora with…
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An essay by John Zhou
On an overcast afternoon in November, 2022, a teenage boy pages through a glossy video game manual in his bedroom in the Saitama prefecture of…
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By: Justin McMahon
Academic laboratories and biotech companies around the world are racing to develop next-generation therapeutics. At the forefront of this scientific innovation is gene therapy: a medical approach…
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By Jasreen Singh
What are binaural beats?
Have you ever heard something that wasn’t actually there? Perhaps you were listening to an auditory illusion known as binaural beats.
A binaural…
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By Mariella Careaga
Alzheimer’s disease is a degenerative brain disorder that progressively impacts a person’s cognitive functioning and behavioral capacities, leading, ultimately, to the disruption of that person’s daily life.…
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In this new infographic, Gil Torten discusses single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq). Read more to find out about what this process looks like and how scRNA-seq can be used in…
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When you think of researchers growing “mini-brains,” you might picture a mad scientist out of a sci-fi or horror movie. But the reality looks quite different. Cerebral organoids, often colloquially…
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Advances in bioengineering and robotics have delivered incredible devices capable of partially restoring functionality to those who suffer from movement related disabilities. However, this technology is not perfect. Patients still…
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In March 2020, my research stopped. The cognitive neuroscience lab where I work was shuttered because our research involves collecting behavioral and neuroimaging data from human participants – something impermissible…
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How cool would it be to have the ability to move someone else’s hand? Perhaps we could make our friends do some tasks for us or we could make kids…
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Nearly everything we do requires our brain in some way. Eating a bagel? That uses your brain. Reading this article? That’s using your brain, too. All those questionable decisions you…
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If someone had told me a year ago that he sleeps with his watch on at night, I’d probably wonder just how eccentric of a personality I was dealing with.…
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[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n 47 CE, Scribonius Largus, court physician to the Roman emperor Claudius, described in his Compositiones a method for treating chronic migraines: place torpedo fish on the scalps of patients…
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[dropcap]D[/dropcap]id you know that it is now possible to study human organs inside micro-chips? Organ-on-a-chip or lab-on-a-chip is a cell culture chip that stimulates activities and physiological responses of human tissue(s) or…
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[dropcap]C[/dropcap]ontrolling the minds of others from a distance has long been a favourite science fiction theme – but recent advances in genetics and neuroscience suggest that we might soon have that…
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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he beat is low and steady – but it’s all just in my head… While I’m sitting on my couch, listening to some smooth jazz, there is a faint beat…
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*Note: this article explores a recent paper that has been reviewed and published in its preprint form, before peer review.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hile there is a certain majesty in the convoluted wrinkles…
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You might have heard the term ‘phrenology’ thrown around, usually in the context of pseudoscience and racism. Or, if you’ve heard discussions about the Quentin Tarantino movie Django Unchained, it…
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Can we learn everything about the brain by studying individual brain cells?
It started with a simple equation. In 1980, a mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot working for IBM plotted the…
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[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat’s in a brain? That which we call a voxel by any other name would sound far less confusing.
Imagine all of the atoms in your brain. Now imagine how these…
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Scientists studying pond scum discovered its peculiar ability to sense light, even without eyes. This discovery would eventually lead to a technique called optogenetics, one of the most powerful techniques…
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In the early 1980s, a few batches of contaminated synthetic heroin triggered severe Parkinson’s disease symptoms among the drug addicts who used it. The tragedy would lead to a new…
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[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat is the brain? Researchers conceive of neurons as information processing units, meaning that the circuits formed by neurons support logical and mathematical operations. In this view, the brain is…
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Magritte’s comments on our fascination with the unknown rings true not just in artistic surrealism, but also in many of our scientific research endeavors. The human mind is continually fascinated…
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In Isaac Asimov’s 1950 short story collection I, Robot, intelligent robots with positronic brains exist alongside humans. Unlike conventional computer hardware, the word positronic implies that electrical current is carried…
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In Part II of this series, we considered artificial intelligent in the context of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel and Stanley Kubrik’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Space Odyssey, intelligence…
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Sometimes it’s hard to understand why scientists do what they do. Why spend a career studying cells, fungus, or flies? Other than being nerdy and wanting to learn about our…
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Brain stimulation might sound like some Frankensteinian demonstration from a Victorian science fair. But in reality, it is a contemporary technique making a huge impact in neuroscience by addressing a…
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We have someone new joining our team! She is a neuroscience PhD student at the University of Iowa, and she studies speech perception – but let’s let the animation she created…
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What if you could take a pill to enhance your cognitive abilities? What if this pill could help you ace a test, get more work done efficiently, and truly multitask? …
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Last month, astronomers announced the prediction of a new giant planet in our solar system dubbed Planet IX, a genuine ninth planet with ten times the mass of Earth. The…
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For the first time in over a decade, a new Star Wars film is upon us, and if you’re like the staff of Knowing Neurons, your nucleus accumbens is firing…
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Knowing Neurons is proud to present our inaugural entry in a new series of YouTube videos! In this episode, Joel asks, “Is the brain smarter than a computer?” With Joel as…
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Have you ever wondered why the same brain regions are often implicated again and again in many tasks and behaviors? For instance, the prefrontal cortex is implicated in so many…
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I propose to consider the following question, ‘Can machines think?’
Thus begins Alan Turing’s paper “Computing machinery and intelligence.” It’s 1950 England, and the world’s first computer is being used…
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First impressions are pivotal. While reading another person’s cues, an abridged version of them forms as we draw on complex social inferences in merely seconds of interaction. That is, if…
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~
Infographic by Jooyeun Lee and Kate Fehlhaber.
~
References:
Hsu P. & Feng Zhang (2014). Development and Applications of CRISPR-Cas9 for Genome Engineering, Cell, 157 (6) 1262-1278. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2014.05.010
Fineran…
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A familiar progression of chords blares out of your speakers as the red lights of the surrounding traffic fade into the memory of a dark stage illuminated by pulsing neon lights.…
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Pictures are powerful tools for illustrating quantitative data and capturing public interest. Each year, NASA releases many beautiful images of Martian dunes and distant nebulae which help win public funding.…
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It’s hard to imagine life without Google Maps nowadays. We use the interactive map daily to find out how to get from point A to point B. Wouldn’t it be…
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Our senses connect us to the world. Your visual system lets you know that there is a yellow car ahead of you, and your auditory system lets you know that…
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