Unpicking the Mystery of the Body’s ‘Second Brain’

Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key…

Magnetic Minerals May Have Given Life Its Molecular Asymmetry

The preferred “handedness” of biomolecules could have emerged from interactions between electrons and magnetic surfaces on…

How Insect Brains Melt and Rewire During Metamorphosis

Do fruit flies remember their larval lives? To find out, scientists made the neurons inside larvae…

Is It Real or Imagined? Here’s How Your Brain Tells the Difference

New experiments show that the brain distinguishes between perceived and imagined mental images by checking whether…

Old Memories Can Prime Brains to Make New Ones

Creating a memory takes energy, and brains only have so much. A study using snails shows…

A New Study Reveals the Traits That Speed Up Evolution

The first large-scale comparison of DNA mutation rates in 68 different vertebrate species gives insights into…

The Biggest Microbiome Study Sheds New Light on Shared Health Risks

The Biggest Microbiome Study Sheds Light on Shared Health Risks

How Your Brain Distinguishes Memories From Perceptions

The neural representations of a perceived image and the memory of it are almost the same.…

This Brain Molecule Decides Which Memories Are Happy—or Terrible

When the brain encodes memories as positive or negative, a small peptide called neurotensin determines which…

Reshuffled Rivers Bolster the Amazon’s Hyper-Biodiversity

The rainforest's lush genetic diversity may be due in part to the dynamics of branching rivers,…