In the brain, the function of a nerve cell (a neuron) is based both on the input it receives, via synapses onto its dendrites from upstream neurons, and…
Assistant Director of Graduate Programs Fanuel Muindi, PhD, (@FanuelMuindi on Twitter) recently co-authored a paper advocating for the importance of storytelling in science communication. The paper titled “Human…
Everyone seems to have an opinion about which foods to eat or avoid, how to lose weight (and keep it off!), and which superfood to horde. But there’s…
Mammals inherit two copies of each gene—one from their mother and one from their father. In most cases, the gene copy inherited from each parent is functionally indistinguishable.…
Gametes are the vessels of gene immortality. To escape the dying soma, these cells rely on a specialized form of the cell cycle in which a single round…
Neurons come in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes, with the structure of each type underlying its specific functions. A major preoccupation of developmental biologists is to…
Babies possess the ability to predict what will happen in their environment based on intuition about gravity, motion, and mass of objects. This has lead to the idea…
During perceptual decision-making, animals need to accumulate sensory evidence over time, but the underlying neural processes remain poorly understood. Here we combine behavioral experiments and whole-brain imaging in…
Injury to the central nervous system (brain or spinal cord) usually leads to irreversible loss of function. This is because many injured neurons die and few if any…
In many vertebrates, neural circuits undergo substantial reorganization in early postnatal life. This reorganization strengthens some neuron-to-neuron connections, while other neuronal connections are weakened by synapse elimination. It…
