biology

A working catalogue of twelve open problems in biology — each a concrete, testable target for the field.

Scientists have a history of trying — and failing — to link biology and quantum mechanics. The real connection between them may be in the math.

Findings from ant-sim, a colony simulator I wrote in 2021 and reworked in 2026. Every number below...

<p>Full disclosure: I am currently employed at Stitch Fix, but I think this is really cool.</p>

Biology is often seen as an experimental science, with theory serving to generalize patterns from empirical data. But history reveals that theory plays a more generative role in discovery itself.

Scientists have a history of trying — and failing — to link biology and quantum mechanics. The real connection between them may be in the math.

VSQRD Portal is the shared workspace between a sponsor and its CRO. It holds the contract before the study, the timeline and updates during it, and the delivered files, checked on upload.

Late last week, we started seeing headlines about how new research was suggesting we might have two brains instead of the one that seems to show up on MRI scans. As is so often the case, these rumors can be traced back to a single press release put out by one of the universities where the work was done. You do not have two brains. It's a silly way to look at the results of the new paper. But there are far better ways to look at the results, ways that can help us understand how the brain gets put together and illustrate some of the general ideas behind developmental biology. So let's take a look at what the research actually shows and place it in the context of brain development. Read full article Comments

For a long time, sleep research has treated the cerebral cortex as a passive follower reacting to signals from the deep brain. “Usually, sleep is associated with being controlled by subcortical regions,” said Geoffrey Terral, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. The cortex is where the slow rhythms of deep sleep can be seen, but researchers assumed the signals that triggered them originated elsewhere. In a recent Nature study, Terral and Renata Batista-Brito, who runs the lab, report a population of cortical cells that challenges that assumption. These cortical cells make up only around one percent of the cortex's inhibitory neurons, and switching them on in a mouse puts the animal to sleep. “What our work shows is that the cortex can not only see this rhythm but also initiate it by itself, and this is sufficient to promote sleep,” Terral said. Read full article Comments