synapse

Four old maps were lying in different desk drawers. Each one marked genes linked to cellular aging, but the maps did not match: different names, different scales, different legends. A scientist hunting for a gene to test had to cross-check them by hand, at the risk of missing an important mark. SenSASP stitched those maps into one.

A jazz trio plays in the dim light of a club. The pianist leads the melody, the bassist holds the rhythm, and the drummer sprinkles out rolls. If you listen only to pairs of musicians, you can catch how the pianist adjusts to the bass or the bass to the drums.

In an aquarium the size of a dining table, two schools of black neon tetras swim in adjacent compartments separated by a transparent wall. They cannot touch each other, but they see every movement. And here's the surprising part: when one school decides to turn left, the other does the same a moment later. It's like two pendulums hanging behind glass, starting to swing in rhythm.

Getting lost in a hall of mirrors is easy: every wall reflects another, and you feel like you've been here before. The brain gets similarly confused when surrounded by many similar places. Neurons responsible for the spatial map can fire the same signal for two different corners of a room. This is called spatial ambiguity.

A mail carrier delivers letters along one-way streets. As long as he only drives forward, the route is simple and predictable. But if U-turns are suddenly allowed, he'll start doubling back, crossing his own tracks, and the delivery pattern gets tangled. That's roughly how an infection behaves when people can get sick more than once.

Every night, the brain cycles through several sleep stages — from drowsiness to deep sleep and back. Some transitions happen abruptly, like a light switch flipping, while others are smooth, like a slow slide down a slope.

In the long extensions of a neuron, the dendrites, tiny couriers are constantly bustling about. These are messenger RNA molecules carrying instructions for protein assembly. Their journey starts at the cell body and ends at synapses — contacts with other neurons.

In the long extensions of a neuron, the dendrites, tiny couriers are constantly bustling about. These are messenger RNA molecules carrying instructions for protein assembly. Their journey starts at the cell body and ends at synapses — contacts with other neurons.

Blood vessel cells were seeded onto a transparent film just 700 nanometers thick — a hundred times thinner than a human hair. Flat electrodes are hidden beneath the film. They send a weak alternating current and listen as the resistance changes.

A stadium packed with fans hears the announcer’s voice for the first time, and instantly the whole place erupts. The message sounds again and again. Only a handful of people in nearby rows respond. That’s roughly how neural networks behave in brain organoids — tiny lab-grown replicas of the brain.

A stadium packed with fans hears the announcer’s voice for the first time, and instantly the whole place erupts. The message sounds again and again. Only a handful of people in nearby rows respond. That’s roughly how neural networks behave in brain organoids — tiny lab-grown replicas of the brain.

Imagine a spiral staircase with balls rolling down. Some are twisted to the right, others to the left. The steps are arranged so that right-twisted balls slip through faster, while left-twisted ones get stuck. Something similar happens inside helical molecules — for example, in the double helix of DNA.

The brain self-cleans its waste: cerebrospinal fluid flows through narrow channels surrounding arteries. The channel walls are soft and ripple with each pulse, and the tissue is porous like a sponge. Every heartbeat turns arteries into tiny pumps, driving fluid through the pores.

After a stone is thrown, the circles on water vanish, but the liquid retains microscopic oscillations. The slightest gust, and ripples appear again. Neural networks behave similarly. When electrical signals quiet down, the memory of them remains in the contact points — synapses.

Chatting with living neurons is like tuning an old radio: it's not enough to find the right frequency: you've got to aim the antenna too.

An electron microscope is a giant pipe organ: instead of pipes (electromagnetic lenses, instead of air) a stream of accelerated electrons. It once merely painted mute frescoes of the atomic world, condemning scientists to grueling decipherment.

A patchwork quilt where each patch is a recording of activity from a small brain region. One patch was stitched on Monday in London, another on Tuesday in New York, and a third a month ago in Tokyo. This mosaic covers the brain only partially, and there is no common seam to join them.

A neuron sends a signal to its neighbor. The neighbor doesn't respond immediately — the impulse travels along the process at a finite speed, like a letter delayed in transit. Usually, such a delay is considered a nuisance, but in this new work, it becomes the conductor. When two excitable neurons are connected with a delay, a rhythm spontaneously emerges between them.

A neuron resembles an electrical circuit with batteries and variable resistors. The resistors are played by ion channels — protein pores in the membrane that open and close, letting charged particles through. Whether a nerve impulse fires depends on how fast and at what voltage these pores operate.

Inside every cell, a complex network of genes determines what it will become — a nerve cell, a muscle cell, or part of the skin. This choice often resembles flipping a toggle switch: two stable positions, and the cell decides which way to tip. But cells have a feature rarely considered in such models: they divide.

A chef tastes a sauce and knows: it needs a pinch of salt. But toss that same pinch into a lake, and no one will notice the difference.

A drop of oil in a glass of water forms a sphere. Inside a living cell, a similar separation occurs, but instead of oil, proteins and nucleic acids form dense droplets — condensates. These droplets act as temporary workshops: they gather needed molecules, speed up reactions, and break apart when the task is done.

An artist paints a picture, glancing at the audience in the hall. If the viewer smiles, the artist adds more red and rounded lines to the canvas; if the viewer frowns, the artist removes blue and sharpens the angles.

Every group has its unspoken trios: three friends who are always together. And there are pairs that exist on their own. It turns out that how much trios "contain" pairs determines how everything, from a virus to a new idea, spreads through the group. Scientists introduced a measure they call the nesting coefficient.

Inside every neuron, there's a long, thin channel, the axon, through which signals travel from the cell body to other cells. To keep this channel working, mitochondria constantly shuttle along it. These tiny organelles produce energy and move in both directions, like cars on a narrow road.

The brain is like a multi-story building: lower floors process simple signals, while upper floors assemble them into complex perceptions. Scientists have long suspected that this order is tied to how neurons work together. But exactly how has remained a puzzle.

A landscape cut by roads or rivers into isolated patches resembles a shared apartment after partitions are installed: residents no longer bump into each other in the common hallway. Species that once competed for the same food or space now live apart. Competition weakens, and those that would have lost to pushier neighbors in a continuous landscape now survive.

Holding a phone number in your head while you dial it: that's working memory. In the brain, a group of cells is responsible for this, sending signals to each other like people passing a bucket along a chain. But every transfer has a cost: it requires messenger substances that get used up.

Young planetary systems resemble an orchestra that has just started rehearsing: all the musicians strive to play in the same rhythm.

Speech is like an orchestra where every note must sound at just the right moment. The brain turns a thought into a chain of sounds in a fraction of a second, and until now it was unclear how it manages this hierarchy — from individual sounds to syllables to whole words.

Modern microscopes see the brain in exquisite detail: not just the synapses themselves, the contact points between neurons, but also the molecules they are made of. Such images are becoming more common and cheaper to produce.

Each breath slightly speeds up the heart, and each exhale slows it down. This rhythm, visible on an ECG, is called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. For a long time, it was dismissed as a mere side effect of the nervous system. But new research shows that this coordination is not a coincidence: it's a way to save energy.

A neuron in the brain is like a person handing out business cards at a crowded conference. At first, making acquaintances is easy, but as the address book fills up, each new contact requires more effort: there's little room left. The authors based their model on this 'crowding' rule: the more incoming connections a neuron already has, the harder it is to form another one.

A dense social network: everyone is connected to almost everyone else, and in this web it's hard to see who really matters. Too many threads — computers choke, simulations stall. Scientists have figured out how to prune such networks without losing what's essential. The idea is to remove connections that don't participate in shortest paths.

A mouse brain contains about 70 million neurons, and the connections between them are far from evenly distributed: some cells have only a couple of dozen contacts, while others have thousands. It's like a city with quiet alleys and bustling squares. But until now, it was unclear how this unevenness affects the brain's actual function.

Muscle contraction is driven by two types of protein filaments: thin carbon actin filaments and thick myosin filaments that act as molecular motors. At rest, a special protein safety catch, tropomyosin, blocks the myosin-binding sites on actin.

You can edit a cell perfectly, and it still turns out useless. The gene is fixed exactly as planned, yet the cell behaves unpredictably: it drifts, changes fate, loses safety. It's like fixing one gear in a watch, but the watch still runs wrong because the whole mechanism is out of sync. Previously, a cell was viewed as a list of independent parts.

The brain is like a sprawling city: districts-regions communicate via streets-neural pathways. If traffic lights at an intersection fail, traffic grinds to a halt. Similarly, in the brain, when bundles of nerve fibers (white matter) malfunction, distant regions stop working in concert, and thought stalls.

Fluid flows in the narrow gaps between brain cells. It doesn't stay still: each heartbeat pushes it forward, and breathing adds its own waves. This was seen in images ten years ago, but only now have researchers calculated how this pulsing accelerates molecules. If you drop ink into a stream, it drifts with the current. But if the stream speeds up and slows down, the ink spreads wider.

A virus approaches a cell like a key to a lock. But this lock is not ordinary: it vibrates, it trembles, and whether the key matches the rhythm of those tremors determines if the door opens. According to new research, this is exactly how recognition works between the coronavirus spike protein and the ACE2 receptor on the surface of human cells.