John Hewitt

(Phys.org) —Last month, researchers reported the creation of the first primitive brain-like structures made from human stem cells. To create the complex morphology of these cerebral organoids, cells within a proliferating ...

(Phys.org) —In many regards, a brief time-lapse video can teach more about embryonic development than any amount of reading. It is hard not to be impressed how a repeatable form reliably emerges despite considerable variation ...

(Medical Xpress)—In the familiar rendering of a neuron, as in the image above, the so-called electrical spikes are usually depicted as short pulses. In reality, if the spike lasts for over a millisecond and its expanding ...

(Medical Xpress)—"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." This so-called "law of the instrument" has shaped neuroscience to core. It can be rephrased as, if all you have a fancy voltmeter, everything looks ...

(Phys.org) —The ability of a cell to move, replicate, and recast itself according to the needs of the organism which it serves, comes at it price. The extreme flexibility of cells takes its origin from the constant turnover ...

(Medical Xpress)—A recent perspective paper published in Science has raised some important, and timely, questions regarding neural diversity. The authors, from Columbia, MIT, and New York University, would simply like to ...

There was considerable fallout, both positive and negative, from our first story covering the radical pig-chimp hybrid theory put forth by Dr. Eugene McCarthy, a geneticist who's proposing that humans first arose from an ...

The ability to construct complex myelin sheaths around axons is one of the greatest vertebrate inventions since the hinged jaw.

The fantastic mechanical isolation of the brain in the skull, makes high impact maneuvers, like heading a soccer ball, routine for an organ that would otherwise barely hold up under its own weight. The downside of this level ...

(Phys.org) —Metallic glasses are essentially a frozen, supercooled liquid. They are amorphous metals, often alloys, which are non-crystalline and therefore have a highly disordered atomic arrangement. They are true glasses ...

(Medical Xpress)—Pioneering experiments back in 1982 by Tasaki and Iwasa at the NIH revealed that action potentials in neurons are more than just the electrical blips that physiologists readily amplify and record. These so-called ...

(Medical Xpress)—To move material in bulk, the standard shipping container used by cells, is the vesicle. These approximately 40-micron sized spheres are essentially recyclable grocery bags that can be loaded and adorned ...

(Phys.org) —These days, getting a Ph.D. is probably the last thing you want to do if you are out to revolutionize the world. If, however, what you propose is an idea, rather than a technology, it can still be a valuable asset ...

(Medical Xpress)—It took nearly two months, but the videos from the May 6th-7th national BRAIN Initiative meeting are now available online. Although the title of that workshop made central mention of the idea Physical and ...

(Phys.org) —The market for thin, flexible, printed electronic circuits is potentially huge. Although tremendous advances have been made in printing organic semiconductors like thin-film transistors (TFTs), one of their present ...