John Hewitt

(Phys.org)—'Brains, Genes, and Primates' is the title of a curious perspective article recently published in the journal Neuron. In it, a who's who of dignitaries and luminaries from the field of neuroscience toss out a life ...

(Phys.org)—One might think of mitochondria as devices for transporting electrons to their lowest energy state. Little bags of finely-tuned respiratory chain subunits which combine electrons extracted from food with oxygen, ...

The vibrational theory of olfaction explains several aspects of odorant detection that theories based purely on receptor binding do not. It provides for additional selectivity through receptors that are tuned to specific ...

(Phys.org)—Stuart Kauffman, from the University of Calgary, and several of his colleagues have recently published a paper on the Arxiv server titled 'Quantum Criticality at the Origins of Life'. The idea of a quantum criticality, ...

The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is? is a new book by Nick Lane that is due out on April 23rd. His question is not one for a static answer but rather one for a series of ever sharper explanations—explanations that ...

(Phys.org)—There is a whole lot more to the textbook mitochondrial genome then once was thought. A case in point is a multifunctional peptide named humanin that is dual-encoded deep within 16S ribosomal RNA gene in the mtDNA. ...

(Medical Xpress)—Demyelinating diseases, like MS or ALS, attack an otherwise healthy nervous system and leave its owner a prisoner in their own body. The harder big pharma searches for—and fails to find—miracle drugs to cure ...

(Phys.org)—There is no mistaking the first action potential you ever fired. It was the one that blocked all the other sperm from stealing your egg. After that, your spikes only got more interesting. Waves of calcium flooding ...

(Phys.org)—Raising the temperature is one easy way to get chemical reactions to speed up. This temperature dependence can be accurately described by a simple exponential relation known as the Arrhenius equation. A commonly ...

(Medical Xpress)—An enduring neurobiological mystery is why do vertebrate rods and cones shut down their transmitter release in response to a light stimulus. If that particular question is too broad, then consider a slight ...

(Medical Xpress)—In a recent post we traced mechanisms of mitochondrial quality control in the nervous system back to their origins in the womb, and hinted that there would soon be more to come on this topic. Conveniently, ...

(Medical Xpress)—The Ice Bucket Challenge to raise awareness for Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) went viral on social media last summer. Over 1.2 million videos were posted on Facebook alone. The difficulty in treating ...

(Phys.org)—Neurons might not be able to send signals as fast as electrons in wires or photons in fiber, but what if they can communicate using miniature sonic booms? That would be quite a revolutionary discovery. A group ...

(Medical Xpress)—Programmers typically evolve new code by copying and modifying existing code to meet new needs. With the more advanced programming languages, they also make use of something known in the business as polymorphism—the ...

(Phys.org) —In Part I of our review of the new book "The Origin and Evolution of the Eukaryotic Cell" we talked about the acquisition of endosymbionts by cells. While there we focused on some of the genetic issues involved ...