John Hewitt

(Phys.org)—"The origin and evolution of eukaryotes" is a tale that has yet to be told. At this point in time, it exists only as the title of a fascinating new compendium that has just been produced by the Cold Spring Harbor ...

(Medical Xpress)—The nervous system is host to some of the most sophisticated cellular structures found anywhere in the body. The orderly phalanxes of sterocilia which arm the ear's inner hair cells, and the photosensitive ...

(Medical Xpress)—Butterscotch can be made by heating brown sugar and butter together according to some predefined proportion. Although one might imagine an infinite variety of butterscotches might be crafted through the addition ...

(Medical Xpress)—A brain-computer-interphase that is optogenetically-enabled is one of the most fantastic technologies we might envision today. It is likely that its full power could only be realized under the guidance of ...

(Medical Xpress)—Thousands of people today have various kinds of stimulators placed deep in their brains in the hope of curing their ills. Many others require systems of tubes, catheters, and shunts penetrating deep into ...

Handedness is a complicated business. To simply say life is left-handed doesn't even begin to capture the blooming hierarchy of binary refinements it continues to evolve. Over the years there have been numerous imaginative ...

(Medical Xpress)—The well-behaved neuron receives signals through its many dendrites to generate spikes on a single axon. The electrical energy of these signals is generally believed to be integrated at the cell body and ...

(Phys.org) —Perhaps the worst fate to be had in the sea is to be slimed by the hagfish. The proteinaceous goo they secrete has gotten many a hagfish out of bind by gumming up the gills and suffocating a would be attacker. ...

(Medical Xpress)—One of the challenges in high energy physics is to understand the origin of cosmic rays. The problem is that although these rays continue to be observed at ever higher energies, there is currently no known ...

(Medical Xpress)—What happens when pulses on axons collide? Fortunately for neuroscience, that usually only happens when neuroscientists artificially create counter-propagating pulses to study connections. In real brains ...

(Medical Xpress)—As principal transformers of bacteria, organelles, synapses, and cells, vesicles might be said to be the stuff of life. One need look no further than the rapid rise to prominence of The international Society ...

(Phys.org) —How does consciousness work? Few questions if any could be more profound. One thing we do know about it, jokes biophysicist Luca Turin, is that it is soluble in chloroform. When you put the brain into chloroform, ...

(Medical Xpress)—If you ask a child which is the world's fastest animal, they may tell you anything from cheetah, falcon or swift, to sailfish. If you ask a neuroscientist what is the fastest spiking neuron, you probably ...

(Phys.org) —Having the photoreceptors at the back of the retina is not a design constraint, it is a design feature. The idea that the vertebrate eye, like a traditional front-illuminated camera, might have been improved somehow ...

(Medical Xpress)—Nothing says "don't mess with me" like a deeply-fissured cortex. Even the sharpest jaws and claws in the animal kingdom are worthless without some serious thought muscle under the hood. But beneath the highly ...