One of several great things about the new mRNA vaccines is that they’re so simple. They’re basically just the lipid membrane, saltwater, and the mRNA, which is so easy to synthesize that I did it myself as an undergrad. Despite all the rumors, there are far fewer opportunities for side-effects and unknowns than with traditional …
Another old axiom proves true: Stress really does turn your hair gray—and a relaxation can reverse it. In this study out of Columbia University, researchers used a new technique to make ultra-fine slices through strands of hair, looking back in time the same way climatologists study ice cores. Each slice, 1/20th of a millimeter thick, …
There might not be a phrase that annoys me more than “trust the science.” First of all, science is a system of inquiry that’s specifically designed to avoid the pitfalls of belief. Trusting in science is an insult to science. Science is the opposite of trust. More than that, though, science as an industry is …
This week, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine published work investigating the neural circuits behind information-seeking behavior. In a clever design, Ilya Monosov and his team taught two monkeys to recognize symbols that foretold either a positive or negative event. By beginning with an uncertain symbol that was subsequently confirmed or denied by a …
We’ve long known how memories fade over time into just the kernels of their meaning. After time, most of the details that we recall are only fictionalized details, filling in the gaps around the important narrative. In a study out of the Universities of Glasgow and Birmingham published last week in Nature Communications, researchers were …