Stories by Ben Thomas

The past several years have brought two parallel revolutions in neuroscience. Researchers have begun using genetically encoded sensors to monitor the behavior of individual neurons, and they've been using brief pulses of light to trigger certain types of neurons to activate.

We all know how it feels to get lost in a great book. Sometimes the characters and emotions can seem every bit as real as those of our everyday lives.

For the first time ever, neuroscientists have completed a comprehensive roadmap of the top-trafficked communication highways in the human brain.

2013s Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine honors three researchers in particular – but what it really honors is thirty-plus years of work not only from them, but also from their labs, their graduate students and their collaborators.

As Albert Einstein famously said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” The history of science is littered with so-called “intractable”  problems that researchers later cracked wide open using techniques their ancestors could hardly imagine.

Stacked layers have fascinated us humans for as long as we’ve sought to organize the universe around us. Authors and artists have developed primitive conceptions of heaven, earth and hell into elaborate hierarchies of celestial and infernal spheres.