Aging manifests itself through a decline in organismal homeostasis and a multitude of cellular and physiological functions[1][1]. Efforts to identify a common basis for vertebrate aging face many challenges; for example, while there have been documented changes in the expression … | Continue reading
The traditional concept that heritability occurs exclusively from the transfer of germline-restricted genetics is being challenged by the increasing accumulation of evidence confirming the existence of experience-dependent transgenerational inheritance. Transgenerational inherita … | Continue reading
Access to quantitative, robust, yet affordable diagnostic tools is necessary to reduce global infectious disease burden. Manual microscopy has served as a bedrock for diagnostics with wide adaptability, although at a cost of tedious labor and human errors. Automated robotic micro … | Continue reading
Analyses of pharmaceutical pipelines of drug development in the 1990-2010 documented progressively increasing attrition rates and duration of clinical trials, leading to a diffuse perception of a “productivity crisis”. We produced a new set of analyses for the last decade, using … | Continue reading
Setting up an experiment in behavioral neuroscience is a complex process that is often managed with ad hoc solutions. To streamline this process we developed Rigbox, a high-performance, open-source software toolbox ([github.com/cortex-lab/Rigbox][1]). Rigbox simplifies the interf … | Continue reading
New technologies and analysis methods are enabling genomic structural variants (SVs) to be detected with ever-increasing accuracy, resolution, and comprehensiveness. Translating these methods to routine research and clinical practice requires robust benchmark sets. We developed t … | Continue reading
We present an ultra-high resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) dataset of an ex vivo human brain specimen. The brain specimen was donated by a 58-year-old woman who had no history of neurological disease and died of non-neurological causes. After fixation in 10% formalin, t … | Continue reading
Fields as diverse as human genetics and sociology are increasingly using polygenic scores based on genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for phenotypic prediction. However, recent work has shown that polygenic scores have limited portability across groups of different genetic an … | Continue reading
During gene expression, RNA export factors are mainly known for driving nucleocytoplasmic transport. Whilst early studies suggested that the Exon Junction Complex provides a binding platform for them, subsequent work proposed that they are only recruited by the Cap-Binding Comple … | Continue reading
In the field of artificial intelligence, a combination of scale in data and model capacity enabled by unsupervised learning has led to major advances in representation learning and statistical generation. In biology, the anticipated growth of sequencing promises unprecedented dat … | Continue reading
Quantitative behavioral measurements are important for answering questions across scientific disciplines—from neuroscience to ecology. State-of-the-art deep-learning-based methods offer major advances in data quality and detail by allowing researchers to automatically estimate lo … | Continue reading
The ability to read out, or decode, mental content from brain activity has significant practical and scientific implications[1][1]. For example, technology that translates cortical activity into speech would be transformative for people unable to communicate as a result of neurol … | Continue reading
We propose a novel approach based on modern deep artificial neural networks (DNNs) for understanding how the morpho-electrical complexity of neurons shapes their input/output (I/O) properties at the millisecond resolution in response to massive synaptic input. The I/O of integrat … | Continue reading
Reconstruction of neural circuitry at single-synapse resolution is an attractive target for improving understanding of the nervous system in health and disease. Serial section transmission electron microscopy (ssTEM) is among the most prolific imaging methods employed in pursuit … | Continue reading
We present a system for scalable and customizable recording and stimulation of neural activity. In large animals and humans, the current benchmark for high spatial and temporal resolution neural interfaces are fixed arrays of wire or silicon electrodes inserted into the parenchym … | Continue reading
Socio-economic position (SEP) is a multi-dimensional construct reflecting (and influencing) multiple socio-cultural, physical, and environmental factors. Previous genome-wide association studies (GWAS) using household income as a marker of SEP have shown that common genetic varia … | Continue reading
Habits form a crucial component of behavior. In recent years, key computational models have conceptualized habits as arising from model-free reinforcement learning (RL) mechanisms, which typically select between available actions based on the future value expected to result from … | Continue reading
The role of membrane potential in most intracellular organelles remains unexplored because of the lack of suitable probes. We describe a DNA-based fluorescent reporter that quantitates membrane potential and can be targeted to specific organelles in live cells. It is equipped wit … | Continue reading
Researchers in the life sciences are posting their work to preprint servers at an unprecedented and increasing rate, sharing papers online before (or instead of) publication in peer-reviewed journals. Though the popularity and practical benefits of preprints are driving policy ch … | Continue reading
The human gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem that both affects and is affected by its host status. Previous analyses of gut microflora revealed associations between specific microbes and host health and disease status, genotype and diet. Here, we developed a method of predicti … | Continue reading
Functional genomics approaches can overcome current limitations that hamper oncology drug development such as lack of robust target identification and clinical efficacy. Here we performed genome-scale CRISPR-Cas9 screens in 204 human cancer cell lines from 12 cancer-types and dev … | Continue reading
Protein therapy has the potential to alleviate many neurological diseases; however, delivery mechanisms for the central nervous system (CNS) are limited, and intracellular delivery poses additional hurdles. To address these challenges, we harnessed the protist parasite Toxoplasma … | Continue reading
The discussion of an early postglacial dual-route colonization of the Scandinavian Peninsula is largely based on associating genomic data to an early dispersal of lithic technology from the East European Plain. However, a direct link between the two has been lacking. We tackle th … | Continue reading
Curiosity is often portrayed as a desirable feature of human faculty. For example, a meta-analysis revealed that curiosity predicts academic performance above and beyond intelligence, corroborating findings that curiosity supported long-term consolidation of learning. However, cu … | Continue reading
Superorganisms such as social insect colonies are very successful relative to their non-social counterparts. Powerful emergent information processing capabilities would seem to contribute to their abundance, as they explore and exploit their environment collectively. In this seri … | Continue reading
Particular deep artificial neural networks (ANNs) are today's most accurate models of the primate brain's ventral visual stream. Here we report that, using a targeted ANN-driven image synthesis method, new luminous power patterns (i.e. images) can be applied to the primate retina … | Continue reading
Resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is a popular imaging modality for mapping the functional connectivity of the brain. Rs-fMRI is, just like other neuroimaging modalities, subject to a series of technical and subject level biases that change the inferre … | Continue reading
The high frequency of modern travel has led to concerns about a devastating pandemic since a lethal pathogen strain could spread worldwide quickly. Many historical pandemics have arisen following pathogen evolution to a more virulent form. However, some pathogen strains invoke im … | Continue reading
Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the rare ability to name the pitch of a tone without external reference. It is widely believed that acquiring AP in adulthood is impossible, since AP is only for the selected few with rare genetic makeup and early musical training. In three experimen … | Continue reading
How the neocortex works is a mystery. In this paper we propose a novel framework for understanding its function. Grid cells are neurons in the entorhinal cortex that represent the location of an animal in its environment. Recent evidence suggests that grid cell-like neurons may a … | Continue reading
There has been an increasing concern that most published medical findings are false. But what does it mean to be false? Here we describe the range of definitions of false discoveries in the scientific literature. We summarize the philosophical, statistical, and experimental evide … | Continue reading
Machine learning-based analysis of human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) patterns has enabled the visualization of perceptual content. However, it has been limited to the reconstruction with low-level image bases (Miyawaki et al., 2008; Wen et al., 2016) or to the ma … | Continue reading
Organs are sculpted by extracellular as well as cell-intrinsic forces, but how collective cell dynamics are orchestrated in response to microenvironmental cues is poorly understood. Here we apply advanced image analysis to reveal ECM-responsive cell behaviors that drive elongatio … | Continue reading
Most of the diversity of microbial life is not available in culture, and as such we lack even a fundamental understanding of the biological diversity of several branches on the tree of life. One branch that is highly underrepresented is the candidate phylum TM6, also known as the … | Continue reading
Background: The complex nature of biological data has driven the development of specialized software tools. Scientific workflow management systems simplify the assembly of such tools into pipelines and assist with job automation and aids reproducibility of analyses. Many contempo … | Continue reading
Since the mid-2000s, podcasts have emerged as a new and fundamentally decentralised global medium for science communication, with hundreds of podcasts freely disseminating scientific information worldwide. However, despite widespread interest in the benefits of podcasts for teach … | Continue reading
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is the most common cause of postneonatal infant death. The allostatic load hypothesis posits that SIDS is the result of perinatal cumulative painful, stressful, or traumatic exposures that tax neonatal regulatory systems. To test it, we explore … | Continue reading
Insomnia is the second-most prevalent mental disorder, with no sufficient treatment available. Despite a substantial role of genetic factors, only a handful of genes have been implicated and insight into the associated neurobiological pathways remains limited. Here, we use an unp … | Continue reading
Consumer genomics databases reached the scale of millions of individuals. Recently, law enforcement investigators have started to exploit some of these databases to find distant familial relatives, which can lead to a complete re-identification. Here, we leveraged genomic data of … | Continue reading
Phrenology was a nineteenth century endeavour to link personality traits with scalp morphology. It has been both influential and fiercely criticised, not least because of the assumption that scalp morphology can be informative of the underlying brain function. Here we test this i … | Continue reading
Myopia, or short-sightedness, is one of the leading causes of visual disability in the World. The prevalence of myopia has risen steadily over recent decades, reaching epidemic levels in Southeast Asia. Observational studies have reported associations between educational attainme … | Continue reading
The role played by natural selection in shaping present-day human populations has received extensive scrutiny, especially in the context of local adaptations. However, most studies to date assume, either explicitly or not, that populations have been in their current locations lon … | Continue reading
Different human populations facing similar environmental challenges have sometimes evolved convergent biological adaptations, for example hypoxia resistance at high altitudes and depigmented skin in northern latitudes on separate continents. The pygmy phenotype (small adult body … | Continue reading
Using data from 697,828 research participants from 23andMe and UK Biobank, we identified 351 loci associated with being a morning person, a behavioural indicator of a person's underlying circadian rhythm. These loci were validated in 85,760 individuals with activity-monitor deriv … | Continue reading
Social genetic effects (SGE, also called indirect genetic effects) are associations between genotypes of one individual and phenotype of another. SGE arise when two individuals interact and heritable traits of one influence the phenotype of the other. Recent studies have shown th … | Continue reading