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Biology

Neurons Process Words on Different Timescales

Neurons Process Words on Different Timescales

MIT neuroscientists have discovered distinct groups of neurons within the brain's language processing centers that operate on different timescales, potentially explaining how we understand both individual words and their combined meaning in sentences.

Water-Soluble Enzyme Opens Doors for New Antibiotic Development

Water-Soluble Enzyme Opens Doors for New Antibiotic Development

MIT researchers have developed a method to make a key bacterial enzyme water-soluble, potentially paving the way for a new class of antibiotics to combat antibiotic resistance.

Illuminating the Brain: A New Technique for Deep-Brain Imaging

Illuminating the Brain: A New Technique for Deep-Brain Imaging

MIT engineers have developed a groundbreaking technique called BLUSH that uses MRI to detect light deep within the brain, opening new avenues for understanding brain function.

Ten years of neuroscience at Google yields maps of human brain

Ten years of neuroscience at Google yields maps of human brain

A piece of human brain tissue the size of half a grain of rice requires 1.4 petabytes (1.4 million gigabytes) to encode — including about 16,000 neurons, 32,000 glia, 8,000 blood vessel cells (for a total of ~57,000 cells) and 150 million synapses.

Polarization to Improve Quantum Imaging

Polarization to Improve Quantum Imaging

The latest innovation exploits the entanglement of photons to influence the color, brightness, and now the polarization of light.

Life’s building blocks are surprisingly stable in Venus-like conditions

Life’s building blocks are surprisingly stable in Venus-like conditions

Life's essential amino acids can endure the harsh sulfuric acid conditions analogous to those in Venus' clouds. This unexpected stability challenges previous assumptions and opens new possibilities for life's existence in extreme celestial environments.

Exploring the cellular neighborhood

Exploring the cellular neighborhood

Cells rely on complex molecular machines composed of protein assemblies to perform essential functions such as energy production, gene expression, and protein synthesis. To better understand how these machines work, scientists capture snapshots of them by isolating proteins from cells and using various methods to determine their structures. However, isolating