Paola Arlotta holds up a vial of clear fluid swirling with tiny orbs. When she shakes her wrist, the shapes flutter like the contents of a snow globe.
“Those small spheres swirling around are actually tiny pieces of human cerebral…

Paola Arlotta holds up a vial of clear fluid swirling with tiny orbs. When she shakes her wrist, the shapes flutter like the contents of a snow globe.
“Those small spheres swirling around are actually tiny pieces of human cerebral…

Human beings can juggle up to 10 balls at once. But how many can they move through the air with their imaginations?
The answer, published last month in Nature Communications, astonished even the researchers pursuing the question. The…

Among the many wonders of the brain is its ability to master movements through practice — a dance step, piano sonata, or tying our shoes.
For decades, neuroscientists have known that these tasks require a cluster of brain areas known as the…

The punched card, a paper instrument invented 300 years ago to automate looms, helped create a technology that most of us today can’t live without: computers.
A new Houghton Library exhibition — “The Punched Card from the Industrial…

For cognitive neuroscientist Nadine Gaab, the termination of a five-year grant one year before it was scheduled to end couldn’t have come at a worse moment. As part of a study aimed at understanding the co-development of math and reading…

When Michael Brenner taught the graduate-level class “Applied Mathematics 201” in fall 2023, the course’s nonlinear partial differential equations were too tough for artificial intelligence. AI managed to solve just 30 to 50 percent of the…

Executive function — top-down processes by which the human mind controls behavior, regulating thoughts and actions — have long been studied using a standard set of tools, with these assessments being included in national and international…

For a mouse, survival in the wild often boils down to one urgent question: flee or freeze?
The best strategy depends on which mouse you are asking. A new study by Harvard biologists has found that two closely related species of deer mice have…

The idea of residing within a hologram remains a hypothesis. It has not been universally accepted among physicists and continues to be one of several theories attempting to elucidate the…

Entropy follows a unidirectional arrow, where it can only increase or remain the same, and the implications of either case are enormous.
Imagine you have a box containing lots of pieces,…