A neurobiologist’s legacy: rewriting how cells operate — and how they go rogue. A model of Ben Barres’ brain sits on the windowsill behind his desk at Stanford University School of Medicine. To a casual observer, there’s nothing remarkable about the plastic lump, 3-D-printed from an MRI scan. Almost lost in the jumble of papers, coffee mugs, plaques and trophies that fill the neurobiologist’s office, it offers no hint about what Barres’ actual gray matter ...read more

Bacteria That Shape Blood Vessels Researchers have discovered a surprising link between gut-dwelling bacteria and the brain’s blood vessels. Cerebral cavernous malformations (CCMs) are capillaries that are enlarged or deformed and thin-walled, making them vulnerable to leaks — which can lead to stroke or seizure. To study these deformities, experts genetically engineered mice to form CCMs after an injection of a specialized drug. Some rodents went on to develop abdominal infections, ...read more

A woman suffers from digestive symptoms that wax and wane for months. What could be the root of her mysterious illness? “I’ve never seen my belly so big,” said Christina, puffing her cheeks out like a cartoon character. “It keeps bloating and bloating.” Christina, the wife of my good friend Norman, was a healthy 50-year-old who took no medications and had no chronic health issues. She had first told me about the bloating, diarrhea and stomach cramps one month e ...read more

Pot growers have turned public lands into industrial agricultural sites. And the ecosystem effects are alarming. On a hot August morning, Mourad Gabriel steps out of his pickup onto the gravel road that winds up the side of Rattlesnake Peak. Dark-bearded and muscular, the research ecologist sports a uniform of blue work clothes, sturdy boots and a floppy, Army-style camo hat. He straps on a pistol. “Just to let you know,” Gabriel says, sensitive to the impression the gun makes, ...read more

This August, the sky will dim until the daytime world becomes dark. The bright disk that usually lights everything, burns skin, feeds plants and tells animals when to sleep will become a blank circle, surrounded by the shifting haze of its atmosphere. This scene will pass over the United States, from Oregon to South Carolina, potentially capturing an audience even larger than the Super Bowl. And these people — including you, I hope — will likely react emotionally, not scientifically. ...read more

1. Is your daily slog through a non-equilibrium system of interacting particles — how physicists define vehicular traffic — getting you down? Us too, especially when it slows for no apparent reason. 2. According to a study in the New Journal of Physics, traffic jams develop spontaneously when vehicle density exceeds a critical level, beyond which minor fluctuations in the flow of individual vehicles destabilize the whole thing. 3. In fact, even construction or an accident isn’t ...read more

Over time, these cycles of bounty and absence come and go, and every place on Earth is crossed eventually. For human beings, with our limited lives and limited means of travel, these vagaries of celestial alignment mean the majority of people on Earth have never seen a total solar eclipse. The Daytime StarsThe first total solar eclipse most Americans will have ever seen begins the morning of Monday, Aug. 21, 2017, two seconds before 10:16 a.m. PDT. At that moment, the dark shadow of the moon tou ...read more

Errors in the use of spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel could pose risks for science. That’s according to a preprint posted on arXiv from Ghada AlTarawneh and Simon Thorne of Cardiff Metropolitan University. AlTarawneh and Thorne conducted a survey of 17 researchers from the University of Newcastle neuroscience research centre, ranging from PhD students to senior researchers. None of the respondants had any formal, certified training in spreadsheet use, with most (71%) being self-taught ...read more

KELT-11b, one of the physically largest objects known, is 40 percent wider than Jupiter and has the density of styrofoam. (Credit: Walter Robinson/Lehigh University) Last week, a team of astronomers reported the first potential discovery of an exomoon–a satellite orbiting a planet around another star. Part of what is so striking about the report is the scale of this possible planet-moon system. In this case, the “moon” appears to be about the size of Neptune; the planet it or ...read more

(Credit: Irina Kozorog/Shutterstock) An ant without a sense of smell is an ant that’s lost. After creating ants that had been genetically modified to lack a sense of smell, scientists watched them wander away from their colonies, steal food, refuse to mate and fail to tend to eggs — antisocial behavior that contradicts the hive-mind mentality of most ant communities. It’s likely not because of any sociopathic tendencies on the ant’s part, but because they’ve been ...read more