To understand how memories are formed and maintained, neuroscientists travel far beyond the cell body in search of answers.

The finding may help to explain why people with SYNGAP1 mutations tend to have learning difficulties and a high tolerance for pain.

Reconstructing the past using ancient DNA

The Scientist’s annual competition uncovered a bonanza of interesting technologies that made their way onto the market and into labs this year.

Courtesy of Genevieve Anderson If not for Nobel laureates Thomas Hunt Morgan, Eric R. Kandel, and Sydney Brenner, the notion of a general behavioral model might seem odd. Behaviors, after all, are determined by an animal's evolutionary history and ecological niche. They are often idiosyncratic, shared in detail only by closely related species. But, thanks to Morgan's research in the early 20th century, and Kandel's and Brenner's work over the past 35 years, the fly Drosophila melanogaster, t

Date: February 1, 1999Table of Confocal Microscope Manufacturers Perhaps in few other fields has the creation of an instrument been so important to the establishment of a new theory or discipline. Even the Galilean telescope, with its revelation of the Medicean moons, does not compare to the microscope because the foundation for astronomy had already been well established by naked-eye observation. Cell theory, by contrast, had no such foundation in anecdotal experience. However, it wasn't long