The Scientist - Home

Under constant darkness, Drosophila’s ability to form lasting memories is impaired.

Virtual reality experiments reveal that the popular drug may make the brain more open to misremembering.

Strategies to make lab animals forget, remember, or experience false recollections probe how memory works, and may inspire treatments for neurological diseases.

Studying nonhuman primates, the University of Washington neuroscientist has identified important features of the neural underpinnings of learning and memory.

The animals develop a new memory that overrides the fearful one by inhibiting the cells that encode the original memory.

The California-based company Humm has developed a “bioelectric memory patch” to improve working memory, but some experts question the efficacy of the device.

Gilead’s experimental antiviral drug shortened the average time it took COVID-19 patients to recover in a NIAID-sponsored trial. There was weak evidence that it also helped reduce deaths.

Engineering an ultra-sensitive light-activated ion channel into brain cells allows for the control of neurons in live animals without a brain-implanted light source.

The liquid biopsy, which detects cell-free tumor DNA, spotted undiagnosed cancers in some women, but had a greater number of false positives and false negatives.

Analyses from single-cell sequencing datasets support the idea that COVID-19 is not just a respiratory disease but an illness that can affect multiple organs.

The closure of visa offices, travel and immigration restrictions, and general anxiety create barriers for the international graduate students and postdocs who play a huge role in research in the United States.

Preprints from the first round of seroprevalence studies indicate that many more people have been infected with the virus than previously reported. Some of these studies also have serious design flaws.