Last week, the Food and Drug Administration ignored the advice of its own expert advisory committee and approved the first new treatment for Alzheimer’s in 18 years. Called Aduhelm, it carries a substantial risk of painful brain swelling and bleeding, requires monthly infusions, and comes with an eye-popping list price of $56,000 per year. These caveats might be fine if the drug, which is manufactured by Biogen, miraculously restored the memories lost by the 6 million Americans with Alzheimer’s—or at least measurably improved the lives of patients in some meaningful way. But according to even the FDA’s own statisticians, the clinical data fail to show the new drug can slow Alzheimer’s devastating cognitive decline. Read more…
Across social media, Silicon Valley data wonks, as well as people with Ph.D.s in fields tangentially related to epidemiology, are analyzing public datasets, posting graphs, and making sweeping predictions about the pandemic. Some, like Ginn, draw conclusions that contradict accepted public health advice. Other casual assessments of the numbers are being used to make uselessly terrifying cases for containing the virus’s spread. Wherever you look, people have become suspiciously comfortable with concepts like R0 and CFRs, which they use to argue in favor of or against widespread social distancing. At least one epidemiologist has called the phenomenon a crisis in its own right—an “epidemic of armchair epidemiology.” Read more…
If traumatic brain injuries can impact the parts of the brain responsible for personality, judgment, and impulse control, maybe injury should be a mitigating factor in criminal trials — but maybe not. This is the story of my brother’s motorcycle accident, personality change, and crime, during which I discover that assigning crime a biological basis creates more issues than it solves. Read more…
Angela Saini’s new book makes a compelling argument about how even scientists with good intentions end up perpetuating misleading ideas about race. Read more….
Corporations have privatized almost every part of the public prison system. Now, private equity firms are swooping in, seeking lavish returns for pensions, endowments, and charitable foundations. The story begins in a prison kitchen in central Michigan. Cover story. Read more...
Because I became a full-time science writer after obtaining a PhD, scientists often ask me: “How can I do the same?” Here are my five best tips. Read more...
The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist offers an outrageous tale of scientific fraud. Its commentary on the court system is even more chilling. Read more…
Forensic Science Put Jimmy Genrich in Prison for 24 Years. What if It Wasn’t Science? A special investigation reveals a disastrous flaw affecting thousands of criminal convictions. Cover story. Read more…
Scientists, Stop Thinking Explaining Science Will Fix Things. It won’t. Try this instead. Read more…
Researchers have long known that the adolescent brain is continually rewiring itself, making new connections and pruning unnecessary neurons as it matures. Only recently has it become clear that the process stretches well into early adulthood. Buried in that research is an uncomfortable legal question: If their brains have not fully matured, how responsible are adults ages 18 to 24 for their crimes? Read more…
The Supreme Court has increasingly called upon new findings in neuroscience and psychology in a series of rulings over the past decade (Roper v. Simmons, Graham v. Florida, Miller v. Alabama and Montgomery v. Louisiana) that prohibited harsh punishments—such as the death penalty and mandatory life without parole—for offenders under 18. Due to their immaturity, the argument goes, they are less culpable and so deserve less punishment than those 18 or older. Now people are questioning whether the age of 18 has any scientific meaning. Read more…
To figure out the origin of life might take a conceptual shift towards seeing it as a pattern of molecular energy. Life, geologist Mike Russell argues, is not a freak occurrence but a unified part of a sweeping physical narrative, ‘merely one more part of the continuum of energy flow in the expanding Universe’. Read more…
Cutting-edge neural technologies can erase traumatic memories and read people’s thoughts. They could also become the 21st century’s next battleground. Cover story. Read more…
Each summer, sharks get a bad rap, with the mere sight of a dorsal fin clearing entire beaches. They pick up on the scent of blood from miles away, their sleek, torpedo-like bodies and powerful jaws no match for the unsuspecting fish or seal. But it turns out that these killing machines also have a secret weapon—a sixth sense—that allows them to prey in murky waters or even complete darkness. Read more…
How did rocks, air and water coalesce into the first living creatures on the primordial Earth? Why did complex life like animals and plants arise from a single ancestor only once in the history of our planet? In “The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life,” Nick Lane sets out to answer these questions and many more with a novel suite of ideas about life’s emergence and evolution. Read more…
Here may be the real conclusion from looking at the Human Brain Project and the BRAIN Initiative: Neither should be called “big science.” That’s just rhetoric. If you think about it, building a particle accelerator, sequencing the human genome, or putting a man on the moon are actually not science projects: They are engineering projects. In fact, there’s actually no such thing as big science. Read more…
Babies learn to speak months after they begin to understand language. As they are learning to talk, they babble, repeating the same syllable (“da-da-da”) or combining syllables into a string (“da-do-da-do”). But when babies babble, what are they actually doing? And why does it take them so long to begin speaking? Insights into these mysteries of human language acquisition are now coming from a surprising source: songbirds. Read more…
For months, Henry Markram and his team had been feeding data into a supercomputer, four vending-machine-size black boxes whirring quietly in the basement of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. The boxes housed thousands of microchips, each programmed to act like a brain cell. Cables carried signals from microchip to microchip, just as cells do in a real brain. In 2006, Dr. Markram flipped the switch. Blue Brain, a tangled web of nearly 10,000 virtual neurons, crackled to life. Read more…
IN THE MID-’80s, the political philosopher James Flynn noticed a remarkable but puzzling trend: for the past century, average IQ scores in every industrialized nation have been steadily rising. This bizarre finding—christened the “Flynn effect” by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve—has since snowballed so much supporting evidence that in 2007 Malcolm Gladwell declared in The New Yorker that “the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact.” But researchers still cannot agree on why scores are going up. Are we are simply getting better at taking tests? Are the tests themselves a poor measure of intelligence? Or do rising IQ scores really mean we are getting smarter? Read more…
Not too long ago, the idea that “you are your brain” was the revolutionary mantra of a handful of scientists, but today it raises hardly an eyebrow among the general public. The brain has become, for many, synonymous with the biological machinations of the self, and the self-knowledge promised by neuroscience has ignited a hunger to understand how it weighs in on age-old questions: Do we have free will? How do we make decisions? What happens when we fall in love? Why do we make art? Imagine, Jonah Lehrer’s polymathic new book is poised to feed this hunger. If only the science behind the book were true. Read more...
Tiny Biocomputers Move Closer to Reality: Several research groups are developing DNA-based circuits that could one day monitor and treat disease from inside the body. Read more…
Electric Fish from the Congo May Hold the Key to How We Move. Read more…
A new technique offers scientists an unprecedented window into complex psychiatric disorders. Read more…
After a traumatic injury, scientists discover that neurons governing memory can regenerate. Read more…
In the final chapter of his latest book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, neuroscientist David Eagleman muses on the ultimate dethronement of humankind, the “fall from the center of ourselves.” Just as Galileo plucked the Earth from the center of the solar system, and Darwin relegated us to one twig among many on the evolutionary tree, a century of modern neuroscience has confirmed Freud’sintuition that the vast majority of brain activity occurs at levels of which the conscious “I” is scarcely even aware—much less in control of. What we call the conscious mind, Eagleman argues, is far from center stage, and the more we try to find out who—or what—is actually in control of our brain, the more we find out there is, as Gertrude Stein said, “no there there.” Read more...
