Why does an ant, with a brain smaller than a grain of sand, find the shortest path better than a human engineer?
Richard Feynman didn’t learn about ants from a textbook. He learned by sitting on his bathroom floor with a sugar cube and a stopwatch. What he discovered wasn’t just biology—it was a biological supercomputer solving the \.
New multiplexed imaging technology using standard clinical MRI systems can simultaneously map more than 20 biomarkers in high resolution, providing a comprehensive view of the brain with a single scan.
Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign demonstrated the multiplexed MRI technology (MRx) by characterizing brain tumors and multiple sclerosis lesions—revealing different structural, physiological and molecular changes within the diseases. Led by Zhi-Pei Liang, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the U. of I., the team has reported its findings in the journal Nature.
“MRx can be a powerful tool for noninvasive tissue characterization, helping to advance personalized, precision and predictive medicine,” Liang said. “By providing rich, multidimensional biomarkers to capture disease progression and treatment response, this capability could open new opportunities for more precise diagnosis, individualized treatment planning and improved patient outcomes.”
Autoimmune diseases, where the body’s own immune system mistakenly goes on the attack, are much more common in women – and a new study analyzing more than 1.25 million blood cells goes a long way to explaining why.
The analysis, led by a team from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia, revealed over 1,000 genetic ‘switches’ in immune cells that work differently depending on sex.
In short, these variations in gene activity mean that inflammatory pathways that respond to threats are likely to be busier in women, leading to a greater risk of conditions like lupus and multiple sclerosis.
College students with anxiety, depression and eating disorders may be more likely to start and to respond more positively to therapy offered via a digital app compared to referrals to in-person campus clinics, according to a study led by Penn State researchers and published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
Globally, an estimated 40% to 60% of college students experience a mental health disorder at some point, and the need for campus counseling services has increased faster than institutions’ capacity to provide these services, according to the researchers.
The research team wanted to see if a proactive intervention using a digital therapy app could effectively treat anxiety disorders, depression and eating disorders, as well as address the increased need for psychological services.
The events that occupy our thoughts in an especially persistent way are often those that are unfinished-from half-written papers to unfolded laundry. These events seem to also be privileged in memory, as in the “Zeigarnik effect”: When people carry out various tasks, but some are never finished due to extrinsic interruptions, memory tends to be better for those tasks that were unfinished. But just how foundational is this sort of “unfinishedness” in mental life? The Zeigarnik effect is often explained by appeal to the salience of goals or the weight of obligation, but might unfinishedness also be spontaneously prioritized even in visual processing-independent of these high-level social/motivational factors? Across four experiments (N = 120), observers viewed paths that gradually unfolded through mazes, from a start point to an end point. Probes briefly appeared along the path, and observers later simply reproduced their positions. Critically, each path either reached its end point or stopped shortly before-remaining visually unfinished. Although this manipulation was entirely task-irrelevant, it greatly influenced performance-with more precise reproductions on unfinished trials. This same pattern held across multiple experiments, even while carefully controlling for various lower level visual properties, and it generalized across different types of displays. This new visual Zeigarnik effect shows how vision extracts an unexpectedly rich property that is usually associated with higher level thought, and how the unfinishedness of events is privileged in the mind at a deep level. (PsycInfo Database Record © 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Olaf SpornsMay 1, 2015Annual Science Board Symposium — New Science. New Horizons.
Dr. Adam Gazzaley, Cognitive Neuroscientist at the University of California San Francisco, explores the latest research on the interaction between the brain and technology.
This presentation is clipped from a virtual keynote Jeff was invited to give on December 16.Numenta technology is built on the Thousand Brains Theory, our se…
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
— Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2
The two hemispheres of our brain collaborate to produce a coherent understanding of the world—at least, that’s what they’re supposed to do. In his groundbreaking book, The Master and His Emissary, neuro-philosopher and psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, proposed that our culture has been captured by the left hemisphere, whose dogmatic, technical and irrational way of processing information leads it to manifestly dangerous conclusions about the way the world works. Importantly, the left hemisphere never changes its mind.
In one of the widest conversations on Planet: Critical to date, Iain explains how we came to lose sight of the bigger picture by forsaking the intuition, creativity and intelligence of the right hemisphere. We discuss how our relationship to language makes and unmakes the world, the search for meaning, human agency, relationality, morality, art and the divine, with Iain clearly spelling out a path to human fulfilment—which may very well be the only thing which can save Earth from the worst of us.
🔴 The Master and His Emissary: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/master… Platformed: Charles Foster 🌎 Support Planet: Critical: / planetcritical 🌎 Subscribe: https://planetcritical.com/ 🌎 BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/racheldonald…
🗣️ Platformed: Charles Foster