The human brain is very good at solving complicated problems. One reason for that is that humans can break problems apart into manageable subtasks that are easy to solve one at a time. This allows us to complete a daily task like going out for coffee by breaking it into steps: getting out of our office building, navigating to the coffee shop, and once […]
When navigating a place that we’re only somewhat familiar with, we often rely on unique landmarks to help make our way. However, if we’re looking for an office in a brick building, and there are many brick buildings along our route, we might use a rule like looking for the second building on a street, […]
Scientists at the McGovern Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have reengineered a compact RNA-guided enzyme they found in bacteria into an efficient, programmable editor of human DNA. The protein they created, called NovaIscB, can be adapted to make precise changes to the genetic code, modulate the activity of specific genes, or […]
Just ten to 15 minutes of mindfulness practice a day led to reduced stress and anxiety for autistic adults who participated in a study led by scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute. Participants in the study used a free smartphone app to guide their practice, giving them the flexibility to practice when and where they chose. […]
When visual information enters the brain, it travels through two pathways that process different aspects of the input. For decades, scientists have hypothesized that one of these pathways, the ventral visual stream, is responsible for recognizing objects, and that it might have been optimized by evolution to do just that. Consistent with this, in the past decade, […]
