Author: Tom Patriot

Does the age of a mother influence the traits and characteristics of her progeny, and how? A team of scientists at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona have addressed these questions by studying tiny, genetically identical C. elegans worms. Their results have been published in Nature. “Our lab has long been interested in understanding why genetically identical individuals sharing the same environment still often differ substantially in their characteristics,” explains Ben Lehner, ICREA Professor and Coordinator of the Systems Biology Program at CRG. “Through a rather circuitous route, we have…

Summary: The brain’s ability to use approximate probabilistic inference can not be studied by simple tasks that are not well suited to expose the inferential computations that make the brain special, researchers say. Source: Rice University. The human brain naturally makes its best guess when making a decision, and studying those guesses can be very revealing about the brain’s inner workings. But neuroscientists at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine said a full understanding of the complexity of the human brain will require new research strategies that better simulate…