Category Archives: Neuroscience

History, Journalism, Medicine, Neuroscience

Roots of brutality

ns_logoWHY would an apparently normal young adult drop out of college and turn up some time later in a video performing a cold-blooded execution in the name of jihad? It’s a conundrum we have been forced to ponder ever since a group calling itself ISIS declared war on infidels. But 70 years ago we were asking something similar of guards in Nazi concentration camps – and, sadly, there have been plenty of opportunities to ponder the matter in between…

This article first appeared in New Scientist on 14 November 2015. To continue reading, click here (paywall).

Evolution, Journalism, Medicine, Neuroscience

A Faustian bargain

economist-logoHUNTINGTON’S disease is awful. It slowly robs its victims of mobility, wits and emotions. And there is no cure. The idea that it might be the obverse of something good sounds, to say the least, counter-intuitive. Yet that is the contention of a small band of neuroscientists who have been studying it. They suggest the underlying cause of Huntington’s, a strange form of genetic mutation called a triplet-repeat expansion, might also be one of the driving forces behind the expansion of the human brain. Huntington’s, these people suspect, may be a price humanity pays for being clever…

This article first appeared in The Economist on 7 March 2015. To continue reading, click here.

 

Journalism, Neuroscience

Once upon a time…

ns_logoWHAT is “now”? It is an idea that physics treats as a mere illusion, yet it is something we are all familiar with. We tend to think of it as this current instant, a moment with no duration. But if now were timeless, we wouldn’t experience a succession of nows as time passing. Neither would we be able to perceive things like motion. We couldn’t operate in the world if the present had no duration. So how long is it…?

This article first appeared in New Scientist on 10 January 2015. To continue reading, click here (paywall).

Journalism, Neuroscience

Upside down world

ns_logoA MAN walks confidently towards an open gate but instead of going straight through he raises his knee very high as if he were stepping over a low wall. He strides forward, reaching out to shake a friend’s hand. But again he misjudges, and his friend draws back in alarm to avoid being punched in the nose…

This article was first published in New Scientist on 11 October 2014. To continue reading, click here (paywall).

 

Journalism, Medicine, Neuroscience

The forgetting gene

page11-nature_logo

ONE day in 1991, neurologist Warren Strittmatter asked his boss to look at some bewildering data. Strittmatter was studying amyloid-β, the main component of the molecular clumps found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. He was hunting for amyloid-binding proteins in the fluid that buffers the brain and spinal cord, and had fished out one called apolipoprotein E (ApoE), which had no obvious connection with the disease…

This article was inspired by an Ernst Strüngmann forum on brain diseases in March 2014 and first published in Nature on 6 June 2014. To continue reading, click here.