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A cell-by-cell look at neuropsychiatric diseases
DNA sequences are connected to genes and functions in the developing and adult brain
DNA study implicates medieval warfare and colonial trade
HARVARD MAGAZINE May/June2024 :
How long will the world’s forests impound carbon below ground?
by Jonathan Shaw
MARYVILLE, Tennessee, lies near the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, a range home to more tree species than exist in all of Europe. Benton Taylor grew up amidst this abundance, but as a boy, he barely noticed the plants. In the nearby national park, a family friend was raising—together with a menagerie of other mammals—a pair of bears orphaned as cubs. Taylor dreamed of studying these apex denizens of the forest, who forage at the top of the food chain. But as his education and understanding grew, his curiosity shifted to seed-dispersing animals, plants, and the soil and nutrients that sustain them: a trip down the trophic pyramid, driven by an appreciation of forests as ecological systems in which plants are primary producers. “Now I’ve half moved into the basement,” jokes the assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, whose research encompasses the strategies plants use to obtain essential nutrients such as nitrogen, and how that, in turn, affects their ability to store another vital element with a global climate impact: carbon.
by Nina Pasquini
DIVERSIFYING one’s assets is useful not only in finance but also in diet, according to an October study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). Though not many people have heard of the “portfolio diet”—consisting of plant-based foods proven to lower unhealthy cholesterol, such as nuts, oats, berries, and avocados—it is one of the easiest ways to improve long-term cardiovascular health. “The idea was that each of these foods lowers cholesterol quite minimally, but if you make a whole diet based on these different foods, you will see large reductions in [unhealthy] cholesterol,” said Andrea Glenn, an HSPH postdoctoral research fellow in nutrition and the lead author of the study. The more of these foods one eats, the higher the protection—but one need not include them all to reap the diet’s benefits, she said. “Like a business portfolio, you can choose the ones you want.”
Mina Cikara explores how political tribalism feeds the American bipartisan divide.
by Max J. Krupnick
B 8G4L/ChimeraX
Around 7.3 billion people faced temperatures strongly influenced by global warming over the past year.
The landmark decision could transform the treatment of sickle-cell disease and β-thalassaemia — but the technology is expensive.
From identifying disputed artworks to reconstructing lost masterpieces, artificial intelligence is enriching how we interpret our cultural heritage.
Seinfeld episodes help scientists to distinguish between the brain regions involved in understanding and appreciating humour.
Electrical stimulation improved his mobility, although researchers say that a larger study is needed to assess the device.
Nataly Castelblanco Martínez works to raise awareness of the perils faced by the much-loved marine mammals.
Geoffrey Hinton has spent a lifetime teaching computers to learn. Now he worries that artificial brains are better than ours.
In your brain, neurons are arranged in networks big and small. With every action, with every thought, the networks change: neurons are included or excluded, and the connections between them strengthen or fade. This process goes on all the time—it’s happening now, as you read these words—and its scale is beyond imagining. You have some eighty billion neurons sharing a hundred trillion connections or more. Your skull contains a galaxy’s worth of constellations, always shifting.
Too often, a facial-recognition search represents virtually the entirety of a police investigation.
By Eyal Press
On March 26, 2022, at around 8:20 a.m., a man in light-blue Nike sweatpants boarded a bus near a shopping plaza in Timonium, outside Baltimore. After the bus driver ordered him to observe a rule requiring passengers to wear face masks, he approached the fare box and began arguing with her. “I hit bitches,” he said, leaning over a plastic shield that the driver was sitting behind. When she pulled out her iPhone to call the police, he reached around the shield, snatched the device, and raced off. The bus driver followed the man outside, where he punched her in the face repeatedly. He then stood by the curb, laughing, as his victim wiped blood from her nose.
Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.
By James Somers
A host of disorders once thought to be nothing to do with the brain are, in fact, tightly coupled to nervous-system activity.
Device can wield tools inside one of the heart’s chambers while bracing itself against a stabilizer fitted into a major cardiac vein.
Dried brine from a subsurface ocean speckles the surface of Ganymede, which orbits Jupiter.
Video timeline: 00:00 – What happens to your brain when you age? 00:32 – In the womb 01:03 – Childhood 03:19 – Teenage years 04:48 – Early adulthood 05:27 – Middle age 07:04 – Later life 07:36 – Death
HARVARD MAGAZINE November-December 2023 :
Diet, cooking, and the human microbiome
IN THE LATE 2000s, Rachel Carmody was spending a lot of time counting calories. An anthropology graduate student at Harvard, she was studying whether cooking changed the number of calories the gut can extract from food. When humans invented cooking thousands of years ago, she and her advisor Richard Wrangham wondered, had they opened the door to a new source of energy?
DURING THE past two decades, the number of annual cancer deaths in the United States has fallen by 27 percent, a remarkable improvement driven by new precision diagnoses and treatments tailored to individual patients. Today, oncologists can detect cancer in its earliest stages and deliver drugs that enlist the patient’s own immune system to improve their odds of survival. Yet cancer remains the second deadliest disease in the United States, claiming more than 600,000 lives every year. Its persistence underscores the urgent need for a deeper understanding of how cancer interacts with the body. Assistant professor of neurology Humsa Venkatesh believes she may have found a promising new pathway for highly effective cancer treatments in the most unexpected of places: the human brain.
Bacteria cooperate to benefit the collective, but cheaters can rig the system. How is the balance maintained?
People often recognize social behaviors in complex organisms such as insects, nonhuman primates, and humans. But Megan Frederickson, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Toronto, is interested in a different, microscopic social community: bacteria. “Cooperation is everywhere,” she said. “Cells cooperate in multicellular organisms; individuals cooperate in societies; and different species cooperate… Why would it not be the case that microbes cooperate with each other?”
Clinicians and researchers teamed up to investigate how inappropriate proinflammatory mechanisms contribute to the pathogenesis of drug-refractory epilepsy.
Doctors treat epilepsy with anticonvulsants to control seizures, but some patients do not respond to these first-line therapies. For patients with drug-refractory epilepsy (DRE) whose seizures persist after treatment with two or more anticonvulsants, clinicians must surgically remove part of the brain tissue to cure the disease.
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