Biological neural networks as a research area focus on the structure, dynamics, and computation of networks of real neurons in living organisms, integrating cellular neurophysiology, synaptic plasticity, and systems-level circuit organization. The field investigates how biophysical properties, connectivity patterns, and neuromodulatory influences give rise to information processing, learning, memory, and behavior. It spans experimental and theoretical approaches, including electrophysiology, imaging, connectomics, computational modeling, and data-driven analysis of large-scale neural recordings, with the dual goals of explaining brain function mechanistically and providing biologically grounded principles that inform artificial neural network design and neuroengineering applications.
A new computational model of the brain based closely on its biology and physiology has not only learned a simple visual category learning task exactly as well as lab animals, but even enabled the discovery of counterintuitive ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Dec 29, 2025
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249
Right now, the debate about consciousness often feels frozen between two entrenched positions. On one side sits computational functionalism, which treats cognition as something you can fully explain in terms of abstract information ...
Other
Dec 22, 2025
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Every clonal raider ant lives a nearly identical life. Each new generation of these blind, queenless ants is born at the same time, eats the same things, lives in the same environment, and—as an asexually reproducing species—has ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 10, 2025
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45
The Jahn-Teller effect, proposed by Jahn and Teller in 1937, describes how molecules or crystals with degenerate electronic orbitals can lower their total energy by distorting their structure. This distortion lifts the degeneracy, ...
Condensed Matter
Dec 10, 2025
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41
Researchers at UT San Antonio have uncovered new details about electrical signals happening within nerve cells, deepening scientists' understanding of the brain.
Cell & Microbiology
Dec 3, 2025
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107
Researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas' Center for Advanced Pain Studies (CAPS) and their colleagues have made a fundamental discovery about a key mechanism that enables nervous system connections to strengthen.
Cell & Microbiology
Nov 20, 2025
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17
Researchers have developed a powerful new software toolbox that allows realistic brain models to be trained directly on data. This open-source framework, called JAXLEY, combines the precision of biophysical models with the ...
Biotechnology
Nov 13, 2025
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25
New studies from Arizona State University reveal surprising ways bacteria can move without their flagella—the slender, whip-like propellers that usually drive them forward.
Molecular & Computational biology
Nov 8, 2025
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396
The brain does not need its sophisticated cortex to interpret the visual world. A new study published in PLOS Biology demonstrates that a much older structure, the superior colliculus, contains the necessary circuitry to ...
Evolution
Nov 5, 2025
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127
An international team of researchers, including scientists from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, has uncovered a surprisingly complex nervous system in sea urchins. The animals appear to possess an "all-body brain" whose ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 5, 2025
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