SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Brainpower May Lie in Complexity of Synapses
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Evolution's recipe for making a brain more complex has long seemed simple enough. Just increase the number of nerve cells, or neurons, and the interconnections between them. A human brain, for instance, is three times the volume of a chimpanzee's.
A whole new dimension of evolutionary complexity has now emerged from a cross-species study led by Dr. Seth Grant at the Sanger Institute in England.
Dr. Grant looked at the interconnections between neurons, known as synapses, which until now have been regarded as a standard feature of neurons. But in fact the synapses get considerably more complex going up the evolutionary scale, Dr. Grant and colleagues reported online Sunday in Nature Neuroscience.
Read more...
Science in the Media
Newspapers:
Magazines and Web Sites:
The Science-Media Intersection:
Sign Up
... for Sigma Xi SmartBrief, a free daily summary of the latest news in scientific research, delivered straight to your in-box. Each story is summarized concisely and linked directly to the original source for further reading.
Click here to subscribe.
Subscribe to Our Content!
Visit our RSS Feeds page to choose among 13 customized feeds, or create a free My AmSci account to request an email notice whenever a specified author, department or discipline appears online.
Sending...
Your email has been sent