Ed Yong, Science Writer

Several neural diseases, including chronic pain and epilepsy, involve a lack of restraint. That is, damage to nerves in the spine reduces the levels of a signalling chemical called GABA, which silences excitable neurons. The result: too much neural activity.

There are drugs that can restore GABA, but they don’t always work, they are only temporary and they have unwanted side effects like sedation. There is another option: transplant GABA-producing neurons directly into the spine. Scientists have now done this in mice, with successful results.

I covered the story for The Scientist. Check it out.

Photo by Nanny Snowflake

In a small office north of London, Stephanie Pierce from the Royal Veterinary College is watching a movement that hasn’t been seen for 360 million years. On her computer, she has resurrected the long-extinct Ichthyostega – one of the earliest four-legged animals to creep about on land. By recreating this iconic beast as a virtual skeleton, Pierce has shown that while it looked like a giant salamander, it couldn’t possibly have walked like one. It had some of the planet’s earliest bony legs, but they weren’t very good at taking steps.

Ichthyostega hails from the Devonian period, a time in Earth’s history when swimming transformed into walking. Fish invaded the land and evolved into the first tetrapods—four-limbed animals that include amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.  Muscular fins used for steering and balance evolved into legs for walking.

Since its discovery over 50 years ago, Ichthyostega has been an icon of this pivotal transition. Some 300 specimens have been found but many are incomplete, flattened or distorted. Pierce’s new model provides the best look yet at the animal’s skeleton. “It makes Ichthyostega a bit more tangible,” she says. “It’s not ...

The world’s largest animals have been hiding something. The bodies of the giant rorqual whales—including the blue, fin and humpback—have been regularly displayed in museums, filmed by documentary makers, and harpooned by hunters. Despite this attention, no one noticed the volleyball-sized sense organ at the tips of their lower jaws. Nicholas Pyenson from the Smithsonian Institution is the first, and he thinks that the whales use this structure to coordinate the planet’s biggest mouthfuls.

The rorquals sieve tiny prey from the water with a unique hunting technique called lunge feeding. They surge forwards, open their mouths and swallow everything in front of them. This seemingly simple tactic is one of the most extreme in the animal kingdom. In one move, a lunging fin whale can engulf a volume of water that’s bigger than its own body. Its bigger cousin – the blue whale – can swallow half a million calories in one gulp.

Here’s what happens in slow-motion prose. A hunting rorqual detects the movements of their prey with pressure-sensitive whiskers on the underside. It accelerates to high speed and opens its mouth to almost a right angle. The ...

And by magic, I mean mixed metaphors, endless hours on Twitter, and tears.

The Open Notebook has a series called Natural Habitat, which looks at the space in which science writers work. I, perhaps foolishly, agreed to take part in it. You can find the resulting video and photos here, featuring the local pub, treelancing (TM), and a cuddly giant squid.

A mouse optic nerve with new axons (in red) running all the way along it.

A blind man sees his fiancée’s smile for the first time. Another walks around at night, navigating via streetlamps and headlights. Yet another reads his own name (and spots a typo). All three had lost their sight years before, as an inherited disorder destroyed the light-sensing cells of their retinas. But they had since been fitted with retinal implants that took over from the broken cells, sensing incoming light, and converting it into electrical impulses delivered to the brain. The devices are a long way from 20/20 vision, but they have nonetheless restored sight to those who had lived without it for years.

These retinal implants seem miraculous, but they have a major drawback: they rely upon a working optic nerve. This is the main communication line between the eye and the brain. If it’s damaged, no amount of retinal techno-wizardry will help. And that’s bad news for people with glaucoma, the world’s second leading cause of blindness, which wrecks the optic nerve.

But even for those people, there is hope. Silmara de Lima ...

Top picks

Manta rays depend on forests. Carl Zimmer on top form.

The evidence for precognition was staring us in the face all along. Hilarious satire of psychology’s problems.

How a professor who fooled Wikipedia got caught by Reddit – implications for ”truth” online. Great story by Yoni Applebaum.

Not allowed to have a small heart: great long read from Greg Downey on Tourette Syndrome

Living photography. This is as cool as it sounds

Committee assesses ethics of trial, in which kids would get an anthrax vaccine unlikely to ever be necessary. But Project “Dark Zephyr”?? Are you kidding me? With a straight face? What about Project “Shadow Mistral”. Or “Hot Air”

My BBC column “Will we ever….?” now has guest stars. First up: John Pavlus on the Turing test.

Helen Pearson talks to The Open Notebook about her seriously good profile of protein-resurrector Joe Thornton

Doctors ‘rewire’ hands of paralysed man. Great story by Ian Sample

This tiny sphere is all the world’s water. (And as usual, America is hoarding it ;-p)

“Not all neurons are exactly alike. The brain contains multitudes.” – a new series on neurons by Ferris Jabr, which continues, with a look into the

Cathy Hutchinson has been trapped in her frozen body for 14 years, after a stroke disconnected her brain from her spinal column. Recently, however, she commanded a robot arm to bring a thermos of coffee to her lips. This story has been all over the news, but for the ultimate telling of the tale, you need to read Jessica Benko’s amazing story over at The Atavist.

I reviewed it for Download the Universe – a review site for science e-books, where a bunch of us writer types are having tremendous fun writing about writing for the sheer joy of it. A sample of the review follows to whet your appetite. Go buy the e-book. You can thank me later. And do read the review too.

Throughout the history of neuroscience, we have gained an inordinate amount of knowledge by studying people with severe brain damage, and watching how they manage to live. HM’s surgically altered brain revealed secrets about how memories are formed – after his death, he was revealed to be an American man called Henry Molaison. KC, a Canadian man whose real name is still unknown, also taught us much about how memory works, following ...

Your laziest days are positively frenetic compared to the lifestyle of some deep-sea bacteria, buried in the sediments of the Pacific Ocean. These microbes are pushing a slow-going lifestyle to an extreme. They subsist on vanishingly low levels of oxygen, in sediments that have not received any new food sources since the time of the dinosaurs. And yes, they survive.

Not only that, but these microbes could make up 90 per cent of those on the planet. “We’re looking at the most common forms of life on this planet, and we know almost nothing about them,” said Hans Røy, who has been studying them for many years. Now, Røy has finally measured just how slow their metabolism really is.

I’ve written about this discovery for The Scientist, so head over there for the full story.

Image by Shelly Carpenter, NOAA Ocean Explorer

The Earth’s earliest days were largely free of oxygen. Then, around 2.5 billion years ago, primitive bacteria started to flood the atmosphere with this vital gas. They produced it in the process of harnessing the sun’s energy to make their own nutrients, just as plants do today. The building oxygen levels reddened the planet, as black iron minerals oxidised into rusty hues. They also killed off most of the world’s microbes, which were unable to cope with this new destructive gas. And in the survivors of this planetary upheaval, life’s first clock began to tick and tock.

Today, all life on Earth runs on internal clocks. These ‘circadian rhythms’ are the reason we feel sleepy at night, and why our hormones, temperature and hunger levels rise and fall with a 24-hour cycle. They’re molecular metronomes that keep the events inside our bodies ticking in time with the world around us.

Until now, it seemed that the major branches of the tree of life each had their own timekeeping systems, evolved independently of the others. But Akhilesh Reddy and John O’Neill from the University of Cambridge have disproved that ...

I have a new feature out in Nature looking at two big problems within the field of psychology. First, the field is almost entirely dominated by positive results, while negative ones languish unpublished in personal file drawers. Second, there are few incentives to replicate old results and negative replication attempts face a lengthy gauntlet of obstacles. In the story, I look at why these problems exist and why some psychologists are starting to take them very seriously.

The piece has its origins in an incident that regular readers will already know. In January, Stephane Doyen and colleagues had unsuccessfully tried to repeat a classic experiment where people walk more slowly down a corridor after being unconsciously primed with age-related words. I wrote about their research. Two months later, the man behind the original study – John Bargh of Yale University – wrote a scathing attack on Doyen’s team, me, and the journal that published the study. I responded.

The ensuing discussion opened my eyes to an undercurrent of unrest. Many psychologists came out of the woodwork to mention experiments that were hard to replicate, common practices that they ...