branchesofbiology
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Fish May Feel Each Other’s Fear Through the Same Mechanism That Drives Human Empathy
You may have heard that ‘fish don’t feel pain.’ It’s a common, persistent myth that dates back to 17th-century French philosophy. Yet, regardless of René Descartes’s many other worthwhile ideas, the scientific consensus is that he was flat-out wrong on this one. Fish, and all other classes of vertebrate animals, seem to suffer from bumps,…
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The Latest HIV Cure Is the First of Its Kind
Doctors say they’ve likely cured yet another person of HIV using a specialised form of stem cell transplant. The patient has remained HIV-free for six years and is the first known woman to have successfully undergone the procedure. The doctors used a novel technique that transplanted stem cells from a relative and a donor’s umbilical…
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First Complete Map of a Fly Brain Has Uncanny Similarities to AI Neural Networks
To most humans, a fruit fly larva doesn’t look like much: a pale, wriggling, rice grain-shaped maggot, just a few millimetres in length. Yet, in their own way, fly larvae lead rich and interesting lives full of sensory inputs, social behaviours, and learning. If you’ve ever doubted that a lot goes on inside a maggot’s…
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How Airborne DNA Could Revolutionise Conservation
Elizabeth Clare’s airborne eDNA project is a winner of the 2023 Gizmodo Science Fair for demonstrating a way to use airborne DNA to reveal which species are present in an environment.