How saliva changes the flavor of food
By Chris Gorski The liquid that our mouths produce isn’t just a lubricant. It plays an active role in how we perceive taste and can influence what we choose to eat, researchers are discovering. Read more
AI for better crops
By Saugat Bolakhe The technology could transform how growers protect their harvests, by detecting plant diseases very early on. But the challenge is to develop tools that are as affordable as they are effective. Read more
Navigating the ethics of ancient human DNA research
By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega Paleogenomic research has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, igniting heated debate about handling remains. Who gives consent for study participants long gone — and who should speak for them today? Read more
From the archives
Turning grapes into wine is often regarded as a kind of alchemy, but Champagne house Bollinger is applying AI to the task, crunching data on soil, weather and growing techniques to predict vintage quality. What spurred this futuristic assessment? Climate change, Tim Barber writes in WIRED. For more on how winemakers, growers and researchers are grappling with this warming world, read our story.
Climate change is altering the chemistry of wine
By Ula Chrobak and Katarina Zimmer Warming, wildfires and unpredictable weather threaten to disrupt the delicate processes that underlie treasured wines. Researchers and producers are innovating to keep ahead. Read more
What we are reading
Unimaginably alien
What if we haven’t yet found life beyond Earth because it’s too different for us to recognize? This question plagues scientists preparing for missions to exotic worlds like Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus. To deal with this, a recently launched NASA project is developing techniques for detecting signatures of life that don’t mirror our home planet’s biochemistry, Sarah Scoles writes for Scientific American. Intricate arrangements of environmental materials that signal complexity or disequilibrium, for example, may be good proxies for “life as no one knows it.” The Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures, as the initiative is called, is also devising instruments to spot such clues at otherworldly destinations.
SSRI skirmish
SSRIs are drugs that increase the buildup of serotonin in people’s brains. And taking SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) like Prozac and Zoloft can help treat depression. But the brain is a complicated thing: Low serotonin levels don’t cause depression. This is not breaking news, writes neuroscientist Ben Rein in Open Mind magazine, despite recent headlines claiming as much. Rein, troubled by the non-controversy that led some people to go off their (quite effective) meds, explains the history of SSRI research, how scientists think the drugs exert their effects and how this misinformation debacle came to be. (For more antidepressant science, check out our podcast episode.)
Close encounters
Across Wisconsin, 2,000 wildlife cameras have been taking pictures for six years, catching encounters between critters — a face-off between a bobcat and racoon, for example, or cranes meeting turkeys. The images are part of a citizen-science research project, and the findings suggest that in human-altered landscapes, such as farms, these meetups are more likely, Emily Anthes reports in a photo-rich story for the New York Times. If human activity fosters more strange greetings — opossums hissing at deer; otters brushing up against raccoons — there could be consequences for disease transmission, competition for food and more.
Art & science
CREDIT: CARLOS AIZENMAN
Neuro fantasia
You won’t find the spinal cord of an inky Raijú (shown above) or the cerebral cortex of the Nile calcatrix in any neuroscience textbook. These creatures are imaginary. But their nerve cells oscillate and spiral in the vivid art of Carlos Aizenman. A neuroscientist at Brown University, Aizenman’s work blends digital tools and overlapping photo techniques with some of the earliest neurobiology illustrations and images.
Some of Aizenman’s work draws on the detailed ink-and-paper work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish neuroanatomist who merged his love of art with his father’s expectation of a medical career by hand-drawing the structures he saw in his microscope. Ramón y Cajal’s assertion that the brain is made of individual cells earned him a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906. The work of his contemporary, Camillo Golgi, also appears in Aizenman’s art. Golgi shared the 1906 Nobel with Ramón y Cajal for developing a staining technique for isolated cells called the “black reaction.” In fact, Ramón y Cajal used the “black reaction” to prove that the brain was made of individual cells — a theory Golgi, and many others, adamantly disagreed with.
Aizenman, for his part, “wanted to recreate the feeling of possibility and wonder one gets when they first peer at something new under a microscope.” Peruse more of his “Imaginary Neurohistology” series at Etsy. If the names of the creatures have you particularly tickled, you have Aizenman’s daughter to thank.
