A computer network that emulates schizophrenia is providing University of Texas at Austin researchers with important insights into the inner workings of schizophrenic brains. Writing about their work in Biological Psychiatry, the researchers explain that the computer neural network they used simulated the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. “The hypothesis is that dopamine […]
Frustration is usually something best avoided. But for scientists, understanding how “frustrated” systems behave is the key to understanding a host of puzzling phenomena that affect systems from neural networks and social structures to protein folding and magnetism. In such systems, frustration describes the interacting components when they cannot settle into a state that minimizes […]
Adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine – the A,T,G and C that make up the DNA code. But these 4 letters are not the whole story. The rise of epigenetics in the past decade has drawn attention to a fifth nucleotide, 5-methylcytosine (5-mC), that sometimes replaces cytosine in the famous DNA double helix to regulate which […]
