Tag Archives: Newtonian

Kevin Mitchell, Trinity College Dublin The traditional view of causation in neuroscience involves a “driving” metaphor, in which activation of one set of neurons drives downstream neurons, which drive further-downstream neurons, which eventually drive behavior. This view is inherited from seminal studies on sensorimotor reflex circuits and underlies the interpretation of many optogenetic manipulations. This perspective casts the brain as …

Human sperm are famously good swimmers, yet the physics of their motion has puzzled scientists for decades. Thick cervical mucus or lab-made gels should throttle any cell only fifty microns long, but sperm shoot through with surprising ease. That puzzle finally cracked when a Kyoto University team revealed that the sperm tail’s internal mechanics side step Newton’s third law, the …