News & Comment

Being first in a family to aim for a science career takes resilience and resourcefulness.

Bats, the only flying mammals, comprise almost 25% of mammalian species. They are excellent navigators, highly social, and extremely long-lived. Their sense of echolocation has been studied for many years — but many species possess also excellent vision and olfaction. In recent years, bats have emerged as new models for neurobiology of navigation, social neuroscience, aging, and immunity.

Tissues and organs are inherently three-dimensional. Studies to understand their function and dysfunction should therefore aim to maintain the 3D spatial context.

Machine learning approaches can distinguish six different classes of presynapses from electron micrographs across the Drosophila brain.

Scientific breakthroughs can change how we understand and live in the world, disrupting long-held assumptions and concepts and raising new questions for philosophy and science. To address these challenges, we describe a model for collaboration of scientists with philosophers and ethicists, and its benefits to the research process and outcomes.

Assessing forest health and resilience is an urgent, many-methods task that takes global collaboration, data collected at multiple scales and a willingness to be surprised.

Amid the brutality of war around them, some Ukrainian scientists find calm in bioinformatics.

Tissues, organs and organ systems are composed of interacting cells (the cellome). We discuss the emergence of an omics approach that we refer to as cellomics. It enables cellome-wide analysis in whole-organ or whole-body specimens, based on advanced three-dimensional imaging and image analysis technology. We think that cellomics will pave the way for the incorporation of cellular, intercellular and spatial information across millions of cells in our body.

We provide some advice about how to best name methods and software tools.

A label-free optical technique enables monitoring of the dynamic properties of individual biomolecules as they move freely in solution.

Dimension reduction helps to visualize high-dimensional datasets. These tools should be used thoughtfully and with tuned parameters. Sometimes, these methods take a second thought.

Sometimes their queer identity is one that people set apart from their science identity. Others find unique ways to integrate multiple facets of their identity.