Lydia Denworth

6 days ago | scientificamerican.com | Lydia Denworth

The rattling or whistling noises of regular snorers are famously hard on those who share their beds. Middle-aged men and people who are overweight come frequently to mind as perpetrators because they are the most common sufferers of sleep apnea, often caused by a temporarily collapsing airway that makes the person snore heavily. But recent studies in children and pregnant women have revealed that even mild snoring can negatively affect health, behavior and quality of life.

2 weeks ago | hechoencalifornia1010.com | Lydia Denworth

The world is full of things to learn. Where to start? How to choose what to pay attention to? What motivates someone to seek new knowledge? The desire to learn is partly a preference for novelty: we tend to seek out new information and experiences, and that adds to what we know. We also like to reduce uncertainty. Information can bring food, safety, relationships, and other physical rewards.

1 month ago | scientificamerican.com | Lydia Denworth

I recently met a 26-year-old chef named Caroline Horvatits whose story is simultaneously distressing and hopeful. About a decade ago, during high school, Caroline was stricken by gut pain so severe she couldn’t sleep and missed her midterm exams. After a colonoscopy, a gastroenterologist diagnosed her with ulcerative colitis (UC), a disease where the body’s immune cells overreact and attack the colon—part of the large intestine—leaving open sores in the lining.

1 month ago | thetransmitter.org | Claudia Lopez Lloreda |Calli McMurray |Lydia Denworth |Katie Moisse

ReporterThe Transmitter ReporterThe Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Academia, Craft and careers, Funding, Policy The Ph.D. application process crescendos during the first few months of every year: Prospective students visit schools, programs extend offers, and applicants decide which one to enroll in by 15 April. But this year, changes to the funding infrastructure of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) have disrupted that process.

1 month ago | thetransmitter.org | Lydia Denworth |Katie Moisse |Mark Humphries |Austin Coley

When Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung of Princeton University saw high-resolution 2D electron microscope images in a 2018 Cell paper, they decided to try to build a fruit fly connectome with that dataset. Funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative, Murthy and Seung used the electron microscopy data to launch the work that resulted in FlyWire, a nine-paper package published in Nature in October 2024. The work made international headlines  for its novelty and ambition.