In the vast and often unseen world of microscopic life, a recent discovery may force scientists to rethink what it means to be alive. Nestled inside a tiny plankton cell, researchers found a ...

The gut bacterium Bacteroides fragilis has long presented researchers with a paradox. It has been associated with colorectal cancer, yet it also lives quite happily in most healthy people. A study by ...

A trumpet-shaped, single-celled organism seems able to predict one thing will follow another, hinting that such associative learning emerged long before multicellular nervous systems ...

The brain is an evolutionary marvel. By shifting the control of sensing and behavior to this central organ, animals (including us) are able to flexibly respond and flourish in unpredictable ...

Much more difficult is learning to connect different types of stimuli or events, and predicting that one is linked to another. Such associative learning was most famously demonstrated when Ivan Pavlov ...