Pnas.org

The problem of how the brain undertakes multiple tasks concurrently is one of the oldest in psychology and neuroscience. Although successful negotiation of the rich sensory world clearly requires the ongoing management of multiple tasks, humans show...

The hydroxyl radical (OH) is the central oxidant of the lower atmosphere. OH is highly variable in space and time, but current observation-based methods cannot resolve local and regional OH gradients. We combine the robust chemical relationship...

Our senses provide rich information about world. For example, we might learn that elephants are large and gray by seeing one in a zoo. Sensory experience is not always necessary, however. People born blind have knowledge about “visual” ideas (e.g.,...

Virtual chemical space, i.e., the set of all conceivable drug-sized molecules, offers an abundance of unexplored quadrants which might contain novel bioactive compounds. Exploring these quadrants has to balance novelty of compounds with their...

Awareness that our planet is a self-supporting biosphere with sunlight as its major source of energy for life has resulted in a long-term historical fascination with the workings of self-supporting ecological systems. However, the studies of such...

Increased burning in subalpine and boreal forests dominated by obligate seeders and historically characterized by infrequent, stand-replacing fires has raised the specter of novel fire regimes in which young forests reburn before having recovered...

Approximately one-third of eukaryotic proteins are synthesized on ribosomes attached to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane. Many of these polypeptides co- or posttranslationally translocate into the ER, wherein they fold and mature. An ER...

Germline genes that are aberrantly expressed in nongermline cancer cells have the potential to be ideal targets for diagnosis and therapy due to their restricted physiological expression, their broad reactivation in various cancer types, and their...

Mitchell A. Lazar has spent his career studying the transcriptional regulation of metabolism, particularly the role of nuclear receptors. He has discovered several nuclear receptors and elucidated the mechanisms by which they interact with the...

The generalization of fear responses toward neutral stimuli is a highly prevalent and debilitating dimension of trauma- and anxiety-related disorders. Understanding the neural circuits that underlie the ability to suppress fear generalization is of...

To successfully and efficiently live in social groups, we need information about each other’s emotions. Emotional contagion has been suggested to facilitate such information transmission, yet it remains difficult to measure this in animals. Previous...

The function of α-synuclein (α-syn) has been long debated, and two seemingly divergent views have emerged. In one, α-syn binds to VAMP2, acting as a SNARE chaperone—but with no effect on neurotransmission—while another posits that α-syn attenuates...

Future sea level rise (SLR) poses serious threats to the viability of coastal communities, but continues to be challenging to project using deterministic modeling approaches. Nonetheless, adaptation strategies urgently require quantification of...

Biologists believe that a major mass extinction is happening in the tropics. Destruction of forests is a key reason. However, there are no solid predictions of the percentage of species that will go extinct as more and more forests are disturbed....