A benchmark driven guide to binding site comparison: An exhaustive evaluation using tailor-made data sets (ProSPECCTs)

Humans have extraordinarily large brains, which tripled in size in the last few million years. These increases are puzzling, because brain tissue is energetically expensive—a smaller brain is easier to maintain in terms of calories. Muthukrishna et al. present a theory, captured in an analytic and computational model, that explains these increases in brain size: The Cultural Brain Hypothesis.

Collective motion has been usually modeled by simple interaction rules and explained by global statistics. Fujii et al. introduce decomposition methods to directly extract and classify the latent global dynamics of nonlinear dynamical systems in an equation-free manner, even including complex interaction in few data dimensions.

Studies have demonstrated a critical role for cellular morphology and the topology of signaling networks in regulating the spread of biochemical signals in neurons and other cells. Basak et al. add complexity to this narrative by demonstrating that voltage-gated ion channels on the plasma membrane could actively amplify or suppress the strength/spread of downstream signaling components.