Nicole Mlynaryk

San Diego Science Writer

Feature Articles

Explore a selection of my feature stories for online and print magazines and news outlets

Simons Foundation •

New Efforts to Relate Brain Structure and Function Reveal Surprising Properties of Neural Circuits

Nematodes don’t like to be touched. A poke will send the worm slithering backward, away from the bothersome nudge. Unless, that is, the worm was in the midst of turning when it was poked. “Somehow, the act of turning makes the worm change the way it responds to this very salient stimulus, but we didn’t know how this computation played out in the brain,” says Andrew Leifer, a neuroscientist at Princeton University and an investigator with the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain. Despite havi
Simons Foundation •

Old Drugs Offer a New Route for Exploring Neural Dynamics

Though humans have been exploring psychoactive drugs since ancient times, how they actually work remains largely a mystery. Researchers have made extensive progress unpacking the biochemical impacts of different drugs, such as their target molecules and how they shape synaptic transmission. But uncovering how specific drugs alter neural activity to enhance attention, alleviate depression or dampen tremors remains a much more difficult challenge. This is beginning to change, though, as researcher
This Week •

Diversity and Science Lecture Series Gets Funded

Graduate seminar series receives a $460,000 grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to expand its programming at UC San Diego and beyond

Amid the growing social justice movement in the summer of 2020, many graduate programs issued mission statements for equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI). But as Gene Yeo, a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine, met with students from the Bioinformatics Graduate Program (BGP), he could see they needed something bey