In his seminal study on information transfer between biological organisms, Ralph Hartley wrote that “in any given communication the sender mentally selects a particular symbol and by some bodily motion, as his vocal mechanism, causes the receiver to be directed to that particular symbol”1. Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) have emerged as a new paradigm that allows brain-derived information to contr

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Neuroimaging data sets contain vast amounts of information. Credit: J. T. Vogelstein et al. Randal Burns recalls that the brain-science community was “abuzz” in 2011. Burns, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, was focusing on astrophysics and fluid dynamics data management at the time. But he was intrigued when Joshua Vogelstein, a neuroscientist and colleague

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The discovery of high-temperature superconductors, the determination of DNA’s double-helix structure, the first observations that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating — all of these breakthroughs won Nobel prizes and international acclaim. Yet none of the papers that announced them comes anywhere close to ranking among the 100 most highly cited papers of all time. Citations, in which one

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The search for more efficient optimization algorithms is an important endeavor with prevalence on many disciplines ranging from the social sciences to the physical and natural sciences. Belonging to the latter, the protein folding problem1,2,3,4,5,6,7 consists of finding the lowest free-energy configuration or, equivalently, the native structure of a protein given its amino-acid sequence. Knowing

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