The Year in Biology

Video : 2025’s most surprising breakthroughs in biology included a finding that a father’s environmental exposures can impact the development of their offspring, research confirming that intelligence evolved independently in birds and mammals, and a new mathematical model reveals that evolution happens in explosive bursts.

视频：2025 年生物学领域最令人惊讶的突破包括发现父亲的环境暴露会影响后代的发育，研究证实鸟类和哺乳动物的智力是独立进化的，以及一个新的数学模型揭示进化发生在爆炸性爆发中。

A s I reflect on a year of Quanta biology stories to decide which of the many excellent ones to recommend, I am relying on memory.

当我回顾一年的广达生物学故事来决定推荐哪些优秀的故事时，我依靠的是记忆。

But what exactly does that mean?

但这到底是什么意思呢？

“Memory” is a slippery word.

“记忆”是一个难以捉摸的词。

It means one thing to a person striving to recall places, people or moments from the past, and another to someone searching their mind for a fact they swore they knew.

对于一个努力回忆过去的地点、人物或时刻的人来说，这意味着一回事，而对于那些在脑海中寻找他们发誓知道的事实的人来说，这意味着另一回事。

A neuroscientist might consider a “memory” to be a physical connection between neurons or networks reactivated by cognitive processes, or the changes in an animal’s behavior in response to something it experienced in the past.

神经科学家可能会认为“记忆”是由认知过程重新激活的神经元或网络之间的物理连接，或者是动物对过去经历过的事情做出的行为变化。

But what is memory to a cell biologist — or to a cell?

但对于细胞生物学家或细胞来说，记忆是什么？

This is what the writer Claire L.

这是作家 Claire L.

Evans explored in her scientific, philosophical, semantic journey through the long-forgotten and recently revived history of aneural, or brainless, forms of memory.

埃文斯在她的科学、哲学、语义之旅中探索了长期被遗忘和最近复兴的神经记忆或无脑记忆形式的历史。

She recounts decades-old and brand-new experiments that test whether individual cells record experiences, such as pulses of chemicals in their environments.

她讲述了几十年前和全新的实验，这些实验测试单个细胞是否记录经验，例如环境中化学物质的脉冲。

In the process, these experiments challenge fundamental ideas in neuroscience.

在此过程中，这些实验挑战了神经科学的基本思想。

For a cell, Evans writes, “there’s no distinction between memory, the memorizer and the act of remembering.” Is that also true for us?

埃文斯写道，对于细胞来说，“记忆、记忆者和记忆行为之间没有区别。”对于我们来说也是如此吗？

Here are some more stories from 2025 that I think are worth remembering.

这里还有一些我认为 2025 年值得记住的故事。

O ne of the many things I love about biology is the way evolution situates us in the grand context of deep time.

我喜欢生物学的众多原因之一就是进化论将我们置于深层时间的宏大背景中。

It connects us to billions of years of struggle, survival and adaptation; it places my ancestors in unrecognizable forms and almost incomprehensible worlds, and helps me appreciate the strangeness of our age, too.

它将我们与数十亿年的斗争、生存和适应联系起来；它把我的祖先置于无法辨认的形式和几乎无法理解的世界中，也帮助我体会到我们这个时代的陌生之处。

Usually we glimpse these ancient worlds one at a time: the Cambrian seas ruled by trilobites, the great Carboniferous swamps, the fantastic dinosaurs of the Jurassic.

通常我们一次只能瞥见这些古老的世界：三叶虫统治的寒武纪海洋、巨大的石炭纪沼泽、侏罗纪神奇的恐龙。

In Quanta ’s special issue on basic climate science , Peter Brannen takes us on an extensive and fascinating journey through the latest advances in geologic climate modeling, which is trying to weave these stories of past worlds into a single narrative — the history of Earth for as long as animals have occupied it.

在广达关于基础气候科学的特刊中，彼得·布兰宁（Peter Brannen）带我们踏上了一次广泛而迷人的旅程，了解地质气候模型的最新进展，该模型试图将过去世界的这些故事编织成一个单一的叙述——自从动物占领地球以来，地球的历史。

Telling such a tale is no small feat.

讲述这样一个故事绝非易事。

To assemble this tour de force, Brannen had to compile far-flung details about past climates — the frozen and hothouse worlds through which animals lived and died — and situate them within the deductions scientists have made about evolution from fossil and genomic evidence.

为了完成这一杰作，布兰宁必须收集有关过去气候的广泛细节——动物生存和死亡的冰冻世界和温室世界——并将它们置于科学家根据化石和基因组证据对进化做出的推论中。

His effort paid off in a piece that spans 540 million years of interconnections between rocks, atmosphere, water and life, each of which makes and reshapes the others.

他的努力得到了回报，这部作品跨越了 5.4 亿年的岩石、大气、水和生命之间的相互联系，其中每一个因素都创造并重塑了其他因素。

He introduces us to the “pioneering forests [that] geoengineered the ancient world,” the “tropical coal swamps, streaked by titanic bugs, [that] were first buried in this age, moving carbon dioxide into the geologic abyss,” and the chalky plankton that drifted like snow to the seafloor and was “delivered to deep sea trenches, cooked and then released through the throats of volcanoes at the surface again as carbon dioxide.”

他向我们介绍了“对古代世界进行地球工程的开创性森林”，“热带煤沼泽，布满了巨大的虫子，在这个时代首次被埋藏，将二氧化碳转移到地质深渊”，以及像雪一样漂流到海底的白垩浮游生物，“被运送到深海海沟，煮熟，然后通过表面火山的喉咙再次以二氧化碳的形式释放出来”。

This perspective propels our story beyond biological evolution and into planetary evolution.

这种观点推动我们的故事超越生物进化，进入行星进化。

It reveals that all we are and will ever know is ultimately part of Earth’s carbon cycle.

它揭示了我们现在和将来所知道的一切最终都是地球碳循环的一部分。

And isn’t it glorious to be present as living, breathing, embodied carbon?

作为活生生的、会呼吸的碳的存在，不是很光荣吗？

T oday we live surrounded by intelligent networks of electrified neurons that fire signals to process information, recall memories and create representations of the world using language.

今天，我们生活在由带电神经元组成的智能网络包围之中，这些神经元发出信号来处理信息、回忆记忆并使用语言创建对世界的表征。

But wait — am I talking about living brains or the neural networks that power artificial intelligence?

但是等等——我说的是活体大脑还是驱动人工智能的神经网络？

To a biologist, such comparisons can feel like an abuse of neuroscience in service of tech marketing, but I still want to know: How do these two kinds of networked intelligences measure up?

对于生物学家来说，这样的比较感觉像是滥用神经科学来服务于技术营销，但我仍然想知道：这两种网络智能如何衡量？

Is there anything to learn about the human brain by comparing it to AI, or vice versa?

通过将人类大脑与人工智能进行比较，或者反之亦然，是否可以了解人类大脑的任何内容？

A feature by staff writer Yasemin Saplakoglu delivers answers to these questions and more.

特约撰稿人亚塞明·萨普拉科格鲁 (Yasemin Saplakoglu) 的专题文章为这些问题及更多问题提供了答案。

“ AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK ” explores the origins of artificial neural networks in neuroscience models, and shows how decades of assumptions and simplifications by early computational neuroscientists have led to widespread misunderstanding of the complexity, diversity and networked nature of the human brain.

《人工智能与大脑完全不同，但这没关系》探讨了神经科学模型中人工神经网络的起源，并展示了早期计算神经科学家几十年来的假设和简化如何导致了对人脑的复杂性、多样性和网络化本质的广泛误解。

Yes, artificial neurons fire and connect like biological ones — but the cells that make up our brains are “wicked complicated things,” Saplakoglu writes, “whose behaviors are controlled by a menagerie of molecules released on precise timescales.”

是的，人造神经元像生物神经元一样放电和连接，但构成我们大脑的细胞是“邪恶的复杂事物”，萨普拉科格鲁写道，“它们的行为是由一系列在精确时间尺度上释放的分子控制的。”

I now have a new understanding of AI, but more importantly, I feel a fresh appreciation for the complexity of the miraculous organ in my head, “the most complex piece of active matter in the known universe,” as one neuroscientist told Saplakoglu.

我现在对人工智能有了新的认识，但更重要的是，我对我大脑中神奇器官的复杂性有了新的认识，正如一位神经科学家告诉萨普拉科格鲁的那样，“已知宇宙中最复杂的活性物质”。

This piece ran as part of Quanta ’s series on artificial intelligence’s complex relationship with fundamental science.

这篇文章是广达关于人工智能与基础科学的复杂关系系列的一部分。

Check out the entire project here.

在这里查看整个项目。

I ’m a huge fan of ecologist Rachel Carson’s book The Sense of Wonder , published in 1965, a year after her death.

我是生态学家雷切尔·卡森 (Rachel Carson) 的书《奇迹的感觉》(The Sense of Wonder) 的超级粉丝，该书出版于 1965 年，即她去世一年后。

In it she insists that every one of us is born a scientist, with innate curiosity about the world that gets drilled out of us as we become adults.

她在书中坚持认为，我们每个人都是天生的科学家，对世界有着与生俱来的好奇心，随着我们长大成人，这种好奇心就会从我们身上被激发出来。

Her argument has influenced my approach to science journalism, and I find it embodied in Manu Prakash, an engineer and microbiologist at Stanford University, who was the subject of a Quanta Q&A .

她的观点影响了我对科学新闻的态度，我发现它体现在斯坦福大学工程师兼微生物学家马努·普拉卡什身上，他是广达问答的主题。

Prakash’s philosophy compels him to spend “half his time studying urgent health issues with global impact and the rest pursuing questions ‘of no use to anyone,’” he told writer Molly Herring.

普拉卡什的哲学迫使他“花一半的时间研究具有全球影响的紧急健康问题，其余的时间则去追寻‘对任何人都没有用’的问题，”他告诉作家莫莉·赫林。

The conversation captures an endlessly creative and active scientist — one day reeling in strange plankton to investigate their biophysical mechanisms and the next inventing low-cost tools to diagnose malaria in the field.

对话捕捉到了一位充满创造力和活跃的科学家的故事——有一天，他卷入了奇怪的浮游生物，研究它们的生物物理机制，第二天又发明了低成本工具来现场诊断疟疾。

Prakash embraces and defends the basic science we cover at Quanta — research that is “not at the service of something, but the groundwork that is our entire society’s foundation,” he told Herring.

普拉卡什拥护并捍卫我们在广达所涵盖的基础科学——他告诉赫林，这些研究“不是为了某种服务，而是我们整个社会的基础”。

H ow does our sense of touch work?

我们的触觉是如何运作的？

David Ginty, a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School known to some colleagues as “the emperor of touch,” has dedicated his career to documenting the surprising menagerie of neurons that innervate our skin .

哈佛医学院的神经生物学家戴维·金蒂（David Ginty）被一些同事称为“触觉皇帝”，他的职业生涯致力于记录支配我们皮肤的令人惊讶的神经元群。

“These strangely shaped cells are the reason why the experience of touch is so rich and multifaceted — why a buzzing cell phone feels different from a warm breeze or a lover’s caress, from raindrops or a mother’s kiss,” writes Quanta contributor Ariel Bleicher.

Quanta 撰稿人 Ariel Bleicher 写道：“正是这些形状奇特的细胞使得触摸体验如此丰富和多面——为什么嗡嗡作响的手机感觉与温暖的微风或爱人的爱抚、雨滴或母亲的亲吻不同。”

“To realize that your body is covered in them — that they are a part of you — takes your breath away.”

“当你意识到你的身体被它们覆盖——它们是你的一部分——你会惊叹不已。”

When Bleicher pitched me this story, she described the touch neurons as evolved feats of engineering.

当布莱彻向我讲述这个故事时，她将触觉神经元描述为工程学的进化壮举。

They are little mechanical objects at the surface of our skin or just beneath it that, when activated by temperature or vibrations of various frequencies, send signals to our nervous system to generate perceptions — warmth and cold, pressure, pain, itchiness, pleasure, softness and hardness, and awareness of the body in space.

它们是位于我们皮肤表面或皮肤下方的小机械物体，当被温度或各种频率的振动激活时，它们会向我们的神经系统发送信号以产生感知——温暖和寒冷、压力、疼痛、瘙痒、愉悦、柔软和硬度以及身体在空间中的意识。

Bleicher’s descriptions of the neurons and their workings, paired with Ginty’s fluorescent portraits of the various cell types, convey an entire world operating beyond our perception.

布莱彻对神经元及其运作方式的描述，与金蒂对各种细胞类型的荧光肖像相结合，传达了一个超出我们感知的整个世界。

Once they help you see it, you won’t experience this nuanced, multidimensional sense the same way again.

一旦他们帮助你看到它，你就不会再以同样的方式体验这种微妙的、多维的感觉。

Neuroscience is hard — so hard that neuroscientists have, as yet, failed to crack one of the simplest brains: that of the C.

神经科学很难——如此之难以至于神经科学家迄今为止还未能破解最简单的大脑之一：线虫的大脑。

elegans worm.

线虫。

All of its 302 (or so) neurons are mapped, but no one knows how they work together to make a worm act like a worm.

它的所有 302 个（左右）神经元都被绘制出来，但没有人知道它们如何协同工作，使蠕虫表现得像蠕虫一样。

The author of Quanta ’s story on cellular memory, Claire L.

广达细胞内存故事的作者 Claire L.

Evans, reports on an effort to simulate it on a computer.

埃文斯报告了在计算机上模拟它的努力。

Imagine a snow goose: a white chonk of a bird waddling across the Arctic tundra.

想象一下一只雪雁：一只白色的鸟在北极苔原上蹒跚而行。

Now imagine 20 million of them.

现在想象一下其中有 2000 万。

The once-endangered species has recovered spectacularly, and that has created new conservation problems in the central Arctic as big populations chew healthy tundra into barren mud.

这种曾经濒临灭绝的物种现在已经恢复得惊人，这给北极中部地区带来了新的保护问题，因为大量的种群将健康的苔原咀嚼成贫瘠的泥浆。

Most amazing to me is the snow-goose doubling time: There were 5 million geese around Hudson Bay in the 1980s, 10 million in the late 1990s and 21 million by 2014.

最让我惊奇的是雪雁倍增时间：20世纪80年代哈德逊湾周围有500万只鹅，1990年代末有1000万只，到2014年有2100万只。

Sarah Trent traveled to the western Arctic with biologists tracking a newfound snow goose explosion to prevent the same outcome there.

莎拉·特伦特（Sarah Trent）与生物学家一起前往北极西部，追踪新发现的雪雁爆炸，以防止那里出现同样的结果。

One of my most repeated party facts is that the average adult human brain contains a disposable spoon’s worth of microplastic, according to a study that came out earlier this year.

我在派对上最常重复的事实之一是，根据今年早些时候发布的一项研究，成年人的大脑中平均含有相当于一把一次性勺子的微塑料。

(I am fun at parties!) Carolyn Kormann colorfully describes the history of research into the ubiquitous plastic particles, and then carefully unpacks what they might be doing to our cells and tissues.

（我在聚会上很有趣！）卡罗琳·科曼（Carolyn Kormann）生动地描述了对无处不在的塑料颗粒的研究历史，然后仔细地揭示了它们可能对我们的细胞和组织产生的影响。

Get highlights of the most important news delivered to your email inbox

获取发送到您的电子邮件收件箱的最重要新闻的摘要

Quanta Magazine moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation.

《Quanta》杂志对评论进行审核，以促进知情、实质性、文明的对话。

Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected.

辱骂、亵渎、自我推销、误导、语无伦次或偏离主题的评论将被拒绝。

Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (New York time) and can only accept comments written in English.

版主在正常工作时间（纽约时间）有工作人员，并且只能接受英文评论。