Year in review: ‘Speed cells’ help make navigation possible
Discovery suggests brain has distinct speed sensors
FAST TRACKING Studies of rat brains yielded important clues this year about special cells that appear to be crucial for navigation.
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Tucked away in the brain, cellular speedometers clock a rat’s swiftness. These “speed cells,” reported in Nature this year, were a missing piece in science’s understanding of how the brain creates an internal map of the world.