Time for some truly wild biology.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal shared the 1906 Nobel Prize with Camillo Golgi for their work in neuroanatomy. Cajal proposed that nervous systems were composed of disjunction neurons, while Golgi argued that a nervous system comprised a synticium of fused cells.
Cajal was vindicated in the 1950s by advances in microscopy, but as with so many things in biology, both explanations were right in a way.
Out today, a paper in Science that shows that the neural net of an early-stage ctenophore (or comb jellyfish) works much as had Golgi proposed.
Ctenophores represent the earliest branch among the metazoans—animals—and appear to have nervous systems radically different from these anywhere else.
Here's the paper in Science:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade5645
And if you don't have subscription access, a (not final version) preprint on bioRxiv:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20
@ct_bergstrom Haven't been this weirded out since I learned about sapient potatoes.
