Ashley Lopez


Ashley Lopez joined KUT in February 2016. She covers politics and health care, and is part of the NPR-Kaiser Health News reporting collaborative. Previously, she worked as a reporter at public radio stations in Louisville, Kentucky, and Miami and Fort Myers, Florida, where she won a National Edward R. Murrow Award for a story about an immigration policy that was failing some undocumented domestic abuse victims. She earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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‘Friction-maxxing’ in school: Students should read primary literature, not AI summaries

Trainees need to learn how to identify a neuroscience paper’s major takeaways and integrate them into their understanding. This skill doesn’t come from outsourcing the work to large language models.

By Nora Bradford
26 March 2026 | 5 min read

Head direction cells stably orient mice to outside world

The cells’ representations show little drift over time—unlike those of other navigation system neurons—and may provide a “rigid backbone” for more flexible sensory and cognitive responses.

By Angie Voyles Askham
25 March 2026 | 0 min watch
Thumbnail of Juan Gallego.

Juan Gallego discusses how manifolds are transforming our understanding of the coordination of neuronal population activity

A wealth of evidence supports the view that neural manifolds are real and useful, Gallego says, even if they may not completely solve the age-old mind-body problem.

By Paul Middlebrooks
25 March 2026 | 121 min listen