Robin Lloyd

Locum News Editor
Spectrum

Robin Lloyd is a freelance writer, editor and educator, as well as a contributing editor for Scientific American and an adjunct professor at New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a B.A. from Smith College. She completed a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 1998-1999 academic year.

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Illustration of folded origami.

Dimensionality—neuroscience’s red herring?

Placing too much emphasis on a specific interpretation of dimensionality, or treating it as an end-all quantification of some aspect of neural computation, may hinder progress in understanding the brain.

By Matthew Perich
7 September 2026 | 8 min read
Monkeys at Dutch primate center.

Dutch primate center awaits October animal research debate

Science is forging ahead at the Biomedical Primate Research Centre in the Netherlands, following a reversal of last year’s mandate to phase out primate studies. But researchers aren’t sure how long the reprieve will last.

By Lauren Schenkman
2 September 2026 | 5 min read

When we sleep, our brain is filled with spontaneous neural activity. What is it doing?

Daniel Levenstein explains how internally generated brain activity during sleep shapes our cognition, and why NeuroAI is such a powerful approach to understanding the brain.

By Paul Middlebrooks
2 September 2026 | 96 min listen