People with a PhD in the life sciences answer questions about their life and work.

To celebrate five years of eLife we catch up with some of our first authors and reflect on the current state of scientific publishing and peer review.

Ketamine, an NMDA receptor antagonist and experimental model for schizophrenia, produces decision-making deficits in monkeys, which are predicted by a lowering of cortical excitation-inhibition balance in a spiking circuit model.

Artificial selection on communities drives the evolution of interactions and establishes community-level inheritance.

An optimization principle allows natural-image data to predict human sensitivity to synthetic, un-natural textures with multiple gray levels.

Maternal positional information in the fly embryo can be read rapidly in spite of the gene-expression bottleneck and general examples of regulatory architectures that combine speed and accuracy are provided.

Risk factors for SARS-CoV-2 infection in healthcare workers included caring for Covid-19 patients, Black or Asian ethnicity, and Covid-19-positive household contacts, whereas a bundle of PPE-related measures protected ICU staff.

An efficient coding theory for higher-level cognitive processes reveals that humans efficiently adapt to contextual distributions by economizing on environmental prior information.

Parenchymal astrocytes are quiescent neural stem cells whose neurogenic potential can be unleashed by targeted manipulations guided by single-cell RNA sequencing data.

Hydrogen-deuterium exchange, electron microscopy, and vesicle reconstitution show how binding of the autophagy adaptor NDP52 to the FIP200 subunit of the ULK1 complex triggers membrane binding in autophagy.