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Licking Rat Pups: The Genetics of Nurture
What would happen if humans were like turtles – alone at birth with no mom to guide them back home? We probably would not survive very long before getting attacked and/or eaten by something bigger than us. For many animal species, instinct guides survival. But for humans and other mammal species, nurture as an infant […]
Smell the rainbow: Breeding mice to smell light
Almost everyone can agree that our senses are what makes life enjoyable: Your sense of smell helps you recognize delicious baked goods, your sense of sight lets you see how sexy you are in the mirror (very, I’m sure), your sense of balance makes a Saturday in Allston seem like a wacky whirlwind of wobbly […]
Three Bald Mice: The Link Between Behavioral Disorders and the Immune System
A recent study confirms the cause-effect relationship between problems in the immune system and the development of mental illness. Nobel Prize winning geneticist, Mario Cappecchi, and his team, linked a deficiency of microglial cells with Trichotillomania, an impulse control disorder that causes people to pull out their hair. In his experiment, Cappecchi performed […]
"New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down."
It was very important to me that I go to college in a city. The people! The opportunities! The public transportation! Surely you must develop certain skills navigating through streets full of academics and artists and doctors, all with very cool places to go and things to think, right? Perhaps not. Some research suggests that city […]
You’ve got a worm in your brain. Well, at least a part of one.
The cerebral cortex, a layer of neural tissue surrounding the cerebrum of the mammalian brain, has been known to play various roles in memory, language, thought, attention, and consciousness. Up until now, no invertebrate equivalent to the cerebral cortex has been encountered, but Detlev Arendt, Raju Tomer, and colleagues may have found an evolutionary counterpart. […]
Mind the Gap
The discoveries of modern neuroscience have certainly heightened our understanding of the brain and its functions, and have begun to provide us with a physical groundwork for the complicated problem of effectively investigating the mind. While it is certainly beneficial to establish physical principles that underly cognitive function of the brain, how does this effect […]
Having Trouble Getting a Good Night's Sleep? There's an App for That.
Maciek Drejak Labs released an app earlier this year for the iPhone (which can also be used on the iPod Touch) called “Sleep Cycle.” Recently, Lifehacker rated this App the best alarm clock application function for smart phones for its weekly Hive Five feature. The way this application works is by monitoring your body movements […]
Scientific Misinformation
Stuart Hameroff, MD, is an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona. In one of many articles and videos about consciousness on the Huffington Post, Hameroff describes how anesthesia can help explain consciousness. If the brain produces consciousness (all aspects of the term), then it seems to follow that turning off the brain will […]
Creamy Corn or Two-Dollar Cookies? The Rise of Behavioral Economics
Imagine that you’ve just spent the whole morning working non-stop. You’ve been hushing your stomach grumblings for the past hour and you cannot concentrate on anything but your hunger and that devastatingly slow-ticking clock. Another hour passes and that long awaited lunchtime break has finally come around. All you know is that you need food, and […]
A Medical Molecular Mechanism
Tired of hearing about halogenation and hydrogenation reaction mechanisms? Keep that organic chemistry book open, because it gets better: At Columbia University Medical Center, researchers have discovered the reason for the build-up of harmful proteins in Parkinson’s patients. The scientists have worked out a mechanism for the build-up of a class of proteins known as […]