Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have discovered what amounts to a reflexive negativity bias in our sense of smell, showing that bad smells are processed rapidly and unconsciously. The olfactory bulb can process and send a signal to the motor cortex in 300 milliseconds, alerting us to rotten food before we swallow or …
Honestly, I can’t quite wrap my head around this week’s sciku article. The role of dopamine in our external rewards system has been studied extensively, but we also have regular passive spikes of the neurotransmitter cycling trough our brains spontaneously—in mice it’s a spike every minute or so—and we don’t really understand why. In a …
Who knew that the moon’s orbit wobbled on an 18.6-year cycle? Well, actually, we’ve known about this since 1728—and Bronze Age peoples knew about it thousands of years ago, and tracked it in their megalithic monuments all over the world. But a paper in Nature Climate Change this week studied the impact it will have …
In a study out of Yale this week, researchers explored the neurological pathways governing a fly’s choice in what to eat—is it the taste or the calories they’re after? To explore this, scientists laced a normally sweet, nutritious food with bitter quinine, and watched the flies brains as they decided whether to eat that, or …
I almost forgot to share this week’s sciku! It was inspired by researchers at Stanford and TU/e who have been studying how hummingbirds hum. If you’ve spent any time watching hummingbirds, you might already know they answer: they don’t fly like regular birds that apply aerodynamic force to the undersides of their wings with every …