This week, researchers at Yale monitored retinal waves in the brains of mice to show that they were dreaming visually before birth, practicing the use of sight so they would be prepared for possible predators the moment they open their eyes. Newborn humans exhibit some of the same behaviors, so this is believed to imply …
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 …
One of several great things about the new mRNA vaccines is that they’re so simple. They’re basically just the lipid membrane, saltwater, and the mRNA, which is so easy to synthesize that I did it myself as an undergrad. Despite all the rumors, there are far fewer opportunities for side-effects and unknowns than with traditional …