Compared to their knowledge of other senses, scientists know relatively little about how cells sense touch. A newly confirmed family of mechanosensors, comprising more than a dozen members and present in both plants and animals, is an important step toward … Continue reading
Journal Club
Highlighting recently published papers selected by Academy members
Journal Club: Key protein family helps govern sense of touch in both plants and animals
Categories: Cell Biology | Journal Club | Neuroscience
Tagged cell membrane, cell wall, ion channel, mechanosensor, OSCA protein, sense of touch, TMEM63 protein
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Journal Club: Researchers catch the mouse brain in the act of learning something new
Neurobiologists have captured, for the first time, the moment in a mouse’s brain when it first learns something new: in this case, that a beep signals a delicious droplet of sugar water. The results, recently reported in Nature Neuroscience, support a famous … Continue reading
Categories: Animal Behavior | Cell Biology | Journal Club | Neuroscience
Tagged dopamine, Hebbian model of learning, learning, midbrain, neuron
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Journal Club: Simple model reproduces patterns of toxic protein buildup across multiple neurodegenerative diseases
Fatal neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) begin as tiny pockets of misfolded proteins that evade the body’s normal detritus-removal systems. They spread throughout the brain and clog neural pathways. But exactly how these proteins propagate … Continue reading
Journal Club: Being less infectious pays off for lung pathogen
The human body is home to millions of commensal microbes, some of which—given the right circumstances—can cause disease. One such microbe, known as nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi), infects the lungs of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a condition that … Continue reading
Categories: Infectious disease | Journal Club | Medical Sciences | Microbiology
Tagged bacteria, commensal, COPD, fadL, flu, NTHi
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Journal Club: Tracing light’s effect on mood and learning in mice from the eye to deep within the brain
To the mammalian eye, light offers more than just sight. “Light is so important for many innate functions,” says neuroscientist Samer Hattar of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). “We really don’t appreciate the importance of light in our … Continue reading
Journal Club: Butterflies get diversity boost from associations with ants, plants
Harvard University evolutionary biologist Naomi Pierce began studying Lycaenidae butterflies as a graduate student in the 1980s. But only recently has she accumulated enough data, from her team’s work and others’, to begin to address the question that has long … Continue reading
Categories: Animal Behavior | Evolution | Genetics | Journal Club
Tagged ants, butterfly, caterpillars, diversity, evolution, genetic drift, macroevolution, molecular evolution, speciation
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Journal Club: Attention may be at the root of confirmation bias
Confirmation bias is a pervasive phenomenon. Whether it’s a news article or an additional piece of scientific data, people tend to interpret new information as evidence confirming their prior beliefs—even if it actually doesn’t. “People have been aware of this … Continue reading
Categories: Journal Club | Neuroscience | Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Tagged attention, confirmation bias, social media, visual perception
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Journal Club: Ocean wave power generator gets boost from optics insights
Engineers have long dreamed of tapping into the vast quantities of renewable energy available in the motion of ocean waves, but designing apparatuses to harness such power efficiently has so far proven difficult. Borrowing a technique from optical physics, a … Continue reading
Categories: Climate science | Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences | Energy | Journal Club
Tagged optical physics, renewable energy, solar power, wave power, wind power
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Journal Club: Marine conservation move sparks a fishing frenzy
Initiatives to protect marine ecosystems could do more harm to marine life than good, according to a recent PNAS paper. The work suggests that the announcement of one of the world’s largest marine protected areas sparked a sudden uptick in … Continue reading
Journal Club: New screening method promises to reveal elusive cellular receptors for a range of pathogens
The surfaces of human cells are chock-full of proteins that help cells communicate with one another. Unfortunately, many viruses coopt these proteins, latching on in order to enter cells. By revealing which proteins are receptors for which viruses, researchers may … Continue reading
Categories: Genetics | Infectious disease | Journal Club | Microbiology | Uncategorized
Tagged cell surface proteins, cytomegalovirus, HCMV
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