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
Journal Club
Highlighting recently published papers selected by Academy members
Author Archives: Amber Dance
Journal Club: Researchers catch the mouse brain in the act of learning something new
Journal Club: Bioengineers build a tiny heart ventricle to better understand heart disease and treatment
Bioengineer Kit Parker wants to build replacement hearts for children born with heart defects. Although that goal remains a long way off, Parker recently took a step in that direction by assembling a 1:250 scale model of the human left … Continue reading
Journal Club: Giving the brain something to do highlights the circuitry of smarts
Scientists conducting neuroimaging studies hope that their MRI scans will offer up patterns that predict traits related to intelligence, personality, disease, or even offer insights into a patient’s clinical symptoms or their chances of responding to a drug. But according … Continue reading
Journal Club: Fruit flies’ internal circadian clocks continually check the temperature
As a fruit fly sails from sunshine into a patch of shade, its temperature drops by 10 degrees F or so. Immediately, certain neurons in its brain spring into action, telling the fly’s circadian clock about the temperature change. By … Continue reading
Journal Club: New technique lights up the connectome, tracking signals across neuronal populations
Neuroscientists still possess an incomplete understanding of how different neurons interface and communicate throughout the brain’s wiring diagram, called the connectome. In a recent eLife article, Caltech molecular neurobiologist Carlos Lois and colleagues introduce a new tool to screen for such … Continue reading
Journal Club: Cooler temperatures might make some mosquitoes better dengue spreaders
Migrating mosquitoes that carry diseases from the tropics to cooler climes might be better at spreading disease in their new, cooler home, according to a recent study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Researchers from Yale University in … Continue reading
Journal Club: Antarctic cyanobacteria show no changes due to warming—yet
Captain Robert Scott’s Antarctic Discovery expedition took place over 100 years ago—and yet its participants recently racked up another contribution to science. Thanks to the samples of bacterial mats they collected from polar ponds—samples that were pressed, dried, and stored … Continue reading
Journal Club: Geometry of Greenland’s glaciers helps predict future ice melt
The changing climate is just one factor contributing to the melting and thinning of the slow-moving rivers of ice that terminate in spots such as Greenland’s fjords. Each glacier’s geometry—including its thickness and how steeply it flows—also makes a difference. … Continue reading
Journal Club: Layer-cake chemistry offers up a cheap way to perform chemical tests
Sana Jahanshahi-Anbuhi started her study with a trip to the supermarket to buy Listerine breath strips, the sort that melt on your tongue in seconds. But the chemical engineering postdoc at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada wasn’t worried about bad … Continue reading
Journal Club: How much you think you understand depends on what you believe others understand
Knowing that experts understand something is enough to make lay persons think they, too, have better grasped a concept, according to a September 26 paper in the journal Psychological Science. Cognitive scientist Steven Sloman, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode … Continue reading
Journal Club: Childhood adversities correlated with shortened telomeres, poorer health later in life
Stressful experiences during youth seem to leave a mark on a person’s genome decades later, in the form of withered chromosomal caps. As reported in PNAS, childhood stress correlates with increased odds to have shortened telomeres, the chromosome tips that … Continue reading