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

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Amber Dance

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: Bioengineers build a tiny heart ventricle to better understand heart disease and treatment

Posted on August 3, 2018 by Amber Dance

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 →

Categories: Cell Biology | Journal Club | Medical Sciences | Tagged arrhythmia, heart attack, heart defect, isoproterenol, stem cells, tissue engineering, ventricle | Leave a comment

Journal Club: Giving the brain something to do highlights the circuitry of smarts

Posted on July 27, 2018 by Amber Dance

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 →

Categories: Applied Physical Sciences | Journal Club | Neuroscience | Tagged Human Connectome Project, intelligence, MRI, neuroimaging, Raven's matrices, rest-state | Leave a comment

Journal Club: Fruit flies’ internal circadian clocks continually check the temperature

Posted on March 2, 2018 by Amber Dance

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

Posted on December 21, 2017 by Amber Dance

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

Posted on October 20, 2017 by Amber Dance

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

Posted on July 12, 2017 by Amber Dance

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

Posted on April 28, 2017 by Amber Dance

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 →

Categories: Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences | Environmental Sciences | Journal Club | Tagged climate change, Greenland, ice sheet, iceberg | Leave a comment

Journal Club: Layer-cake chemistry offers up a cheap way to perform chemical tests

Posted on February 24, 2017 by Amber Dance

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

Posted on October 13, 2016 by Amber Dance

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 →

Categories: Journal Club | Psychological and Cognitive Sciences | Tagged community of knowledge | 1 Comment

Journal Club: Childhood adversities correlated with shortened telomeres, poorer health later in life

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Amber Dance

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 →

Categories: Cell Biology | Journal Club | Psychological and Cognitive Sciences | Tagged childhood, stress, telomeres | Leave a comment