Archive for the ‘Organism’ Category
Imagine cold fingers creeping up someone’s calf. Now imagine that whenever you saw someone else being touched, you would feel the sensation on your own body. That is mirror-touch synesthesia. Psychologists at UCL verified mirror-touch synesthesia and further showed its linked with heightened empathy in their report in Nature Neuroscience.
Filed under: Behavior, Genetics, Human, SNPs, Uncategorized | 30 Comments
MPA, the Hormone used in the Depo Provera birth control shot, causes memory problems in rats
A new study published in Psychopharmacology shows young rats injected with medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA) performed worse on behavioral memory tests. MPA’s memory impairment persisted even once it had been cleared from the blood. MPA is the active component of the Depo Provera shot but not found in other hormonal contraceptives. The finding is especially significant […]
Filed under: Behavior, Hippocampus, Hormones, Memory, Public Health, Rat | Leave a Comment
Tags: Depo Provera, GAD, MPA, Water Radial Arm Maze
Detecting 5-hmCs 5-hydroxymethylcytosines (5-hmC) went undiscovered because they showed up like other 5-methoxycytosines through bisulfide sequencing. The neuroscientists behind a new study in Nature Neuroscience profiles 5-hmC across development using T4 bacteriophage B-glucosyltransferase to transfer an engineered glucose-azide moiety onto the the hydroxyl of 5-hmC. This moiety was then detected and used to map 5-hmCs […]
Filed under: Aging, Epigenetics, Genetics, Molecular, Mouse | Leave a Comment
Tags: 5-hmC, B-glucosyltransferase, DIPseq, MECP2, TET
Scientists at the Max Planck institute in Munich, Germany recruited six lucid dreamers with years of experience for their study. Once in their dream, the subjects signaled researchers with left-right-left-right eye movements and then immediately started clenching their left hand ten times. Then they performed the eye movements again and made ten clenches with their […]
Filed under: Dreams, eeg, fMRI, Human, Motor, Sleep | 1 Comment
Tags: EEG, EOG, fMRI, imaging, Lucid dreams, sleep
This brand new method developed by Hadas Lapid et al. sticks an electrode into the nose with an exposed tip that directly contacts the nasal olfactory epithelium. Subjects hold their breath as odorants are blown into the nose to avoid artifacts from breathing. The study found that the epithelium seemed to be divided into patches […]
Filed under: Human, Olfaction, Psychophysics, Sensory | 1 Comment
Tags: electro-oflactogram, EOG, odors, Olfaction, pleasentness
Viberg of the Eriksson lab in Sweden shows in a new paper in Toxicology (full text) that a single exposure to BPA on postnatal day 10 has dose-dependent effects. (Mice sexually mature around p45.) The paper is still in press, so details are sparse, but authors saw changes in spontaneous behavior when exposed to a […]
Filed under: Behavior, Development, Mouse | Leave a Comment
Tags: BPA, Brain Development, Environmental Toxin, Mouse Behavior
Just saw Paul Garrity present an interesting story on the function and evolution of TRPA1–a chemical and temperature sensitive cation channel of the transient receptor potential family. He initially discovered TRPA1’s role in thermosensation using an RNAi screening of drosophila larvae on a thermal gradient. As small ectotherms (a term which essentially means cold-blooded), drosophila […]
Filed under: Drosophila, Genetics, Molecular, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Tags: Drosophila, Genetics, Molecular, Receptors, Transient Receptor Potential, TRPA1
Ben Kuebrich
Neuroamer 