We all know that Nature likes to publish sexy stories. Well, at least we scientists know. For the rest of you, Nature is one of the premier scientific journals that everyone and their mom tries to get their papers published in. The competition is brutal. Not only do you need to have a flawless story (as I’ve discussed before), it usually needs to be sexy, too. … Continue reading
Welcome to Brain Bits, where I highlight important or interesting recent news in the world of neuroscience. This week: implanting a compass into the brain, creating an encyclopedia of neurons, discovering how our brains learn so many different things, and more! A new paper in Current Biology demonstrated that blind rats can navigate just as well as sighted rats using a neuroprosthetic compass connected to their … Continue reading
Welcome to Brain Bits, where I highlight important or interesting recent news in the world of neuroscience. In store for today: wireless brain stimulation, implanting false memories during sleep, and a new technology for mutating an entire species (seriously!). A new Science paper demonstrates how a recently developed DNA engineering technique called CRISPR can be used to generate self-propagating mutations. Mutated genes usually spread slowly throughout a species because … Continue reading
If you’ve ever done research, then you know about variability. Probably too much about it, in fact. Variability means your results change from day to day, or from cell to cell, or animal to animal. This does not make us scientists happy. Especially for those of us who study animal behavior, which is particularly capricious, variability is the bane of our existence. Even when we … Continue reading
Welcome to the second installment of Brain Bits, where I highlight important or interesting recent news in the world of neuroscience. This week: how to build a human brain, what female fruit flies do after sex, DIY brain stimulation, and celebrating crappy results. A hallmark of the human brain is the dramatic enlargement of the neocortex, which is believed to mediate higher-level thought and cognition. Last week a new study in Science … Continue reading
Ok guys, so I’m starting a new thing where I’m going to highlight some of the major news that happened this week in the world of neuroscience. These will be relatively short posts that for now I’m calling “Brain Bits”. I think it’ll be good to engage myself and you guys in the broader world of neuroscience on a regular basis, and it’ll also give … Continue reading
Note: This post is a modified version of an article that I submitted to the Access to Understanding science writing competition sponsored by Europe PubMed Central, which required writing a summary of a science journal article chosen from a short list. So this post may seem different from usual—more narrowly focused and formally written—though I’ve edited it to fit the style of my blog. … Continue reading
In last week’s post about taste and smell I cited a study that estimated that humans can smell over a trillion different odors. That study was published in Science earlier this year by Leslie Vosshall’s lab at Rockefeller University.1 While the paper was a bit controversial from the start, this week I discovered that the controversy has reached a new level due to a scathing … Continue reading