The rat brain has served as an excellent model for elucidating the complex anatomy and physiological mechanisms of the human brain. As a result, a significant amount of information on brain diseases, such as dementia and Parkinson’s disease, has been determined from investigations using rat brains.
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Predatory beetles can detect the unique alarm signal released by ants that are under attack by parasitic flies, and the beetles use those overheard conversations to guide their search for safe egg-laying sites on coffee bushes.
Full article: Predatory beetles eavesdrop on ants’ chemical conversations to find best egg-laying sites
Deep-sea squid removes its own arms to distract baffled predators
A species of deep sea squid can jettison its own bioluminescent arms to distract predators and attackers. Later, when the squid has safely escaped, it re-grows its lost limbs.
Moths know how to melt into the background
Many species of moth are experts in camouflage, with the ability to make themselves practically invisible to predators by matching the pattern on their wings with that of their background. But surprisingly little is known about the behaviour surrounding this conjuring trick.
The Superstitious Fund Project
The fund works like this: stock trades are carried out by an Automated Trading System (colloquially, a “robot”), which is a computer program that buys, sells or holds stocks based on a set of specifications encoded into the program’s governing algorithm. The code for Chung’s experiment was written by Jim Hunt, who runs a firm called Trading Gurus, and together with Chung they named it “Sid the Superstitious Robot”. (They also decided to make the source code completely transparent and free to download.)Like many investment models, Sid is an automated speculator. But whereas other algorithms might take action based, for instance, on a stock’s recent performance or the price of oil, the criterion for this program are lunar phases and the affection and disaffection people have for certain numbers. “I wanted it to operate based on human characteristics,” Chung says.
Sid won’t buy anything on the 13th of the month, and steers clear of buying or selling any stock if its value happens to have a 13 in it. As for lunar phases, Chung explains with a hint of pride that the algorithm finds a new moon to be “good”, whereas a full moon is very, very bad. “The closer the moon is to being full, the more it effects us,” Chung says. So as the full moon approaches, the robot – instead of starting to grow claws and thick brown hair – sells more, as if it is nervous about the moon’s impact on multinational corporations and the decision-making capabilities of senior management. If you’re wondering how this automated yet temperamental trader handles an eclipse, one word: sell.
Fragile X and Down Syndromes Share Signalling Pathway for Intellectual Disability
"We have shown for the first time that some of the proteins altered in Fragile X and Down syndromes are common molecular triggers of intellectual disability in both disorders," said Kyung-Tai Min, one of the lead authors of the study and a professor at Indiana University and the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Korea. "Specifically, two proteins interact with each other in a way that limits the formation of spines or protrusions on the surface of dendrites." He added: "These outgrowths of the cell are essential for the formation of new contacts with other nerve cells and for the successful transmission of nerve signals. When the spines are impaired, information transfer is impeded and mental retardation takes hold."
'Inattention blindness' due to brain load
“Engaging attention on a high load task has a strong effect on the brain’s response to the rest of the world,” says Professor Nilli Lavie of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
"It reduces both the level and precision, or ‘tuning’, of neural response to anything else around us that is not part of the task. "These effects of load on neural response explain inattentional blindness. Although our environment hasn’t changed, the change in our brain response under load leads to inability to perceive otherwise perfectly visible stimuli outside our focus of attention,” she explains.
A Mathematical View of Track and Field World Records
A mathematician has developed a new model that can estimate which track and field world records are the most likely to be broken.
Brian Godsey, a graduate student in mathematics at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, recently published a paper including computations of the likelihood of record-setting performances in 48 different men’s and women’s track and field events during this calendar year.
Godsey’s paper did not directly address the likelihood of an athlete setting a track and field world record at the 2012 London Olympics, but his analysis suggests that viewers should keep a close watch on the men’s 110-meter hurdles and three women’s events, the 5,000-meter and 3000-meter steeplechase races, as wells as the hammer throw. There is a 95 percent chance that the women’s steeplechase record will be broken this year, Godsey wrote in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports.
New statistical method provides way to analyze synchronized neural activity in animals
The synchronized electrical activity of multiple neurons gives rise to coordinated network activity. This cooperative activity is highly dynamic and widely thought to be critical for organization behavior and cognitive processes.
Current methods for the statistical analysis of synchronized activity can analyze pairs of cells or detect the existence of correlations between multiple neurons. However, there is no way of accurately determining specific groups of neurons that interact with each other, and how this activity changes with time.
New Generation of Virtual Humans Helping to Train Psychologists
New technology has led to the creation of virtual humans who can interact with therapists via a computer screen and realistically mimic the symptoms of a patient with clinical psychological disorders, according to new research presented at the American Psychological Association’s 120th Annual Convention.