Although she is most known as a fashion icon, Audrey Hepburn was also really involved in humanitarian work. Hepburn has been rewarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom among other awards and honors.Hepburn was mostly involved as a UNICEF ambassador (1988-1993; 50 years!), traveling to provide food to starving children, testifying before the US Congress, […]
Dopamine. This neurotransmitters is well known for being involved in processing reward. I recently read about dopamine being used for something similar in a fruit fly, so I tried to look up if maybe dopamine use is evolutionary conserved. First, multiple introductions from studies using fruit flies suggested conservation [ex: 1]. So I then I […]
Primates have a secondary gustatory (taste) cortex in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) [1]. I thought that this was odd, given that (1) the OFC is associated with understanding consequences and (2) the prefrontal cortex (where OFC is located) is generally not associated with early sensory processing. (Instead, this area is associated with what we consider […]
Pesticides in the gut? Starting around 2002, multiple reviews supporting the hypothesis that the vagus nerve as an initial site for Parkinson’s disease started being published. The vagus nerve includes cells that relay information from the gut to the brain. Currently, the speculation is as follows [1]:– An environmental cue (ex: ingested pesticide) triggers a […]
DNA can jump around. These segments of DNA that move around within the genome are called “transposons.” When the human genome project was completed, >45% of our genome was found to contain DNA segments from transportable elements [1]. Insertion rates of transposons can be estimated, which revealed a varying rate with several peaks throughout primate […]
Sex and violence, they pair well. I assumed that this was mostly pop culture glorifying masculinity through association with aggression and sex… but there’s apparently a tight biological link. Multiple regions in the brain have now been identified as containing cells specific for behaviors related to aggression or mating. Studied mostly in male mice (because […]
“Losing the ability to smell is one of the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s diseases.” I hear this a lot, but people usually can’t comment more than this. So I looked into it:The cells involved in first helping you smell (the olfactory sensory neurons) have a really high turnover rate with a lifespan averaging about a […]
Science has fads and trends. Researchers don’t really like admitting this because it makes the science seem less credible. But these trends are backed with evidence and when it’s interesting, more people study it. When a topic is exhausted with the current technology (or when the initial high hopes are dissolved with mediocre findings), the […]
Last year, PBS released a documentary about James Watson (American Masters: Decoding Watson). Watson received a Nobel Prize in 1962 with Francis Crick for their contribution in discovering the structure of DNA. This documentary has left many researchers very angry because Watson is filmed discussing his perspectives on the intellectual differences between ethnicities. (The director […]
Are we what we eat? Or, to ask a simpler question, “can food affect our behavior?” Naturally, being hungry can increase certain behaviors to raise the odds of finding food, and therefore survival. A component of how food affects behavior may be through gut microbes. A collaborative effort went about trying to understand how movement […]
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