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Search Results for: label/Backyard Brains

  • Backyard Brains: Affordable neuroscience

    Mouse neurons. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Originally published in PLoS Biology. Nerve cells, called neurons, are special cells. They interact with each other and with other tissues in part by using electrical impulses. The cool thing about these cells is that thanks to their electrical signaling, we can measure when they’re sending their messages. A neuroscientist friend of mine once poetically described as “exquisite̶…

    Authored by on November 29, 2011

  • Anorexia nervosa, neurobiology, and family-based treatment

    sume eating. If they were still alive. Bruch’s observations dictated eating-disorders treatments for decades, treatments that led to spectacularly ineffective results. Only about 35% of people with anorexia recovered; another 20% died, of starvation or suicide; and the rest lived with some level of chronic illness for the rest of their lives. Not a great track record, overall, and especially devastating for women, who suffer from anorexia at a ra…

    Authored by on August 10, 2012

  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …molecules themselves break down into a surprisingly small number of building blocks. The proteins that make up all of the living things on this planet and ensure their appropriate structure and smooth function consist of only 20 different kinds of building blocks. Nucleic acids, specifically DNA, are even more basic: only four different kinds of molecules provide the materials to build the countless different genetic codes that translate into all…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • Why do we feel music?

    …dmill. References [1] Marin MM, Bhattacharya J.  ”Music induced emotions: Some current issues and crossmodal comparisons.”  In Music Education, edited by J. Hermida, M. Ferrero,  pp. 1-38, Nova Science Publishers. 2010 [2] Krumhansl CL. “An exploratory study of musical emotions and psychophysiology,” Can J Exp Psychol (1997): 336-53. [PDF] [3]  ”Physiological Changes Associated with Emotion,” in Neuroscience, e…

    Authored by on February 26, 2013

  • After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

    …almost twice as likely to say that they don’t want to live or work near a person with mental illness if they read an article about a person with mental illness involved in a mass shooting, according to a study published March 20 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Interestingly, this tendency is the same even if the article avoids any mention of mental illness. This may be because this link between violence and mental illness is deeply engrain…

    Authored by on March 27, 2013

  • Unicorns and Brainbows

    Brainbow is a mouse with a rainbow brain. By Jeffrey Perkel    A couple weeks ago I wrote about the beautiful world right under our noses, a world visible only under the microscope. The cover image for that post was this picture, a “‘Brainbow’ transgenic mouse hippocampus,” which placed 18th in the 2008 Nikon Small World Photomicroscopy contest. Brainbow technology also won the 2007 Olympus Bioscapes contest, with this be…

    Authored by on May 6, 2013

  • Tiptoe through the thalamus…

    atively coarse resolution of diffusion MRI to the subcellular level of electron microscopy. That’s a story for another day, but if you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend Sebastian Seung’s eminently readable 2012 book, Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are. Back to the Allen Institute datasets. When you click on ‘Mouse Connectivity’, the site presents you with an index of injection sites, 47 in all….

    Authored by on November 19, 2012

  • Sesame Street helps unlock the secrets to the brain during children’s learning

    …levision is a bad idea, but there is something to the idea that educational TV is, well, educational. We have the brain scans to prove it! A study published in PLOS Biology used functional MRI scans to check out the brains of 26 children and 20 adults while they watched 20 minutes of Sesame Street. The actual purpose of the study wasn’t to find out if Sesame Street was educational per se. Rather, it was to observe the neural processes in th…

    Authored by on January 4, 2013

  • You – Yes, You – Are an Astronomer

    On January 7, 1610 (402 years ago today!), Galileo first identified three moons of Jupiter, the first satellites ever observed orbiting another planet. He later found a fourth, and today those moons — Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto — are known as the Galilean moons in his honor. Galileo was able to do this because he used a telescope to observe: every new way to see reveals something new to be seen. You can buy a telescope that’s more…

    Authored by on January 7, 2012

  • Friday Roundup: Land-walking octopus, he’s having a baby, defining veggies, & lots for the ladies

    …’s efforts to perform a butt injection on a woman using “Fix a Flat.” It’s probably best to just love your butt for what it is, which isn’t Fix a Flat. In smarter news, NASA is rolling out Aspire 2 Inspire, targeting girls interested in science. Know a girl who’s interested in science? You can start with the Aspire 2 Inspire video below about women in science: Speaking of women in science, former dean of th…

    Authored by on November 25, 2011

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