Strategies to make lab animals forget, remember, or experience false recollections probe how memory works, and may inspire treatments for neurological diseases.
Sidebar: Society for Neuroscience NEW MESSENGERS: Caltech’s Erin Schuman and colleagues discovered that one form of nitric oxide is important to long-term potentiation. Can you recall where you were when you heard about the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger? Why is it that, almost universally, people can remember with vivid and instantaneous detail this tragic event when they can't recall what they had for dinner just days before? How are some memories indelibly hard-wired into o
By Cristina Luiggi Equations that Spell Disaster Researchers are pinpointing the factors that combine to produce complex diseases. Juan Carlos Solon When Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast in August 2005, the Category 5 storm caused such severe and lingering damage because it encountered the perfect combination of vulnerabilities: weak infrastructure, poor lines of communication, and a dysfunctional emergency rescue system. These conditions coale
The Scientist and Jerome Siegel | Mar 1, 2016 | 10+ min read
Once believed to be unique to birds and mammals, sleep is found across the metazoan kingdom. Some animals, it seems, can’t live without it, though no one knows exactly why.
Editor's Note: Since 1993, the newsletter Science Watch has ranked the year's most cited scientists and research papers. Based on records compiled by the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), analysts prepared such rosters for 1994. Researchers are ranked by their number of "hot papers." An article is considered "hot" if it has garnered a substantially greater number of citations, within a two-year period, than other papers in similar disciplines. For instance, the 199
Date: September 13, 1999Table of Neurochemical Manufacturers The hypothalamus has long been known as a control center for feeding and weight control behaviors. Complex regulatory feedback loops enable this portion of the brain to determine satiety and metabolic activity. Not surprisingly, the control mechanisms are complex and involve different biochemical pathways.1,2,3 Image courtesy of Jeffrey M. Friedman An ob/ob mouse stacking up against its lean counterparts A series of pioneering expe