Swellegance

- science. News. Astronomy. Cosmology. Astrophysics. Physics. White holes.

$sciencecenter: Brainwave delay makes rats feel teleported A bit of a long post, but definitely worth a read. Snuffling around in a Plexiglas box that it knows well, a black and white rat catches a whiff of chocolate cookies. It scampers toward them—but suddenly, it finds itself teleported into another, equally familiar box. One could hardly blame the poor rat for being confused and disoriented for at least a fraction of a second, and researchers have now figured out why: cells in the memory center of its brain compete over where it is for exactly one-eighth of a second. The “teleportation” effect in rats is similar to the momentary disorientation you feel when elevator doors open and you step out onto the wrong floor. It occurs because the place you expect to see and the place you actually do are “mutually exclusive,” says Edvard Moser, a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Normally, the brain orients itself gradually as you move. The hippocampus, the brain’s memory center, contains neurons known as place cells, which record both your environment and your movement within it in order to form memories that ensure you always know where you are. To update the brain on your position, place cells fire in a rhythm called a theta oscillation, which repeats itself every 125 milliseconds and is especially prominent when you’re moving. To teleport rats, Edvard Moser and his wife, neuroscientist May-Britt Moser, built two rat boxes connected by a tunnel. One box had a circle of white light-emitting diodes shining up through the clear floor, and the other had a row of green LEDs around the ceiling. The researchers let a rat run back and forth between the two boxes and forage for food until it became familiar with both. They also implanted an electrode array into the rat’s hippocampus and recorded firing patterns from individual neurons while the rat was in each box. Then the researchers played a mean trick. They put the rat into the white box and placed some cookie crumbles at one end. While the rat was running toward the treat, they switched the light pattern, fooling the rat into thinking it was suddenly in the green box. The rat still managed to find its cookies, but when the researchers looked at the recordings from the place cells, they saw a war going on. At the moment of “teleportation,” one group of cells was firing with the pattern that it had used in the white box, but another group fired with the pattern corresponding to the green box. The neurons sorted it out eventually: Within 125 milliseconds, they were all firing together, which is the amount of time that a theta cycle takes to complete, the researchers report online today in Nature. The fact that the two distinct patterns stuck around to fight it out rather than slowly drifting from one pattern to the other suggests that the brain puts memories into discrete, 125-millisecond packages, preventing itself from mixing them up.$

- science. news. psychology. rats. animals.

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14-billion-years-later:

Glow-in-the-Dark Cats may help cure AIDS.Genetic engineering is one of those things that gets a bad rap despite being a rather natural occurrence in bacteria and even certain higher organisms. Also it gives us cats that glow in the dark, which is totally freaking awesome!The cat seen above wasn’t just created for shits and giggles though. There’s a more serious reason behind this fluorescent feline: battling AIDS. Currently there’s two AIDS pandemics in the world: the human one with the better PR team and the feline version. As such scientists have created Glow-in-the-Dark cats as a way of exploring the genetic system of cats in order to better understand how to combat the genetic aspect of the AIDS/HIV virus.In genetic modification of this type cat DNA is inserted with a set of two genes, one from rhesus monkey that conveys resilience to HIV and one from jellyfish that gives them the eerie glow. The idea behind this is that if the cat glows it’s also highly likely to have the viral resistance gene as well.

- animals. biology. genetics. really awesome. biochemistry. cats. science. facts.

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moderation:

Galaxies of the Distant Observable Universe —Objects Beyond Human Comprehension
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Thousands of galaxies crowd into this Herschel image of the distant Universe. Each dot is an entire galaxy containing billions of stars. For more than a decade, astronomers have puzzled over strangely bright galaxies in the distant Universe. These ‘luminous infrared galaxies’ appear to be creating stars at such phenomenal rates that they defy conventional theories of galaxy formation.
ESA’s Herschel infrared space observatory, with its ability for very sensitive mapping over wide areas, has seen thousands of these galaxies and pinpointed their locations, showing for the first time that they are packing themselves closely together, forming large clusters of galaxies by the force of their mutual gravity.
(via dailygalaxy)

- science.

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ramblingredryan:

lso known as frozen smoke, Aerogel is the world’s lowest density solid, clocking in at 96% air. It’s basically just a gel made from silicon, except all the liquid has been taken out and replaced with gas instead. If you hold a small piece in your hand, it’s practically impossible to either see or feel, but if you poke it, it’s like styrofoam.
Aerogel isn’t just neat, it’s useful. It supports up to 4,000 times its own weight and can apparently withstand a direct blast from two pounds of dynamite. It’s also the best insulator in existence, which is why we don’t have Aerogel jackets: it works so well that people were complaining about overheating on Mt. Everest.

- science. cool. epic. gift. love. sex. redryan. choc. boobs.

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mothernaturenetwork:

Miracle drug discovered that cures any viral infectionThe drug — a single, broad-spectrum cure for virtually any viral infection — could be the greatest medical discovery since antibiotics.

- virus. science. medicine. health.

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orientaltiger:

Rainbow Eucalyptus, is the only species of eucalyptus that grows in the northern hemisphere and is normally grown for its pulpwood, used to create white paper. But why does it look like it’s been painted? The secret behind the Rainbow Eucalyptus is that the trees shed multiple patches of bark every year, but not at the same time. As the patches are gone, the green inner bark is exposed, and as it matures it turns bluish, then orange, purple and maroon. This creates the rainbow effect.

- science. nature.

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