To Sleep, Perchance to Forget

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 1 week (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

A new study has found that older rats seem to replay previous events less and, as a result, have more trouble remembering than younger animals.

Could those memory problems be due to a decline in the brain's replay during sleep? How can these results be extrapolated to humans?

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Urban and food-bred animals as sources of disease

Darkfrog submitted, created time 11 months 2 weeks (www.sciam.com)

According to this writeup in SciAm, the way we grow our food could be breeding new diseases. Most human diseases start out in other species. Even HIV is hypothesized to be an offshoot of SIV. Chickens, they say, are a lot more likely to make us sick than pigeons are (although they're also less likely to excrete on the hood of my car, so it balances out). Now, I would have thought that the move to modern chicken husbandry, where far fewer humans have contact to large numbers of birds, would have made chicken-to-human diseases LESS likely, but it seems it's just the opposite

4 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: human diseases agriculture animal husbandry avian flu birds zoology rats vectors

Solution for NYC Bodega rodent problem

Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 year 2 weeks (www.nytimes.com)

The problem: The bodega owners will be fined for keeping cats in the stores, but a live cat is a thousand time more effective against rodents than traps and exterminators are.

Remember all those articles about pheromones? (http://www.discover8.com/article/Parasites_ingenious_tricks_are_protozoans_making_you_more_daring__0)

The solution: MAKE AN ANTI-RAT SPRAY THAT SMELLS LIKE CAT PEE.

1 comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: cats rodents food economics laws rats mice pheromones

Rats use mental schemas to speed learning

diggman submitted, created time 1 year 9 months (arstechnica.com)

Research in Science suggests that the process of consolidating these memories doesn't have to be gradual. Instead, if we have previous long-term memories that provide a framework for understanding the new information—a mental schema—then we can solidify new memories rapidly.

Submit comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: rats cortex hippocampus memory