Experiments with mice have revealed the neuroscience of why dogs shake their wet fur.Credit: Nat NT/Getty When a dog shakes water off its fur, the action is not just a random flurry of movements — nor a deliberate effort to drench anyone standing nearby. This instinctive reflex is shared by many furry mammals including mice, […]
RESEARCH BRIEFINGS 06 November 2024 The body’s clock is essential for anticipating daily environmental changes. Surprisingly, clock genes are highly expressed in innate immune cells that produce the inflammatory protein interleukin-17A, particularly in body fat. The clock drives a rhythmic production of this protein, which in turn contributes to the metabolic rhythms of fat.
Blood tests could make detecting Alzheimer’s disease easier.Credit: Andrew Brookes/Getty In 2018, the people around Daryl Ditz started to see signs that something wasn’t quite right. “My work colleagues noticed I was kind of slipping with the computer stuff — messing up a little bit, putting files in the wrong place,” he says. “My wife […]
Get a whiff of this: people can distinguish between two distinct smells presented to them less than one-tenth of a second apart. That’s much shorter than the two to three seconds that a typical human sniff lasts 1 . Access options Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription […]
Researchers are cataloguing the effects of birth control on the brain. Credit: Isabel Pavia/Getty Chicago, Illinois Hold the morning coffee and meditation: for about 75 days over the span of a year, neuroscientist Carina Heller’s morning ritual included climbing into her university’s brain scanner at 7:30 a.m. and lying perfectly still for an hour and […]
Platelets and red blood cells mingle in a blood clot (artificially coloured).Credit: Anne Weston, EM STP, The Francis Crick Institute/Science Photo Library Chicago, Illinois Forget the gauze and bandages: electrical stimulation near the ear might help to reduce bleeding. Researchers hope the technique could one day be used before surgery, childbirth and other events that […]
When you think of what makes us human, would you say it’s our powers of prediction? I probably wouldn’t have, at least not until my conversation with Mark Miller, a philosopher of cognition and research fellow at both the University of Toronto and Monash University in Melbourne. He studies how new ideas about the mind […]
Tomorrow is World Mental Health Dayand in many ways, it seems like the world has made great strides in mental health care. In 2023 alone, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) poured $1.25 billion into research studying how mental illness manifests in the brain. People are prescribed more psychiatric drugs now than ever, while […]
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. It is late at night. You are alone and wandering empty streets in search of your parked car when you hear footsteps creeping up from behind. Your heart pounds, your blood pressure skyrockets. Goose bumps appear on your arms, sweat on your palms. Your stomach […]
