Dormivigilia

Today, I did some microscopy work. Below are photomicrographs showing anterior and posterior portions of the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN), the structure in the hypothalamus that regulates sleep/wake and circadian physiology. The nuclei are the dark purplish bulbs at the base above the smiley-face-esque optic chiasm (OC) which transmits photic information. The anatomical locationS of the [...]

If you are a regular reader of my blog, then you’ll know that the Syrian hamster “can drink you under the table” (per the Manswers episode featuring my lab).  This isn’t shocking given that the Syrian hamster, a desert-dwelling creature in its natural environment, eats fermented fruit. After burying fruit in the ground, these animals [...]

This short film of which won a Sundance Film Festival Award addresses the issue of organ donation shortages which can be partially alleviated by allowing death row inmates to donate organs. I imagine national resistance to uplift the banning of organ donations by the convicted partially manifests from the fact that the organs of people [...]

When I was a teenager, I had a paper route. Given that most of my customers (i.e. my neighbors) were born before or during the Great Depression let’s just say I didn’t have a very lucrative business. Many of my customers not only gave me 25 cents, half-dollars, or Susan B. Anthony dollars as tips [...]

In high school, I read the famous soliloquy of Lady Macbeth lamenting her past life. While reminiscing yesterday about the five-page essay assignment that followed the reading of Act 5 and concomitantly reading about somniloquys, I had a sudden stroke of insight! Lady Macbeth’s speech wasn’t a soliloquy, it was a somniloquy; the medical term [...]

For years, evidence “suggesting” that playing Mozart or related Western classical music to growing infants in utero increases intellectual and cognitive capacities has been debunked over and over again. Well, this controversy has been revisited and is supported with some rather compelling evidence. Israeli scientists have discovered that playing Mozart or other Western classical music [...]

In this week’s New Yorker, Jill Lepore interviews Robet Ettinger, a ninety-one (possible 92) year-old man who founded the Cryonics Institute: life after “death” through the assistance of a liquid nitrogen vat, blood drains and subsequent infusions of ethylene glycerol (antifreeze), and a drill (holes into the skull). The storage fee is 28,000. Ettinger inspiration [...]

While listening to my favorite weekly podcast,The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, a recent archeological discovery suggesting that Neanderthals wore cosmetics was featured in the segment “Science or Fiction.” This isn’t fiction. Below is an interview with the project investigator whose team uncovered perforated Pecten shells with red-to-black pigmentation in Spain. Zilhao, J., Angelucci, D., [...]

Yes, you read correctly. Researchers have discovered that Drosophila with a mutation of radish, a gene which encodes for the formation of olfactory memories [the presentation of olfactory cues is the most common modality used to assess memory and learning in flies],  have attention-like deficit symptoms including a short attention span and sporadic activity outbursts! [...]

This week in Nature, Dr. Martin Fussenegger reviews the recent advancements in synthetic clocks. Synthetic clocks typically possess one of three components: 1) a repressilator in which molecular machinery participates in a negative feedback loop (gene A represses B, B represses C, and C represses A); 2) an oscillator, which functions similarly to the clock [...]