The next installment of the Nature Network Neuroscience group journal club is now live. The paper is on somatosensory processing in sensory and motor cortex, from the lab of Carl Petersen in Lausanne.
The contributor breaking down the paper for the neuroscience group is Eric Thomson, a post-doctoral fellow at Duke University in the lab of Miguel Nicolelis. I want to thank Eric for his participation in this new endeavor.
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How many neurons are required for learning and memory? None, according to Saigusa et al., who report basic learning behavior in unicellular amoebae in a recent article in Physical Review Letters.
The amoeba Physarum polycephalum is sensitive to environmental conditions. At room temperature, Physarum move at a constant rate. However, dry air slows the rate of Physarum movement.
The authors puffed dry air on Physarum once an hour for three hours. On the fourth hour, Physarum slowed down, even when no puff of air was delivered. Subsequent hours without air puffs slowly extinguished the periodic slowing of Physarum movement. However, one dry air puff six hours later reactivated the hourly behavior pattern.
These behaviors are consistent with rudimentary learning in higher organisms. Do these data indicate that unicellular organisms can learn? Physarum, like other organisms, have precise biological rhythms set by cellular oscillators. So, Physarum may be particularly sensitive to events occuring at regular intervals, and their periodic slow-down may represent the setting of a biological rhythm. However, rhythms alone do not explain extinction of the behavior in the absence of additional dry air puffs.
Do these data indicate a potential origin for learning, or do they indicate that our definition of learning in complex organisms is too simplistic? I’m a bit torn.
Answers in Genesis, a self-described Christianity-defending ministry dedicated to enabling Christians to defend their faith and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively, recently launched a new publication, Answers Research Journal. Their mission:
Addressing the need to disseminate the vast fields of research conducted by creationist experts in theology, history, archaeology, anthropology, biology, geology, astronomy, and other disciplines of science, Answers Research Journal will provide scientists and students the results of cutting-edge research that demonstrates the validity of the young-earth model, the global Flood, the non-evolutionary origin of “created kinds,” and other evidences that are consistent with the biblical account of origins.
As their parental organization teaches, “facts” don’t speak for themselves, but must be interpreted. All I can say is……….Wow.
Everyone has had that awkward moment at a cocktail party or at the lunch table:
You: Congratulations on the little one; she’s beautiful! When was she born?
New mother: Thank you, thank you. Well, let’s see, I’ve kind of lost track, but with today being January 14 and her birthday being December 17…
You: Oh, so she’s already 5 weeks old then. Wow!
New Mother: Uhh…no. She is exactly 28 days old.
Although mistaken mental math has embarrassed us all, we humans still reign supreme in the nonverbal representation of numerical values, right? A new study in PLoS aimed to find out by directly comparing rhesus monkeys and college students on the same arithmetic task.
I apologize for the blatant promotion, but I wanted to bring your attention to a new forum designed to spur on discussion involving interesting neuroscience papers. I categorized this under “What’s new in NN?”, except here, the “NN” is different: Nature Network. This platform has been around for some time now, but I am new to it. I recommend that you check out the site, as it aims to connect scientists on both the local and global levels (but unless you are in Boston or London, the local part is still being rolled out).
In the Neuroscience group, we are starting an online journal club featuring interesting papers from any journal for discussion. These journal clubs will be written up by experts in each respective field (except those that I do; I am going to fake my way through whatever topics don’t get covered by the experts…). These experts will be students and post-docs discussing somebody else’s work, in the classic spirit of a journal club.
A new policy in the Journal of Neuroscience demonstrates the current push towards open access publication. Researchers can pay to have their article freely available immediately upon publication, starting with all articles submitted as of January 1, 2008. It is interesting, because J Neurosci words the new policy a bit like an experiment, essentially telling the authors and funding agencies to put their money where their mouth is. If they want open access, as many are calling for, they can help support it. Hopefully we can return to this policy in 6 months or so to see how many authors took this option, and who funded those choosing to “pay for play.”
Well, now, it has been a nice long break since the last post, but time to get this blog rolling again here in 2008. Let’s start light, while I finish cooking up the stuff I want to discuss. Let’s return to a request I buried in a previous post that received no response:
With regards to moving on, I have plenty of ideas for new discussions, but would also like to offer up the concept of “reader-generated content.” If I receive enough participation, I’m willing to discuss what you find interesting as often as you send me promising topics. For now, let’s set the modest goal of one reader-selected topic every 2 weeks, and go from there. If you would rather keep your communications and ideas private, feel free to email me at ‘Actionpotential’ at natureny dot com.
This can take any form, including a nomination for a new study that you think might stimulate conversation, or for clarification on a Nature Neuroscience paper that was recently published (I especially encourage the non-scientist readers to take us up on this offer!).
In addition, if you haven’t noticed, we have been working on a modest facelift of the blog homepage, with more organization and categorization. I’d love to hear any feedback on any of these new aspects and will take any other suggestions that might make the blog more user-friendly. Here’s looking towards a captivating survey of neuroscience in 2008!