Do we know each other? Did King Oedipus have a chance? After all, he couldn't smell that this beautiful older woman was his mother. Or is it? Relatives may also recognize each other by smell - but it works quite differently between brother and sister.
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Gambling as a medication side effect? Medications that act as dopamine agonists for neurological diseases could trigger compulsive behavioral changes in individual cases. This is what doctors fear, led by Maja Tippmann-Peikert from the Mayo Clinic, after they had treated a few patients with restless leg syndrome – which is associated with involuntary night-time leg wriggling and leads to sleep disorders – with an active ingredient that acts as an agonist of the neurotransmitt
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Long frog love cries attract females and enemies Scientists at the University of Texas can now explain in a little more detail the risks and rewards of two song variants with which male Túngara frogs wanting to mate advertise themselves as a worthwhile sexual object:
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Directions Bees track down buried explosives, dogs the hideout of escaped convicts - following a scent seems like child's play. But sending sniffing robots on a search is by no means trivial. The math shows where to go. Maybe still looking for the station bakery or for "
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Learning about foreign language acquisition and loss of the mother tongue Adopted toddlers who learn a new language without tuition go through the same steps as learning their first language – even though they are older and have more developed brains.
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A number is a number is a number Numbers in the world always come in a concrete form - but they have a meaning independent of this form: the digit "2" and the word "two" mean the same number. How is this reflected in processing in the brain?
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Amnesia also limits imagination If patients suffer from amnesia as a result of an injured hippocampus, not only is their memory severely impaired, they are also unable to imagine realistic everyday scenes. Researchers working with Eleanor Maguire from University College London had found that their test subjects failed primarily because they failed to put together individual aspects of the fictional scene into a meaningful whole and to paint them vividly in front of their inne
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A formula for procrastination Not perfectionism, but rather a lack of self-confidence is the root of an all too familiar evil: the bad habit of putting off important and better things to do immediately and looking for distractions - also called "
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Molecular Basis of Learning Proven A European research team has demonstrated a connection between neuronal signal transmission and the learning processes in mice: A permanent change in the synapses - the switching points between the nerves - and the learning behavior are based on common molecular mechanisms.
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Sky blue right Does language affect thinking and perception? Partly, partly, say researchers: The power of the word may end up in the brain's left hemisphere. Because whether two colors have different names is of little interest to the speechless other half.
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Speech processing detail clarified The rear part of the corpus callosum makes a decisive contribution to the fact that prosodic aspects of an utterance, such as speech rhythm, intonation and intonation, can be included in speech processing.
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Protein mediates touch stimuli Scientists around Gary Lewin from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin-Buch have for the first time detected a molecule in mammals that plays an important role in the conversion of mechanical stimuli into nerve impulses.
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Take a break Anyone who has had to stay awake for 24 hours at a time performs just as poorly on behavioral tests as a person with one per thousand alcohol in their blood. Physicians, who are regularly forced to work shifts with such a lack of sleep, should nevertheless always make the right decisions, because they are vital.
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Targeting "Wetware" A computing power that was unthinkable only a short time ago, and new, high-resolution examination methods are finally paving the way for a project of the century. Some compare it to the decoding of the human genome, some to the moon landing:
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RNA interference against scrapie Mice infected with the prion disease scrapie live longer when the gene for the prion protein is knocked out in a large proportion of their cells using RNA interference. This is what scientists around Alexander Pfeifer from the University of Bonn report.
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With reputation, there is almost no pen alty Praise good or punish bad? It is not easy to decide what is more useful and less harmful as soon as some suffer from those others who gain an advantage at the expense of others. An optimal reaction should then definitely be one thing:
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Women are more likely to follow the gaze of others If familiar people look in a specific direction, women are more likely to follow this look than men. Researchers led by Michael Platt from Duke University see this as an indication that women are better at social communication.
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Hippocampus makes predictions for the future The hippocampus, a brain region important for learning and memory, also appears to make short-term predictions for the future. Dharshan Kumaran and Eleanor Maguire of University College London have shown in humans that brain structures become active when the brain processes new events that do not match expectations.
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Chemotherapy can change brain structures Certain brain regions can temporarily shrink as a result of chemotherapy. This was observed by Japanese scientists working with Masatoshi Inagaki in breast cancer patients who were treated with chemotherapy after the operation.
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Heritage traces of the hustle and bustle The phase of hyperactivity seems to have come to an end in the discussion of the in-disease of the past decade: ADHD, the notorious fidget-philip syndrome. There is slowly enough reliable factual fodder for a fruitful dialogue between those affected, doctors and therapists - which has made a few of the previously common hostilities impossible.
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Bat Noses Channel Ultrasound Some bats use their noses to control the propagation of their sonar ultrasonic waves. This is reported by Qiao Zhuang and Rolf Müller from Shandong University in Jinan, China. The scientists studied the function of the bats' distinctively shaped nasal lobes, which are often crisscrossed with folds, wrinkles and furrows.
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Tricky Why do we keep falling for this? If the rabbit wriggles in the supposedly empty hat or the pretty assistant in the box riddled with sabers, even sworn realists can no longer believe their eyes. Are you so easily fooled? To dazzle their viewers, savvy illusionists often need nothing more than a few tools - and the ability to deftly manipulate the audience's attention.
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The Power of Monetary In today's world, almost everything revolves around one thing: dear money. The fact that it influences us shouldn't really surprise anyone anymore. How strongly it can intervene in our consciousness is astounding - yes, frightening.
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Alzheimer's enzyme important regulator The enzyme Bace1, which plays a central role in Alzheimer's disease, is also responsible for the myelin covering of nerve fibers. Future Alzheimer's therapies that try to switch off Bace1 could therefore lead to serious side effects, warn researchers led by Riqiang Wan from the Lerner Research Institute.
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How toddlers learn from picture books Looking at picture books together not only introduces young children to reading culture at an early age, but also trains their sense of reality in other ways. As psychologists from the University of Queensland and Virginia have observed, even very young children are able to take in the images, understand them, and grasp their relation to real objects.
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It's all about age To restore sight to the blind - a dream. Therefore, experiments with transplanting retinas and photoreceptors have been going on since the beginning of the last century. So far, however, the transplants have failed, even if they actually grew quite well.
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Middle Class Low Economic Morality The "law-abiding majority of citizens" often cited by politicians does not seem to exist. Rather, there is a widespread propensity for everyday crimes in mainstream society, warn two UK criminologists.
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Gene variant reveals sensitivity to pain Resistance to pain is less a question of bravery than of genetics. This is reported by an international team of scientists led by Clifford Woolf from Massachusetts General Hospital. People who are less sensitive to pain have a specific version of the so-called GCH1 gene, which regulates the amount of the newly identified pain molecule BH4.
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Emancipation on the Prairie The female pronghorn go on a complicated and exhausting search for a partner every year. For this to be worthwhile, something has to jump out. But what? Women are emancipated. Women are picky. After all, they're looking for the man of their dreams, and he's not waiting on every street corner.
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Beyond Silence Are diseases beneficial? Certainly not at first glance, but sometimes yes at second glance. Now and then they help to unravel mysteries of the human body. There are many more things to hear, and French researchers have now tracked down one.
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Quitter pause protects the brain of diving seals Seals suppress shivering during their dives in icy water to conserve oxygen and prevent brain damage. However, as soon as they are able to surface and breathe, they start shaking again, observed Norwegian scientists from the University of Tromsö.
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Pheromone in breast milk works as a smell teacher An odorant in rabbits' mother's milk helps newborns learn the meaning of other smells. As a result, the little ones will probably find their way around more quickly in their environment and increase their chances of survival.
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Huntingtin Disrupts Brain Cell Energy Production Scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have discovered a possible mechanism by which the protein huntingtin reduces energy production in brain cells in the hereditary disease Huntington's.
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Obesity: Promising drug but ineffective The drug MK-0557 was a beacon of hope in the fight against obesity. After ten years of working with the substance, however, a large-scale clinical study has now shown that it only has a minimal effect.
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Hairy touch for robots The role models are rats and seals. With their whiskers, the animals feel things that cannot be seen in the dark and currents that cannot be seen with the eyes even in the light. Skills that autonomous robots could also do something with.
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Expensive business: overpaid managers If managing directors earn too much, a company has to pay dearly for it. Because the entire executive floor benefits from this - the salaries are also higher in the following levels. However, according to James Wade from Rutgers University and his colleagues, the bonus also decreases significantly with the hierarchical level.
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Sleep makes flying smart If many fruit flies live in a small space or they have to solve complex tasks, they sleep more. Researchers at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego observed that these breaks appear to be important for processing the experience and forming memories.
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My scent, your scent? Blood is thicker than water, even fish sing a song about it. But how is a steel blue sunfish supposed to know who is closest to him in the crowd of his nestmates and in the face of highly promiscuous parents? Very simple:
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Test results on medication for children rarely published Results from studies in which the suitability of drugs for children is tested rarely make it into specialist magazines. Daniel Benjamin from Duke University and his colleagues report that those who are attested to have poorer or no efficacy or safety concerns are particularly neglected.
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Motorists overtake bike helmet carriers tighter In an extensive self-experiment, Ian Walker, a traffic psychologist at the University of Bath, found that wearing a cycle helmet increases the risk of a collision with a car, bus or lorry. As hidden recordings with a video camera and distance meter revealed in more than 2,500 overtaking manoeuvres, motorized road users moved an average of 8.
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