Healing hairs that help us hear

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Healing hairs that help us hear

Hearing and balance disorders are both permanent, irreversible conditions in humans. In fact, hearing loss is the most common sensory disorder around the world. Normally, sound vibrations are transmitted from an object through the air to your ear. Vibrations of the ear drum cause bones in your middle ear to vibrate. These vibrations then pass into the most inner component of your ear to the hearing organ (cochlea). The most common problem underlying hearing loss and deafness is the irreversible loss of sensory hair cells of the cochlea, the molecular basis of which is poorly understood.

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The Best-Laid Schemes of Mice and Men.

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The Best-Laid Schemes of Mice and Men.

We’ve domesticated animals for as long as we can remember. When you think of domestication, you probably think of companion animals like dogs and cats, work animals like horses and oxen, and meat animals like chickens and cows. Each of these species can be found in many shapes and sizes, due to millennia of selective breeding that strengthened the traits we as humans found useful or desirable.

Today's discussion, though, focuses not on companion, work or meat animals, but on the house mouse, Mus musculus, the most widely-used mammalian genetic model organism

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Reading Between the Bars: How to see through figures and influence your audience

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Reading Between the Bars: How to see through figures and influence your audience

Although we would like to think of ourselves as independent readers and thoughtful evaluators of published data, it turns out that figure format heavily influences our perception of the data – even when the data points represented by the figure are identical. In this edition of "New in Neuroscience," Kat Kozyrytska describes a study by Prof. Barbara Tversky, who looks at the way people have been representing information visually for thousands of years.

Image credit: Kat Kozyrytska 

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Smell memories in the fly brain and what makes individual animals unique

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Smell memories in the fly brain and what makes individual animals unique

Have you ever woken up in the morning to the refreshing aroma wafting from the neighborhood cafe? Does it remind you of the last Christmas Eve sitting with family enjoying a cup of coffee, or the cozy conversations with an old friend in you two’s favorite coffee shop? Smelling an odor can cause an emotional reaction or elicit a memory that is unique to that individual person.

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New in Neuroscience: How do different mutations in the same gene contribute to different neurological disorders?

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New in Neuroscience: How do different mutations in the same gene contribute to different neurological disorders?

Each year, approximately 61.5 million Americans are afflicted by a mental illness. Although we have not yet determined the underlying cause of these disorders, scientists believe that genetic mutations play a major role. Human genetic testing has identified multiple “risk genes” that are associated with major psychiatric disorders, but little is known about how mutations in the same risk gene can contribute to different disorders.

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Bimanual labor: the neuroscience of piano playing

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Bimanual labor: the neuroscience of piano playing

Hands. As a species, we humans take pride in our opposable thumbs and our penchant for maneuvering our digits to perform complicated tasks. Coordination of limbs is an evolutionarily ancient skill, shared by both vertebrates and invertebrates alike. What is happening in the brain during complicated bimanual performances such as piano playing? And does practice make "perfect" in the brain?

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