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Today, our guest is Okihide Hikosaka, a Senior Researcher and Section Chief at the National Eye Institute, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. We’ll be speaking with him about the role of speculation and intuition in science, the life histories and personalities of our monkey colleagues, and how short-term versus long-term memories inhabit different parts of the basal ganglia.
The number of cells in the human brain is a staggering figure. There are over a trillion cells if you count both neurons (the better-known cells that compute with electrical signals) and glia (cells that provide support and protection for neurons). But the complexity of the brain only becomes more mind-boggling once you recognize that these cells have remarkably different appearances, genetic signatures, and electrical functions.
Read MoreToday, our guest is Professor Bernardo Sabatini, the Alice and Rodman W. Moorhead III Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard University. In this episode, we will talk about overcoming technological barriers, scientific bloodlines, and when the music industry meets science.
(P.S. The music video to which Prof. Sabatini refers: http://mssngpeces.com/projects/interactive/chairlift-met-before/)
Today, our guest is Rick Huganir, Professor and Director of the Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University . We’ll be speaking with him about his lifelong interest in learning and memory, phosphorylation of ion channels and receptors, and his first ever experiments: color preference of mealworms.
“If you know one child with autism,” the saying goes, “you know one child with autism.” Though an estimated 1 in 68 children in the United States will be diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), their diverse personalities seem to defy categorization. Yet, dating back to the first report on ASD by Austrian-American psychiatrist Leo Kanner, clinicians have identified clear themes in the children’s behavior. Researchers have long struggled to pinpoint the common biological pathway underlying these behavioral commonalities seen in ASD. A study published last year by Silvia De Rubeis and her colleagues took advantage of rare risk variants to find molecular commonalities that underlie the behavioral traits that link autism spectrum disorders together.
Read MoreRhesus monkeys, like humans, live within a social status system. A monkey's social position within that hierarchy can be predicted from a single blood sample - but which comes first, the rank or the difference in gene expression?
Read MoreEpisodic memory, or memory for autobiographical experiences, has the remarkable feature that each remembered experience happened exactly once, and yet exists in memory for decades. How does the brain capture fleeting experiences and transform them into patterns of neural activity that are stable over our lives?
Read MoreToday, our guest is Tomomi Shimogori, Team Leader of the Lab for Molecular Mechanisms of Thalamus Development, at RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. We’ll be speaking with her about cortical development, studying development in marmosets, and growing up around the globe.
Though domesticated pumpkins and other gourds (think zucchinis, acorn squashes, butternut squashes), are edible (and tasty!), their wild cousins produce a toxic bitter compound, rendering them poisonous to humans, even in small amounts. Anyone who has ever picked a pumpkin and hauled it home might be wondering…why on earth would a plant produce fruit weighing more-than-some-dogs that no one can eat?
Well, its turns out there's an answer. And it involves some Jurassic Park level science (but better, because it's real). Read on, fellow nerds…
Read MoreToday, our guest is Prof. Robert Edwards, the Cahill Professor of Neurology and Physiology at UCSF. In this episode, we will talk about uptake of neurotransmitter into vesicles for release at the synapse, co-release of dopamine and glutamate, and how a young soul happily found his way to science.
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