Archive for September, 2012

ZEBRA: An amazing resource for molecular mapping of bird brains

Posted on: September 23rd, 2012 by lainyday

This web source has about 70 in situ hybridization experiments  that map genes in the zebra finch brain. Brain slice images and basic methods for non-radioactive probes are included.  Click brain image below or go to http://www.zebrafinchatlas.org/

From ZEBRA site

This is an amazing resource that is open to the public.

Zebra finches: from wikipedia commons

Music is Cheesecake

Posted on: September 20th, 2012 by lainyday
What is music? Why do we have it? “It was an evolutionary accident,” says Dan Levitin, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at McGill University who has written books and papers on why we have music and why we like it.Levitin says the accident idea is a big one. It went public back in 1997 when Harvard professor Steven Pinker, a world-renowned author and experimental psychologist, got up in front of a group of musicologists and cognitive scientists at a meeting and said words to the effect of, “You’re all wasting your time because music is cheesecake.”

Auditory cheesecake.

“Cheesecake is interesting,” Levitin explains. “We have this great fondness for it, but we didn’t evolve a taste for cheesecake. In our hunter-gatherer days, it was an adaptive strategy to load up on fats and sweets because they were very hard to find.”

A Pachyderm’s Ditty Prompts An Elephantine Debate

 

Shanthi explores her yard at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C., in 2010. The 36-year-old Asian elephant loves blowing into a harmonica.

Click Picture for full sotry:  tohttp://www.npr.org/2012/08/26/159998889/a-pachyderms-ditty-prompts-an-elephantine-debate

Chimps’ Answer to Einstein

Posted on: September 4th, 2012 by lainyday

Natasha, a chimp at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda, has always seemed different from her peers. She’s learned to escape from her enclosure, teases human caretakers, and scores above other chimps in communication tests. Now, Natasha has a new title: genius. In the largest and most in-depth survey of chimpanzee intelligence, researchers found that Natasha was the smartest of the 106 chimps they tested—a finding that suggests that apes have their geniuses, too.

Full Story:

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/08/chimps-answer-to-einstein.html