Adult male mice have a simple repertoire of innate, or instinctive, social behaviors: When encountering a female, a male mouse will try to mate with it, and when encountering another male, the mouse will attack. The animals do not have to be taught to perform these behaviors. This has led to the widespread presumption among neuroscientists that the brain circuits…
Bees use their vision to navigate, but until now little was known about what happens inside their brains — which are smaller than a grain of rice — as they perform this task. “Polarized-light-based compass neurons and optic-flow-based speed-encoding neurons are located in a part of the bee brain called the central complex,” the study authors explained. “We found this region…
Sixty years ago, a team of scientists went looking for yellow fever in the jungles that line the northwestern edge of Lake Victoria. What they found instead, in the blood of a rhesus monkey, was a new virus, one they named for the area’s dense vegetation: Uganda’s Zika Forest. Within a few years, Zika virus was showing up in humans, causing a pink…
In research that potentially could delay the onset of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, stroke, cardiovascular disease, and other diseases of aging, biologists have produced a genetic one-two punch that significantly slowed aging and improved health in the middle-aged fruit flies they studied. The approach focuses on mitochondria, the tiny power generators within cells that control the cells’ growth and…
The golden age of antibiotics may be drawing to a close. The recent discovery of E. coli carrying mcr-1 and ndm-5 — genes that make the bacterium immune to last-resort antibiotics — has left clinicians without an effective means of treatment for the superbug. But in a new study, University at Buffalo researchers have assembled a team of three antibiotics…
Dementia affects one-third of all people older than 65 years in the United States. The most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive, irreversible brain disease that results in impaired cognitive functioning and other behavioral changes. Humans are considered uniquely susceptible to Alzheimer’s disease, potentially due to genetic differences, changes in brain structure and function during evolution, and an…