Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

A Myrmeleontidae: antlions, from the Neuroptera order of antlions and owlflies. This order of insects of course contains neither ants, nor lions, owls, or flies—a staple in entomology to name unusual insects with compound names drawing from other animals—e.g., snakeflies, sawflies, and more.

http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/165100160

The antlion name honors the behaviour of their larvae, which live in ground burrows and trap passing ants with their fearsome mandibles.

#iNaturalist #Antlions #Myrmeleontidae #Neuroptera #entomology #insects #Crete

Scientists say they can’t rely on Twitter anymore (@yang3kc quoted by @Verge) https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/31/23739084/twitter-elon-musk-api-policy-chilling-academic-research

Communication consumes 35 times more energy than computation in the human cortex

The brain is the hungriest organ in the body (using 20% of all energy consumed). But most of it is not used for "computing"; it's used to send messages around.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2008173118

The billionaire Sackler Family and Purdue Pharma will pay $6B & serve 0 prison for knowingly selling horrendous amounts of OxyContin while claiming it was non-addictive—resulting in 564K+ American deaths by Opioid overdose.😓 And that doesn’t even begin to contemplate the global harm and deaths the Sackler family caused.

And for all that suffering and atrocity—not one person will go to prison. Not one.

“If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the poor.”

“The U.S. government has tens of millions of unused doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, regularly trashing shots as they pass their expiration dates. ….it’s also a serious roadblock for scientists testing and developing vaccines that could protect against future variants of SARS-CoV-2—and the next pandemic.”

Moderna and Pfizer won’t release the vaccines for research.
No wonder so many people are anti-pharma. 😡

https://www.science.org/content/article/companies-won-t-share-covid-19-shots-stalling-future-vaccine-research

If you will be in Lisbon on June 16th

#Art #artgallery #artmastodon

IL6 is not always the bad guy.

"In the penumbrae of human stroke brain lesions, we identified a subpopulation of microglia that express vascular endothelial growth factor A. These cells, termed ‘repair-associated microglia’ (RAMs), were also observed in a rodent model of CVI and coexpressed interleukin (IL)-6Ra. Cerebrovascular repair did not occur in IL-6 knockouts or in mice lacking microglial IL-6Ra expression"
#Immunology #Inflammation #Microglia #Neuroimmunology

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-023-01521-1

Seinfeld in Spanish: croissants with knife & fork in Madrid

Out in Elife from the lab: Increased cortical plasticity leads to memory interference and enhanced hippocampal-cortical interactions

Our brain is continuously challenged by daily experiences. How to avoid systematic
erasing of previously encoded memories? While it has been proposed that a dual-learning
system with ‘slow’ learning in the cortex and ‘fast’ learning in the hippocampus could protect
previous knowledge from interference, this has never been observed in the living organism.

We used the Object Space Task to test both simple and semantic-like memory. We report that increasing plasticity via the viral-induced overexpression of RGS14414 in the prelimbic cortex leads to better one-trial memory, but that this comes at the price of increased interference in semantic-like memory.

Modelling the behavior showed that RGS14-overexpressing animals had systematically higher learning rate values, indicating that exploration behavior in RGS14-overexpressing animals was driven more by recent than remote memories in contrast to controls.

Increased cortical plasticity resulted also in shorter NonREM bouts and smaller delta-waves.

More neurons with slower firing rates were seen after the plasticity-increase, which may have led to smaller delta waves due to less firing in the upstate.

Further, hippocampal-cortical interactions in form of theta coherence during wake and
REM-sleep as well as oscillatory coupling during NonREM-sleep were enhanced

Increasing cortical plasticity also leads to multiple changes in hippocampal ripples

Finally, in controls, more ripples occurred uncoupled to other oscillations in both the simple learning and Home Cage in contrast to complex learning, which had more ripples following delta waves. In contrast, in RGS14 already simple learning and Home Cage had as many ripples following delta as the other conditions.

Here a summary of learning effects and RGS14 effects: in short after increased plasticity in the prefrontal cortex all experiences (also home cage) are treated like salient information for semantic-like learning. The discrimination of what is important is missing.

Now India is cutting the periodic table from science classes. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01770-y