Previously, on Know Your Neurons: Chapter 1: The Discovery and Naming of the Neuron Chapter 2: How to Classify Different Types of Neurons Chapter 3: Meet the Glia Chapter 4: What is the Ratio of Glia to Neurons in the Brain? By Daisy Yuhas and Ferris Jabr Last time on Know Your Neurons, we talked [...]

Previously, on Know Your Neurons: Chapter 1: The Discovery and Naming of the Neuron Chapter 2: How to Classify Different Types of Neurons, or The Dendrology of the Neuron Forest Chapter 3: Know Your Neurons: Meet the Glia *By Daisy Yuhas Trillions of cells in your brain communicate with one another, respond to infections, guide [...]

Previously, on Know Your Neurons: Chapter 1: The Discovery and Naming of the Neuron Chapter 2: How to Classify Different Types of Neurons, or The Dendrology of the Neuron Forest Scientists have organized the cells that make up the nervous system into two broad groups: neurons, which are the primary signaling cells, and glia, which [...]

During the time I taught laboratory courses here at the University of Illinois in cell and molecular biology (After nearly 20 years of that, I’ve moved to online teaching to give myself more flexibility for science outreach), I would often tell the students, particularly the ones who were considering going into research, that the best [...]

What do you do when your lab results are perplexing and contradict or add a new element to a finding you thought you already had sewn up? Today’s video shares (and maybe celebrates) that frustration of those who’ve experienced this! Perhaps you recall a very catchy tune and animated video about life in the lab [...]

In the vein of great science music videos created for biotech companies (see my post here and here, with more to come in future posts), a new video, with a very enjoyable tune and extreme familiarity with biotech lab work has emerged from Life Technologies. This video follows new biotech PhD candidate, Arnold Young (aka [...]

Nicotine enhances the ability to focus and remember. The alkaloid acts in a similar manner to the brain’s own signaling molecule, acetylcholine. It interacts with eponymous receptors on the surface of nerve cells to regulate signaling in the brain. The role of the nicotinic-acetylcholine receptors throughout the central nervous system is so wide-ranging that new [...]

Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1991 for their development of the patch-clamp technique, which records currents coursing through single ion channels in cells. For neuroscientists, one form of this technique  has become the gold standard for probing information about the goings-on inside a cell. It can [...]