Otherwise titled: Your mouse sounds JUST like his dad! Hoffman et al. “Spectrographic analyses reveal signals of individuality and kinship in the ultrasonic courtship vocalizations of wild house mice” Physiology and Behavior, 2012. (Source)

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how antidepressants are not particularly effective. Either most people don’t respond, or when they DO respond, it’s placebo, or the side effects are too much. None of this is wrong, though I personally do not think the current antidepressants are quite as bleak as recent coverage is [...]

Friday Weird Science is up at Neurotic Physiology! Today we’ve looking at how male millipedes get their fair ladies to uncoil. It turns out it has to do with making noise…with the legs on their butt. Romance, right? Head over and check it out!

Sci is at Neurotic Physiology today talking about an interesting question she received: is there a connection between major depressive disorder and hypotension? It’s new to me so I did some digging, but if any experts out there want to weigh in, I would love to learn more about the topic! Head over there, check [...]

Sci’s not a big celebrator of Valentine’s Day. Instead, I prefer to celebrate February 15th, when all the awesome chocolate will be 50% off. If you all are very unlucky I will post photos of the truly massive haul I’m planning. But for those of you in to Valentine’s Day, Stanford has a fun idea. [...]

Sci is…a really competitive person. I’m so competitive that I will easily get into a contest with someone to prove I am more competitive than they are. School, running, life in general, I will compete at basically anything. Heck, I was playing the Battlestar Galactica game (which, if you like the show, can be pretty [...]

Friday Weird Science is up at Neurotic Physiology! Today we’re talking about an interesting study with snakes in guam…eating your used tampons. Delicious. Come on over and check it out!

…and this is a paper which is not quite what it’s cracked up to be. Because while it does, indeed, have great pictures of your brain on drugs, it doesn’t really go any further than that. It doesn’t explore why these changes are occurring or what they say about the functions of psilocybin. So while [...]

There are many different factors which go into whether animals (or humans) develop obesity and diabetes. Different sensitivity to different chemicals, in different areas of the body and brain, can cause major differences in feeding behavior, body weight, fat, and insulin sensitivity. And now we’ve learned that changes in one circuit of the hypothalamus could [...]

But CAN they? Head over to Neurotic Physiology to find out whether bears really care if you’re on your period.