Who says scientists are stuffy?

Back in October Science magazine announced The 2009 AAAS Science Dance Contest, a challenge to footloose scientists to interpret their Ph.D. work in the form of dance. Videos were posted on YouTube as part of the contest, and a panel of last year's contest winners, Harvard scientists, and professional art directors from a dance company judged the entries. One winner was chosen from each category (1. grad students; 2, postdocs; 3. tenured faculty), as well as a people's choice (the video with the most YouTube views). On the 20th of November Science announced this year's winners, and I have to hand it to them, there are some real gems in there.

Check them out here.

My favorite has to be the professor winner, Vince LiCata, a biochemist at LSU. Aided by his graduate students (no pressure right?), he danced as hemoglobin molecule pairs, which he cooled down and photographed as part of his Ph.D. thesis. A close second is the grad student entry from Sue Lynn Lau, of the Garvan Institute (Sydney, Australia). Fully embracing the sun-loving Aussie culture, she and her cohorts danced to a medley of Hot Hot Hot, The Nutcracker Suite, and Walking on Sunshine in order to portray her work studying the interaction of vitamin D (the synthesis of which requires sunlight) and pancreatic beta-cell function. Finally, there's the postdoc winner Miriam Sach's solo dance depicting verb processing by the brain -- her protrayal of irregular verbs will surely put a grin on your face.

And if these outlandish skits just reinforce your view that all scientists are nutcases, the Popular Choice video might be just the thing to change your mind -- Markita Landry and partner dancing the physics tango!

The contest winners will now go on to work with pro choreographers to interpret a scientific paper in dance, each of which will be featured at the AAAS Annual Meeting in February 2009.

Response times may be slowed during MRI

[Warning: the article in question is at Nature Precedings and has not yet been peer-reviewed, so the results need to be interpreted with caution]

Foucher et al report that reaction times are slowed, by as much as 70 msec, inside MRI scanners, largely due to the static magnetic field. The authors speculate that this increase in response latency might arise from the effect of the giant magnet (2 Tesla) on voltage gated channels, causing neurons to be less excitable.

While the effect on reaction time is not likely to affect how we interpret previous fMRI experiments, it would shed some light on why some psychophysical effects have never been replicated in the scanner (based on anecdotal reports). Curiously, Foucher et al end the article on a positive note, suggesting that static magnetic fields "may also be used to modify neuronal processes for therapeutic purposes". To this, Seahare quipped that at least there's "light at the end of the tunnel".

Excruciatingly slow day at Science

Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth

See also: Slow day at Science?, Slow day at Science? - Part 2,

The mouse forgetting, by the mouse forgot

While reading the abstract to this article in Neuron, I was instantly reminded of that beautiful Kaufmann flick -- Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. Today, I received an email from a friend professing the same sentiment, so I'm convinced a lot of people must have similar thoughts on reading the article. Cao et al induced selective memory erasure by employing a signaling molecule (CaMKII), or rather a transgenic version of it, involved in memory acquisition. They overexpressed CaMKII in a mouse at the time of recall of aversive memories which led to their extinction.

So, Lacuna Inc. may be a little closer to coming into existence than we previously imagined, which is good news for PTSD patients and for the broken-hearted (at least the wealthy ones).

For more information on Joe Tsien's lab try these articles from SciAm.

Partners in slime

Scientific disciplines in most cultures originally developed as offshoots of philosophy and then branched off as they gained critical mass. Gradually, some of these distributaries of philosophy began to converge on topics and decided to come together again, leading to the coinage of some interesting monikers such as neuropsychology, psychopharmacology and even neuropsychopharmacology. Seahare forwarded me a recent paper from Science that got me interested in the field of neuroimmunology, which focuses on the interaction between the brain and immune systems.

(Psycho)neuroimmunology got one of its first thrusts of momentum from an elegant experiment by Ader and Cohen (1975) showing that the immune system can be conditioned to a stimulus (in this case saccharin) unrelated to it. That the nervous system talks to the immune system should be intuitive given how our immune system reacts to (long-term) stress. Naturally, the immune system talks back too. For more information on brain-immune interactions and the consequences of their breakdown, check out Dr. Esther Sternberg's work.

But back to the article at hand, which tries to elucidate some of the neural mechanisms involved. Styer et al focus on the interaction between the nervous system and the innate immune system in the nematode C. elegans. From the paper:

"The nervous system, which can respond in milliseconds to many types of nonspecific environmental stimuli, has several characteristics that make it an ideal partner with the innate immune system to regulate nonspecific host defenses" [Link]

By inducing mutations in npr-1, which encodes a G protein-coupled neuropeptide receptor, they show that GPCRs are involved in neural circuits that influence immune responses. Related podcast here.

K. L. Styer, V. Singh, E. Macosko, S. E. Steele, C. I. Bargmann, A. Aballay (2008). Innate Immunity in Caenorhabditis elegans Is Regulated by Neurons Expressing NPR-1/GPCR Science, 322 (5900), 460-464 DOI: 10.1126/science.1163673

The eyes have it

Most of us are familiar with the pupillary reflex - the tendency of the pupil to constrict in response to light. A slightly lesser known detail is that the pupil may dilate even under constant illumination, in response to processing load, novelty and deception. The last is well-known to poker players however, and is the reason many choose to wear shades while playing.

Some months ago, Einhauser et al published in PNAS that pupillary dilation also reflects perceptual decision making. The authors made use of images responsible for inducing bistable percepts to show that the pupils dilate about 600ms prior to a transition from one percept to the other. What's more, the amount of dilation correlates with the dominance duration of the precept to follow. If you're wondering, pupillary dilation is thought to be mediated by the locus ceruleus via the norepinephrine pathway.

On a slight tangent, the time course of pupillary dilation suggests that the locus ceruleus joins an illustrious group of brain regions that are in the know before the conscious part of you.

Academia and blogging

Batts et al opine that academic institutions can further science among non-scientists by encouraging blogging amongst students - [Link from PLoS Biology].
Bonus: the students' quality of life will improve.

Related post: The blogging cure