Of Use to Whiskered Men in the Dark?

Might this study about whiskers in mice be educational for whiskered humans — about similar human capabilities they may be under-utilizing? The study is: “Detection and neural encoding of whisker-generated sounds in mice,” Ben Efron, Athanasios Ntelezos, Yonatan Katz, and Ilan Lamp, Current Biology, vol. 35, no. 6, 2025, pp. 1211-1226. The authors report: Whisking […]

High Drinking in the Dark

High drinking in the dark and other intellectual adventures await you, yours for the reading, in the study: “Development and implementation of a Dependable, Simple, and Cost-effective (DSC), open-source running wheel in High Drinking in the Dark and Heterogeneous Stock/Northport mice,” Kolter Grigsby, Zaynah Usmani, Justin Anderson, and Angela Ozburn, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. […]

Gift mice, Politicians’ food and pee, Tarantula sucking, Tender youth, Cat dependence

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Time for love — Valentine’s Day celebrates coupling. Alan McWilliam tells Feedback about an offer he received, before the most recent Valentine’s Day, from a US-based biotechnology company. It couples charm with other qualities. Alan says: “I […]

Improbable Research