“Animals have been marked for identification purposes for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.” – explains a new US patent awarded to Somark Innovations, Inc. of San Diego, California. The firm’s invention (marketed under the name Labstamp ® ) relates to the marking, for ID purposes, of animals, where the animal might be, say, a […]
Tag: rodent
Assessing the Relation Between Itching and Scratching
The quest advances, scratch by scratch, in the search for an excellent rodent itch model: “Quantitative assessment of directed hind limb scratching behavior as a rodent itch model,” Hiroshi Nojima and E. Carstens, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, vol. 126, no. 2, June 2003, pp. 137-43. The authors, at Toyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University, Japan and […]
Stimulated Stages of Penile Erection in an Edible Rodent
What’s up with the agouti [pictured here, in a San Diego Zoo photo]? Three proven males show what, according to this new study: “Anatomical Stages of Penile Erection in the Agouti (Dasyprocta leporina) Induced by Electro-Ejaculation,” W.M. Mollineau, T. Sampson, A.O. Adogwa and G.W. Garcia, Anatomia Histologia Embyologia, vol. 41, 2012, pp. 392-4. The authors, […]
Whiskers-Tracking in Videos of Head Fixed Rodents
This month’s Head Fixed Rodents Whisker-Tracking Study of the month is: “Automated Tracking of Whiskers in Videos of Head Fixed Rodents,” Nathan G. Clack [pictured, whiskered, here], Daniel H. O’Connor, Daniel Huber, Leopoldo Petreanu, Andrew Hires, Simon Peron, Karel Svoboda, Eugene W. Myers [pictured, whiskerless, here], PLoS Computational Biology, vol. 8, no. 7, 2012, e1002591. The […]