SCItations

That’s what my pediatrician used to say when he was about to give me a shot. Although shots were much scarier when I was 6, I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve grown into them. That’s why when flu season comes around I’m not the first in line to get vaccinated. I’ve gotten plenty of flu shots in my life, but in recent years I have not taken the vaccine as seriously as some perhaps do. However, considering the way vaccines work I should probably rethink my logic. Before we can think about vaccines though, we should probably think about viruses themselves. A virus is sort of pitiful because it can’t multiply on its own. Unlike our cells which can grow and divide happily, the virus needs a host cell to help it multiply. Instead of asking politely, the virus sneaks some of its genetic material into our healthy cells and our cells unknowingly regenerate this genetic material into more viruses!   Luckily, this is when our immune system kicks in. Our immune system is a slurry of spec...

Ever gotten a whiff of a tainted bottle of wine? You pop the cork and instead of ripe berry notes and velvety toasted oak, a waft of damp mustiness greets your nostrils. Scientists have known that TCA, or 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, is the pesky chemical responsible for spoiled wine but new research has just uncovered what you actually smell—or don’t smell—from a tainted bottle. It has been widely assumed that TCA interacts with your nose in the same way most other odorants do. Tiny smelly molecules usually bind to receptors in your mucous membrane and excite your olfactory nerve cells which tell your brain what you smell. However in a recent publication from Osaka University in Japan, scientists say that in fact TCA is not exciting your olfactory neurons at all. Instead TCA gets inside of your nosey nerve cells and prevents other odorants, like the ones that make your wine smell fruity and delicious, from being detected. One clue to the authors’ conclusions is the exceedingl...

What’s wrong with the following sentence: I saw a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple-babies-eater ? It sounds off doesn’t it? If you have heard the song I am referencing I’m sure you would quickly correct me—it’s a purple- people -eater not a purple- babies- eater. But even if you hadn’t heard the song you would probably say, don’t you mean a flying purple- baby- eater? The error our ears hear in the sentence is built into the way we use language. Steven Pinker explains this word quirk in his book The Language Instinct with a theory of word structure and mental storage. He notes that the noun in a compound word, such as people in purple-people-eater , must be a stem. A stem is the simplest unit of a word that can be manipulated into different parts of speech when certain rules are applied to it. Book would be the stem of books, table the stem of tables, and owl the stem of owls. What do these stems have in common? They are all regular nouns in the sense that forming each o...

How do you imagine our memories work? Are there a thousand file cabinets in our heads, each dedicated to a different topic? Are there little minions running around organizing and re-organizing our stores of knowledge to incorporate all the things we learn every day? How come I can remember the atomic mass of Oxygen but I can’t remember the capital of Connecticut? The truth is we still don’t really know. There are several theories about how we store knowledge but for the most part, it’s still up in the air. However, leaps and bounds have been made in the past 20 years to elucidate some of the mechanisms behind acquiring new knowledge. That is, scientists now think they know at least one way that we humans learn new things.  The process is called Long-Term Potentiation and it is facilitated by events that occur at the synapse—the tiny space between two neurons where molecular signals govern cellular change. There is a molecule called the NMDA-receptor at some of your syn...