In our eyes, the cornea and crystalline lens project an image of the world onto the retina. There, this image is sampled by the rods and the cones —the light-sensitive cells of the vertebrate eye—, coded as a sequence of electrical signals and preprocessed by other neurons before being sent to the brain via the […]
Bees visit flowers to obtain nectar (a sugary liquid) and pollen (their source of fat and protein). During foraging trips, bees do not choose flowers at random. For example, as first pointed out by Aristotle, bees visit only one type of flower in each of their foraging trips. How do bees recognise flowers? Colour textures […]
From a certain point of view, eukaryotic cells could be described as microscopic power plants equipped with factories and energy-generating platforms, inside of which highways and compartments are constantly built and rebuilt, and a fluent traffic provides a constant recycling of structures while getting rid of garbage. The trafficking also involves material coming in and […]
About 95% of the photoreceptors in our retina are rods, which we use for nocturnal vision, since they can detect single photons. During the day, rods saturate, and we use the other 5% of photoreceptors, the cones, which mediate color vision and do not saturate even at the highest light levels. There is still a […]
Olfaction is one of the most important senses. It protects us from eating spoiled food, it helps animals to detect their relatives, it makes the perfume business quite successful and, in general, it connects us to the volatile chemicals surrounding us. These chemicals, usually called “odorants”, can be detected even if they are in a […]
Neurons in your brain are interconnected through synapses, thus constituting the so-called neural networks. Following a simplified but conceptually useful view, each synapse can be seen as a “link” between two given neurons, and it has a certain associated strength. Such a strength gives an idea of how reliable a given synapse is in order […]
Smell has often been the neglected sense, despite—or, hopefully, until—the increasing number of interesting discoveries being made about and around it. Trivially, smells are interpreted as a series of neurochemical reactions mediated by receptors; this is no novelty, and at the single-molecule and single-neuron level the mechanism (how a molecule triggers a specific receptor which […]
The molecular base underlying neuronal processes is being constantly enriched by extended research focused on the investigation of mechanisms involving neurological pathologies. This broad field ranges from widely extended diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, to other less well-known, generally low-incidence neurodegenerative pathologies. However, one of the most challenging aims of modern neuroscience is the understanding […]
Most people consider forgetting things as a nuisance. Not remembering the name of someone we are supposed to remember or not knowing where we left the keys can be a little upsetting. But for some people, being unable to forget things can be really painful, and thus they try to voluntary eliminate their unpleasant memories […]