Improving Health & Medicine

Left-Handed Women’s Quirk Over Sense of Smell

BBC

Scientists say they have discovered a biological anomaly that could change how we understand our sense of smell. The study in the journal Neuron shows some people can smell normally, despite missing the part of the brain that is considered to be crucial for smell - the olfactory bulbs. Lacking bulbs should cause anosmia (being unable to smell). Curiously, the phenomenon mostly affects left-handed women, and has never been detected in men.

November 07, 2019

Improving Health & Medicine

Scientists Map Mouse Personality

Phys.org

Weizmann scientists and colleagues developed an algorithm that categorized mice according to personality – a tool that could be invaluable in experiments involving mice, says Phys.org.

November 07, 2019

Improving Health & Medicine

An Exception to the Rule: An Intact Sense of Smell Without a Crucial Olfactory Brain Structure

Is a pair of brain structures called the olfactory bulbs, which are said to encode our sense of smell, necessary? That is, are they essential to the existence of this sense? Weizmann Institute of Science researchers recently showed that some humans can smell just fine, thank you, without said bulbs. Their finding – that around 0.6% of women, and more specifically, up to 4% of left-handed women, have completely intact senses of smell despite having no olfactory bulbs in their brains – calls into question the accepted notion that this structure is absolutely necessary for the act of smelling. The findings of this research, which were published in Neuron, could shake up certain conventional theories that describe the workings of our sense of smell.

November 06, 2019

Improving Health & Medicine

Do Deep Neural Networks ‘See’ Faces Like Brains Do?

Synced

Recognizing faces is as natural and habitual as can be for human beings. Even with their undeveloped vision, babies can recognize their mother’s face within days, while adults typically know some 5,000 faces. But what actually happens inside our brains during the process of recognizing a face? How are different facial features encoded in our brains? And can artificial intelligence learn to recognize faces the way humans do?

November 05, 2019

Improving Health & Medicine

For the First Time: A Method for Measuring Animal Personality

We might refer to someone’s personality as “mousy,” but in truth, mice have a range of personalities nearly as great as our own. Prof. Alon Chen and members of two groups he heads – one in the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Neurobiology and one in the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany – decided to explore personality specifically in mice. This would enable the scientists to develop a set of objective measurements for this highly slippery concept. A quantitative understanding of the traits that make each animal an individual might help answer some of the open questions in science concerning the connections between genes and behavior. The findings of this research were published in Nature Neuroscience.

November 04, 2019