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#10 How to Care for Your Rat,More info:rspcansw

 

#9     Rats help each other out just as humans do,More info:phys

 

#8     Brain implant lets rats ‘see’ infrared light,More info:sciencemag

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS—Aside from a few animals—like pythons and vampire bats—that can sense infrared light, the world of this particular electromagnetic radiation has been off-limits to most creatures. But now, researchers have engineered rodents to see infrared light by implanting sensors in their visual cortex—a first ever feat announced here yesterday at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Before they wired rats to see infrared light, Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis and his postdoc Eric Thomson engineered them to feel it. In 2013, they surgically implanted a single infrared-detecting electrode into an area of the rat’s brain that processes touch called the somatosensory cortex. The other end of the sensor, outside the rat’s head, surveyed the environment for infrared light. When it picked up infrared, the sensor sent electrical messages to the rats’ brains that seemed to give them a physical sensation. At first, the rats would groom and rub their whiskers repeatedly whenever the light went on. But after a short while, they stopped fidgeting. They even learned to associate infrared with a reward-based task in which they followed the light to a bowl of water.

#7       Rats That Reminisce May Lead To Better Tests For Alzheimer’s Drugs,More info:npr

What rats can remember may help people who forget.

Researchers are reporting evidence that rats possess “episodic memories,” the kind of memories that allow us to go back in time and recall specific events. These memories are among the first to disappear in people who develop Alzheimer’s disease.

The finding, which appears Thursday in Current Biology, suggests that rats could offer a better way to test potential drugs for Alzheimer’s. Right now, most of these drugs are tested in mice.

“We need to have a way to study the exact type of memory that we think is impaired in Alzheimer’s disease,” says Bruce Lamb, a professor of medical and molecular genetics at Indiana University in Indianapolis. He was not involved in the study.

#6     DO RATS KNOW WHEN THEY DON’T KNOW?,More info:wired

HUMANS ARE MASTERS of metacognition: thinking about thinking. We can evaluate what we know and what we don’t know. If you don’t know how to get somewhere, you Google directions. When studying for a test, you have an idea of which material you’re most unsure of and devote more time to it.

Psychologists studying human metacognition usually rely on self-reports. Their subjects are able to simply tell the experimenter what they think. Studying metacognition in non-human animals is not as straightforward. How do you get an animal to “tell” you that it doesn’t know something? Instead of verbal reports, scientists interpret behavioral indicators of metacognition in animals.

#5     Scientists tackle breeding challenges of land mine-finding rats,More info:cornell

 

#4     Study shows city rats eat better than country rats,More info:phys

A pair of researchers, one with Trent University in Canada, the other the University of Manchester in the U.K. has found evidence that rats living in cities have a much richer diet than rats living in the country. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Eric Guiry and Michael Buckley describe their isotopic analysis of rats living in Toronto during the years 1790 to 1890, and what they found

#3     New rat species has a hog nose … and (very) hairy genitals,More info:earthtouchnews

 

#2     World’s first human case of rat disease discovered,More info:local10

 

#1     In France, Even the Rats Have Rights,More info:wsj

 

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