New and Exciting in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine

As always on Monday nights, there are new articles published in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. My picks:

Professional Uncertainty and Disempowerment Responding to Ethnic Diversity in Health Care: A Qualitative Study

In a qualitative study published this week in PLoS Medicine, Joe Kai and colleagues have identified opportunities to empower health professionals to respond more effectively to challenges in their work with patients from diverse ethnic communities. A related perspective showcases the challenges that physicians face in providing culturally appropriate care.

Omnidirectional Sensory and Motor Volumes in Electric Fish:

Most animals, including humans, have sensory and motor capabilities that are biased in the forward direction. The black ghost knifefish, a nocturnal, weakly electric fish from the Amazon, is an interesting exception to this general rule. We demonstrate that these fish have sensing and motor capabilities that are omnidirectional. By combining video analysis of prey capture trajectories with computational modeling of the fish's electrosensory capabilities, we were able to quantify and compare the 3-D volumes for sensation and movement. We found that the volume in which prey are detected is similar in size to the volume needed by the fish to stop. We suggest that this coupling may arise from constraints that the animal faces when using self-generated energy to probe its environment. This is similar to the way in which the angular coverage and range of an automobile's headlights are designed to match certain motion characteristics of the vehicle, such as its typical cruising speed, turning angle, and stopping distance. We suggest that the degree of overlap between sensory and movement volumes can provide insight into the types of control strategies that are best suited for guiding behavior.

Also read the related synopsis. Interestingly, electroreception is the only sensory modality studied so far which does not exhibit centrifugal control, i.e., there is no "tuning" by the central nervous system - it is always tuned the same. In other senses (including some weird ones, e.g., magnetoreception), the brain modulates the sensitivity of the sensory organ. In all those cases, one of those modulations is by the circadian clock. Thus, all the senses except electroreception are more or less sensitive depending on the time of day. I wonder about the other active senses, i.e., senses in which animal emits something into the environment and then senses how the environment responds to it (e.g., sonar in dolphins, ultrasonic emitions of bats, etc.) as I am not sure those were studied.