blood flow

Although female northern elephant seals only typically deliver one pup, females will sometimes nurse offspring from other mothers as in this photo by Brocken Inaglory via Wikimedia commons. A situation like this would result in less milk available to each nursing pup. I just read an interesting paper published in Physiology. Animals periodically undergo periods of food deprivation such as during hibernation, mating, molting and migration. During these period of fasting, they become insulin resistant which helps to preserve glucose stores in the body. In this review, the…
Merino sheep. Original: User:Fir0002 Derivative work: Charles Esson at en.wikipedia via Wikimedia Commons Researchers from Friedrich Schiller University (Jena, Germany) and Heinrich-Heine-University (Düsseldorf, Germany) teamed up to test whether a heart failure medication that is currently being tested might also improve blood flow in the brain. Their findings were published last month in the American Journal of Physiology, Heart and Circulatory Physiology. According to the study authors, the small blood vessels in the brains of sheep closely resemble those in the human brain. Using…
Perovskite solar cells can not only emit light, they can also emit up to 70% of absorbed sunlight as lasers. Critical signaling molecules can be used to convert stem cells to neural progenitor cells, increasing the yield of healthy motor neurons and decreasing the time required to grow them. Mexican blind cavefish are so close to their sighted kin that they are considered the same species, but they use pressure waves (from opening and closing their mouths) to navigate in the dark. Electrostatic assembly allows luminescent elements (like Europium) to be embedded in nanodiamonds; these glowing…
Scientists have discovered just what makes Rudolph's nose turn red:
The blood that flows into our heads is obviously important for it provides nutrients and oxygen to that most energetically demanding of organs - the brain. But for neuroscientists, blood flow in the brain has a special significance; many have used it to measure brain activity using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. This scanning technology has become a common feature of modern neuroscience studies, where it's used to follow firing neurons and to identify parts of the brain that are active during common mental tasks. Its use rests on the assumption that the…