Day 2 of #ScienceAdvent asks us to talk about a discovery that impressed us this year.
Originally we were planning on talking about this paper which introduces a new way of delivering targeted epidural electrical stimulation for restoring trunk and leg motor functions after spinal cord injuries:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01663-5?fr=operanews
But our uni doesn’t subscribe to Nature Medicine and we couldn’t find it anywhere on the internet, so we had to settle for something else.
So we went with a study that looks at the influence of experimenter sex on mouse behavior and their response to ketamine: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01146-x
It seems mice show aversion towards males & exposure to male scents activates the corticotropin-releasing factor neurons in the entorhinal cortex. Plus, this pathway must be activated before ketamine administration, or ketamine won’t produce its antidepressant effects.
https://neurofrontiers.blog/why-men-stress-mice/
