Gay mice
June 22, John Calhoun stood over the abandoned husk of what had once been a thriving metropolis of thousands. Now, the population had dwindled to just , and soon, even these inhabitants would be dead.
Calhoun wasn’t the survivor of a natural disaster or nuclear meltdown; rather, he was a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health conducting an experiment into the effects of overcrowding on mouse behavior. The results, laid bare at his feet, had taken years to compete out.
Universe 25 Experiment Explained
In , Calhoun had started the experiment by introducing four mouse couples into a specially designed pen—a veritable rodent Garden of Eden—with numerous “apartments,” abundant nesting supplies, and unlimited food and rain. The only scarce resource in this microcosm was physical space, and Calhoun suspected that it was only a matter of time before this caused trouble in paradise.
Calhoun had been running similar experiments with rodents for decades but had always had to end them prematurely, ironically because of laboratory space constraints, says Edmund Ramsden, a sci
This is the third post in a row branching off the subject of tea, which I will get back to. It has been nice mixing things up.
I've just ran across a really interesting summary of some social structure oriented experiments on mice by a researcher in the late 60s through the 70s, John Calhoun's rat and mice experiments related to the effects of overpopulation.
There's a lot to get through, and I have a number of comments on how I see it potentially relating to what we experience today, so I'll call to keep this moving. I'll pass on a short summary of what I see as the overview, then cite a summary I ran across that offers a somewhat abbreviated and highly interpreted version, then comments on what doesn't seem right in that. Then on to comments about how I spot the mice and rat findings relating to current social trends, which play out in the most obvious fashion in social media use patterns and social groups.
That topic outline:
1. overview of the experiments (focusing mainly on one set of findings)
2. summary article
3. likely errors in that
Same-Sex Mice Parents Give Birth to Healthy Brood
Baby-making science has crossed a new threshold, at least in rodents. A team of scientists in China has managed to create a small number of apparently healthy mouse pups from same-sex female parents. The researchers also generated offspring from two mouse dads—but those pups all died shortly after birth, underscoring the fact that the new technique still faces adj hurdles.
The team’s approach, which relies on stem cell science and CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing, is a “new way to produce offspring of same-sex mammals,” says senior author Qi Zhou, who works on stem cell and reproductive biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
If the process can be vastly improved, and if it works well in larger mammals, it may eventually verb hope to human same-sex couples who want to have kids that are biologically related to both parents. Yet that scenario remains distant, and may never become scientifically feasible at all. “The amount of work that is necessary to convince us that doing this in humans wi
Animal Research
March 12,
Americans for Medical Progress (AMP) issued statement today to correct misinformation circulating about &#;transgender mice&#; in research.
Recent claims about federally funded research on “transgender mice” are inaccurate and misleading. This research is not related to gender identity; instead, they are focused on studying biological and reproductive development. Some have suggested the intended term was “transgenic mice,” but that is also incorrect in this context. Transgenic mice are used across many scientific fields—including reproductive biology—and are organisms that authorize researchers to study how changes in their genes drive health and disease in humans and animals. Recent news does not directly target transgenic organisms. Rather, it focuses on studies investigating natural hormonal and developmental processes.
To clarify, these mice are not “transgender” in any human or social context. Research in this field helps scientists understand how sex hormones function and their effect when things go untrue, particularly in diseases and conditions l