The neurology of pair bonding and one small step for robots

From space robots on the moon to mental gears and dense objects, it was a week in science. Let’s take a look at some of the interesting developments that took place over the past seven days.

Guess the love

Prairie voles, native to the American Midwest, are so adept at mating that researchers at the University of Texas at Austin studied their brain activity. For insight into the formation of long-term monogamous human relationships.

Prairie vole courtship is so fast that if left to get a beer from the refrigerator, they’ll be picking up a litter by the time you get back to the couch. Within 30 minutes of meeting, a man and a woman will have sex repeatedly, several times per hour. Within 24 hours, they form a lifelong pair bond marked by mutual grooming and emotional support, and both partners eventually care for their children together.

In their study, the researchers found high activity in 68 brain regions including seven brain-wide circuits. This activity involves three stages: mating, bonding, and establishing a lasting bond. Because they found many brain regions that have not previously been linked to bonding, the researchers believe that this study may identify relevant areas of the human brain for future studies of human pair bonding.

Surprisingly, they also found that the activated brain regions were almost identical between men and women, contradicting previous assumptions that the mechanisms involved differed between the sexes.

The robot is on fire.

The Apple TV+ series “For All Mankind” presents an alternate history in which the Soviet Union first landed on the moon and space race From there it accelerated to multiple Earth colonies on the Moon and Mars. Here on smelly old Earth-616, the space race ended in the 1970s when the Soviet Union ran out of space money, and NASA decided that low Earth orbit was good enough for a good search.

But for the first time since 1972 An American spaceship has landed on the moon.. Built by Houston, Texas-based Intuitive Machines, the unmanned, robotic Odysseus gave its flight controllers a healthy scare before final descent when a laser device that provides altitude and speed data malfunctioned.

After replacing the experimental instrument built by NASA, the craft successfully landed and began transmitting data. A win for the private sector with emergency support from the public sector. Welcome, Intuitive Machines! Signed, all taxpayers.

Smile strained

Your mind is like a car transmission. It has multiple gears and many modes that only work within certain gears, and survival often depends on getting the brain into high-intensity panic mode, often without using the clutch.

A brain structure residing in one of the brain’s most revered ancient evolutionary regions, called the amygdala, evokes survival responses and regulates the transition to intense fear behaviors in response to threats such as a A giant Bengal tiger peeking out from the underbrush or your boss asking if. You can “jump to Zoom for an instant chat.”

Incontinence results in recreational symptoms such as psychosis and anxiety. American neuroscientists have now discovered. A previously unknown neural pathway Encoding transitions in high-intensity fear responses. In an experiment involving in vivo calcium imaging with rats, they found a connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.

By manipulating this pathway, they observed the release of neurotransmitters. prefrontal cortex to neurons in the amygdala that, according to the researchers, “directly increase the level of fear that the animal experiences.”

Object dense

Right now, at this very moment, billions of billions of neutrinos are streaming through your body as if you were nothing more than a diffuse cloud of baryons (which is exactly what you are). Neutrinos are fermions that interact only through the weak nuclear force and gravity.

Their mass is so small that physicists thought it was zero. However, one day before supernova 1987-A was first detected 37 years ago, astronomers detected a neutrino from the explosion, indicating that a neutron star had likely formed.

But until this week, they were unsure whether the neutron star is intact or continues to fall into the singularity. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope, MIRI, and NIRSpec Supernovae have now been observed at infrared wavelengths.detecting ions that can only result from the ultraviolet and X-ray emission of a persistent neutron star.

This is the week in science reporting. Until next week, this expanding cloud of baryons says, “Adios, amigos.”

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