✔️ The A&P Professor Science & Education Updates - Issue #123

Life Science

Different types of dendrites process incoming information in different ways before sending it to the body of the neuron.

Ion channels are crucial for neural communication; they control the flow and gradient of charged particles, creating electrical signals. Recent work report | Neuroscience

By borrowing a method developed by physiologists studying obesity, Pontzer and colleagues systematically measure the total energy used per day by animals and people in various walks of life. The answers coming from their data are often surprising: Exercise doesn’t help you burn more energy on average; active hunter-gatherers in Africa don’t expend more energy daily than sedentary office workers in Illinois; pregnant women don’t burn more calories per day than other adults, after adjusting for body mass.

New research suggests the coronavirus can invade and destroy the placenta and lead to stillbirths in infected women. It's an uncommon outcome for any pregnancy but women with COVID-19 face an elevated risk. Authorities believe vaccination can help prevent these cases.

What does society owe immunocompromised people?

Research in mice and flies suggests that bacteriophages, including those found in dairy foods, may have an influence on an animals’ ability to learn and remember information.

A show opening next week at the Getty Research Center plumbs the visual power of anatomical aesthetics.

A deep understanding of the mechanisms mediating acute and chronic pain in humans requires a detailed knowledge of nociceptors, specialized sensory neurons located in the dorsal root ganglia (DRG) and trigeminal ganglia, expressing a broad variety of stimuli-sensitive receptors.

The authors identified important gender- and species-dependent differences and described potential pharmacological targets that could be tested in preclinical settings.

These spatial transcriptomic data will be useful for understanding the biology of acute and chronic pain and for developing effective treatment targeting human-specific pain mechanisms.

Teaching & Learning

Moving from scarcity to abundance.

TAPP News & Notes

Proficiency Grading | Pass-Fail Grading | Averaging Grades | Example of Proficiency Grading | Salman Khan's Book About Education