Perhaps the first lesson that we learn in any neuroscience course involves defining the unique properties of neurons. Neurons, we learn, are polarised entities where information flows from…
You walk into a restaurant and immediately become aware of all the smells coming from the kitchen. These scents arise from small, volatile molecules called odorants. While there…
Behaviors such as mating, territorial defense, parenting or predator avoidance, despite being instinctive, are modulated by social experience. Because instinctive behaviors can be elicited without any previous social…
Sensory systems must be adaptive to allow animals to cope with changing environments. For hundreds of years, neuroscientists thought that neural plasticity came from changes in the connections…
One year ago when Parvathi Sreekumar earned her PhD in Crop Physiology at the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore, India, she never would have guessed that today…
In the gleaming academic fortress of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore, India, MCB professor Venkatesh Murthy and Advisor/Preceptor Laura Magnotti spent two weeks over…
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How good are we at detecting a specific smell in a mixture of smells – for example, the fragrance of a stargazer lily in a large bouquet of…
Animals balance efficiency and flexibility during natural behavior to make their decisions in different contexts. In a recent study published in Current Biology (PDF) the Murthy lab has…
Brains process external information rapidly at a sub-second time scale, which is set by the dynamic electrophysiological properties of neurons and the fast communication within neuronal populations. This…
