Science
We are super stoked to announce that the OYM team will be at the Canadian Neuroscience meeting in Toronto this year, hosting an exciting new satellite symposium on science communication! Come talk about the importance of communication in neuroscience with special guest speakers! Other than shamelessly self-promoting, the hosts have got a whole lot on their minds this week. They’re both on writing duty this week and have been thinking about the way that their science is portrayed and how it fits into the big picture. Kat’s been reading up a lot (like, a lot a lot) on the misuse of statistics in the wake of the American Statistical Association’s statement on p values. Plus, she’s back on a podcast kick and is a new fan of the Bold Signals Podcast. Meanwhile, Liam’s been spending some free time on Twitter and catches us up on the hashtag #BiologySpaceFacts before we move onto this week’s paper. The media attention drew our attention to this study that was published as a letter in Nature. In it, researchers use a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) to study the cells in the dentate gyrus, and their connections to surrounding cortices, that are activated during the formation of contextual fear memories. They use optogenetic techniques to modulate the activity of these ‘engram’ cells, and show that they can strengthen their connections and recover memory function in the AD mice. It’s a whole lot of information to be crammed into a letter, but it certainly takes a promising step towards understanding how AD relates to memory formation and retrieval. More links! Institute for Research on Public Policy Podcast Spurious Correlations