SMOKING ROCKS!!!

Nicotine decreases food intake through activation of POMC neurons.

Mineur YS, Abizaid A, Rao Y, Salas R, DiLeone RJ, Gündisch D, Diano S, De Biasi M, Horvath TL, Gao XB, Picciotto MR.

Smoking decreases appetite, and smokers often report that they smoke to control their weight. Understanding the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the anorexic effects of smoking would facilitate the development of novel treatments to help with smoking cessation and to prevent or treat obesity. By using a combination of pharmacological, molecular genetic, electrophysiological, and feeding studies, we found that activation of hypothalamic α3β4 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors leads to activation of pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) neurons. POMC neurons and subsequent activation of melanocortin 4 receptors were critical for nicotinic-induced decreases in food intake in mice. This study demonstrates that nicotine decreases food intake and body weight by influencing the hypothalamic melanocortin system and identifies critical molecular and synaptic mechanisms involved in nicotine-induced decreases in appetite.

Science. 2011 Jun 10;332(6035):1330-2.

Why is this cool?

 SMOKING IS GOOD...for something. There has been a lot of talk about cancer and emphysema associated with cigarettes and all that data is pretty conclusive, but what if cigarettes actually did some good?! People have known that smokers are usually skinny and wily, but why?

 Turns out smokin' activates your brain to be less hungry. So, when you see someone bad mouthing cancer sticks, you tell them that you're losing weight in an all natural way because going to the gym is unnatural. Animals don't gym and they are as natural as it gets. They just keep it trim and smoke all the time.

  What did the researchers do? They say that through "a combination of pharmacological, molecular genetic, electrophysiological, and feeding studies" they were able to see activation of "pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) neurons." I don't know anything about these neurons or neurobiology, so I can not say exactly what that means. What I can say is that they have found a mechanism by which nicotine intake affects appetite and that is stellar!

 What does this mean for the future? Maybe this research will be a drug and just like multivitamins people will take them everyday to stay slim. Gyms would go out of business because the pill would keep people slender and they would not feel the urge to break themselves on an elliptical. 

 The government could enforce the pill and bring down rising healthcare costs attributed to obesity! Imagine that being on insurers may do the same because costs associated with obesity are so high.  Are the financial costs of obesity so much higher than those attributed to smoking as to justify heavy taxes on sweets and high calorie foods while lowering taxes on and regulations of smoking? A skinny world could be perfection...maybe.

BIG BRAINS!!!

Are bigger brains better? 

Chittka L, Niven J.

Attempts to relate brain size to behaviour and cognition have rarely integrated information from insects with that from vertebrates. Many insects, however, demonstrate that highly differentiated motor repertoires, extensive social structures and cognition are possible with very small brains, emphasising that we need to understand the neural circuits, not just the size of brain regions, which underlie these feats. Neural network analyses show that cognitive features found in insects, such as numerosity, attention and categorisation-like processes, may require only very limited neuron numbers. Thus, brain size may have less of a relationship with behavioural repertoire and cognitive capacity than generally assumed, prompting the question of what large brains are for. Larger brains are, at least partly, a consequence of larger neurons that are necessary in large animals due to basic biophysical constraints. They also contain greater replication of neuronal circuits, adding precision to sensory processes, detail to perception, more parallel processing and enlarged storage capacity. Yet, these advantages are unlikely to produce the qualitative shifts in behaviour that are often assumed to accompany increased brain size. Instead, modularity and interconnectivity may be more important.

Curr Biol. 2009 Nov 17;19(21):R995-R1008.

Why is this cool?

  Today's paper is a review/hypothesis paper that points at large brains and laughs at them. From the abstract, the authors highlight the fact that all behaviors that people think are special in humans are, in fact, replicated by any number of species. On top of that, those species have incomprehensibly small brains!! How do they do it?
 Let's flip the question and ask, why are our awesome mammal brains so gargantuan?

1. We are bigger and as a consequence our brains cells (neurons and glia) have to be bigger.

2. We do a lot of precise work and so we need extremely precise motor control.

3. We remember a lot of stuff.

4. PARALLEL PROCESSING!! We replicate many neuronal circuits and as a result we can think multiple things at once!

 Well, it turns out that to function in this cold world, you don't need all of that stuff. You can get by just swinging sticks and thinking one thought at a time. When you think about all the add-ons that we have in our brains, we seem to be carrying around a Rube-Goldberg Brain!
 Consider this, to turn on a light you need only get to the light and flip the switch. You don't need to be particularly precise and you don't need to be particularly balanced. You don't need to remember that birthday party where you had no friends and you cried yourself to sleep and then your Mom woke up by turning on your bedroom light. Also, you don't need to think about how lights can be improved or how you can improve energy consumption by changing your bulbs. You just need to get to the switch and flip it. Now, when I think of the Tyrannosaurus Rex brain being super tiny, it makes sense. You don't need a super brain to mutilate animals. You just need razor sharp teeth and focus.
 Interestingly, smart people are referred to as big brains, but in comics no super genius has a massive head to house an equally massive brain. Villain geniuses, on the other hand, almost always have hypnotically larges heads. 

 I don't know what Krang's deal is with the Ninja Turtles. He is some interdimensional conqueror, but I have never seen him do anything worthwhile. He certainly is menacing with that huge brain.

So, Lobe was a normal human who used science to replicate the powers of mutants and to give himself super intelligence! Awesome! Also, he is the current CEO or CSO of the Sublime Corporation.

  I had never heard of Egg-Fu until 52, when he recruited a ton of superscientists to create the Four Horsemen in order for Intergang to get revenge on Black Adam! Yes, he is a big egg.

  The Leader is one of the original big headed villians! He has gone through the years trying to prove to the Hulk that brains beat brawn, but, sadly, he is completely wrong. Recently, he has put together some superscientists of his own and, I think, created the RED HULK!

Mental.
Organism.
Designed.
Only for.
Killing.

 M.O.D.O.K. takes the game to a new level! He was super evolved by A.I.M. and was a nobody for many years. By nobody, I mean that he was a joke in the villain world. Recently, he has teamed up with the Leader to be superscience bad asses. Unfortunatley, not everyone wants to see the 'DOK all sorts of extreme and so he regularly appears in silly comics.

Crow brains!!!

Tool-making new caledonian crows have large associative brain areas.

Mehlhorn J, Hunt GR, Gray RD, Rehkämper G, Güntürkün O.

Abstract

Animals with a high rate of innovative and associative-based behavior usually have large brains. New Caledonian (NC) crows stand out due to their tool manufacture, their generalized problem-solving abilities and an extremely high degree of encephalization. It is generally assumed that this increased brain size is due to the ability to process, associate and memorize diverse stimuli, thereby enhancing the propensity to invent new and complex behaviors in adaptive ways. However, this premise lacks firm empirical support since encephalization could also result from an increase of only perceptual and/or motor areas. Here, we compared the brain structures of NC crows with those of carrion crows, jays and sparrows. The brains of NC crows were characterized by a relatively large mesopallium, striatopallidal complex, septum and tegmentum. These structures mostly deal with association and motor-learning. This supports the hypothesis that the evolution of innovative or complex behavior requires a brain composition that increases the ability to associate and memorize diverse stimuli in order to execute complex motor output. Since apes show a similar correlation of cerebral growth and cognitive abilities, the evolution of advanced cognitive skills appears to have evolved independently in birds and mammals but with a similar neural orchestration.

Brain Behav Evol. 2010;75(1):63-70. Epub 2010 Mar 9.

Why is this cool?

 Crows and ravens are iconic animals. Seen everywhere from Nordic mythology where Odin has two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, to movies such as The Crow. Well, it turns out that those birds are extremely intelligent. 
 According to the abstract, the researchers took the brains of New Caledonian crows and compared them to other birds such as carrion crows, jays and sparrows. What they found was several areas in new caledonian crows are larger than in the other birds and that those areas are known for association and motor-learning. They note that in apes these areas are also large, leading one to think that these birds really are intelligent.

 Where does that leave us? Humans use to be the most intelligent animals on the planet, but now the pieces of behavior that distinguished us from other animals are being found everywhere. Is human intelligence astounding not for being completely different, but for being a higher degree? Ants form colonies, many animals hunt in packs, and there are many animals that live in herds. All of these can be considered proto-societies. Tool use has been seen in octopi, crows, and monkeys. Using tools is considered a big part of the human advances. Think about this: a tool is an inanimate object used to accomplish a task (my own definition, so it could be wrong). This includes guns, construction tools, clothes, cleaning implements, and hunting devices! The use of tools by animals suggests that the distinguishing feature of humans is not tool use. 
 What makes humans unique? Is it art or religion? I think the distinguishing feature is the ability of ideas to hijack our existence! Which encompasses both religion and art. When people are no longer starving or fighting for survival, they free their minds to explore thoughtspace! Maybe after thousands of years of exploring thoughtspace, they have made small adaptations that make entrance into thoughtspace easier. Eventually, they yearn for more thoughtspace, this manifests itself as art and religion and devotion to work. Why would thoughtspace become fixed in the human population? Because the byproducts of thoughtspace exploration have tremendous value in the real world? Byproducts? Not tool use, because any beast can use tools, but tool design and improvement. Anyway, it is flaky, but I think it might be something to consider.