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A See-Through Squid Success Story

Adult octopuses have about 500 million neurons, which is about as many neurons as a dog. Typically, more neurons means a more intelligent and complex creature. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Unlike dogs, or even humans, octopuses’ neurons aren’t concentrated in their brains—they’re spread out through their bodies and into their arms and suckers, more like a “distributed” mind. (Scientists still haven’t quite figured out exactly why this is.)

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of unanswered cephalopod questions. Now, researchers have successfully bred a line of albino squid that were first engineered using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology, creating a see-through squid.

Their unique transparency allows scientists to more easily study their neural structure, and a whole lot more.

SciFri experiences manager Diana Plasker talks with Joshua Rosenthal, senior scientist at the University of Chicago’s Marine Biological Laboratory, based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, about this see-through squid success story.

When Eye-Grabbing Results Just Don’t Pan Out

You know the feeling — you see a headline in the paper or get an alert on your phone about a big scientific breakthrough that has the potential to really change things. But then, not much happens, or that news turns out to be much less significant than the headlines made it seem.

Journalists are partially to blame for this phenomenon. But another guilty culprit is also the scientific journals, and the researchers who try to make their own work seem more significant than the data really supports in order to get published.

Armin Alaedini, an assistant professor of medical sciences at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, recently co-authored a commentary on this topic published in The American Journal of Medicine. He joins Ira and Ivan Oransky — co-founder of Retraction Watch and a medical journalism professor and Distinguished Writer In Residence at New York University — to talk about the tangled world of scientific publishing and the factors that drive inflated claims in publications.

 

 

How Art Can Help Treat Dementia And Trauma

We might intrinsically know that engaging with and making art is good for us in some way. But now, scientists have much more evidence to support this, thanks in part to a relatively new field called neuroaesthetics, whic