Weekly Science Picks

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One more week finishes and as usual we got new discoveries and findings from the world of science and technology. A lot of amazing things have happened, staring from new findings in medicine to amazing stories from astronomy until wonderful news from zoology. And, in addition, we should not forget the winter at the Southern Hemisphere starts today. Here we would like to present more details on all of these.

Do animals like drugs and alcohol?

Tales of the tipsy pachyderms go back at least two centuries. In the 1830s, a French naturalist called Adulphe Delegorgue described stories from his Zulu guides of mysteriously aggressive behaviour in male elephants after they fed on the marula fruits. “The elephant has in common with man a predilection for a gentle warming of the brain induced by fruit which has been fermented by the action of the sun,” wrote Delegorgue.

Mars volcano may have been site for life

Mars’s Arsia Mons volcano is nearly twice as tall as Mt Everest, yet it is only the third tallest volcano on Mars. Its northwestern flank shows erosion patterns that typify the presence of a former glacier. This has been known since the 1970s.

Winter is coming… or is it?

Well what can we say, from June to August the days are a bit shorter and the temperatures tend to be cooler than the other months of the year. It’s hard to be more specific than that when you have a whole continent to speak for.

Scientists control rapid re-wiring of brain circuits using patterned visual stimulation

Researchers have shown for the first time how the brain re-wires and fine-tunes its connections differently depending on the relative timing of sensory stimuli. In most neuroscience textbooks today, there is a widely held model that explains how nerve circuits might refine their connectivity based on patterned firing of brain cells, but it has not previously been directly observed in real time.

Finally, we should complete our Weekly Science Picks for this week. Please stay scientifically passionate and curious. New stories are coming soon!