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As it turns out, nature has its own method for transplanting stem cells. When a pregnant mouse has a heart attack, her fetus goes to work to help repair the damage! The experiment mated female lab mice with males who had the genes to produce green fluorescent protein (GFP). Around half the embryos produced also had the ability to produce the protein. This way, scientists could track fetal cells separately from maternal cells. Then heart attacks were induced in the pregnant mice.
When the scientists examined the female mice’s heart tissue two weeks after the heart attacks, they found lots of glowing green tissue—cells that came from the fetus—in the mom’s heart. Mice who had heart attacks had eight times as many cells from the fetus in their hearts as mice who hadn’t had a heart attack did, meaning the high volume of fetal cells was a response to the heart attack.
What’s more, the embryo’s stem cells had differentiated into various types of heart tissue, including cardiomyocytes, the rhythmically contracting muscle cells that produce a heartbeat.
Doctors have observed that women who experience weakness of the heart during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth have better recovery rates than any other group of heart failure patients. This study suggests that fetal stem cells may help human mothers, as well as mice, recover from heart damage. It may also explain another curious clinical observation: The hearts of two women who suffered from severe heart weakness were later found to contain cells derived from the cells of a male fetus years after they gave birth to their sons.
I don’t know about you guys, but I didn’t know this cute little rhino mouse even existed. The poor little guy and the other rhino mice of the world are all suffering from glandular problems, and skin and nail disorders -even so, they’re simply precious. He’s one of Cracked’s list of 15 Animals You Won’t Believe Aren’t Photoshopped.
Link Image Via KimCarpenter NJ [Flickr]
The rodents of the future will eat poison pellets like candy, according to new research conducted on mice found in a German bakery. The baker called in an exterminator to rid his business of the pests and discovered, to his horror, that the little buggers weren’t even fazed by bromadiolone, which is a very concentrated and deadly version of the common rat poison warfarin. This defensive immunity comes from interbreeding with Algerian mice, which had already developed an immunity to the poison. Looks like these unwelcome visitors are determined to stick around, no matter what we throw at them!
Link Image via Image*After
Farmers in Adelaide, Australia are having a bit of a rodent problem. The mouse population has grown to epic proportions due to recent heavy rains and booming crop yields–perfect conditions for an infestation. It’s so bad that one farmer, John Gregory, has caught the mice attacking his pigs.
Since he first saw them dining out on his prized stock he has been at his wit’s end about how to get rid of them, the (Adelaide) Sunday Mail reported.
Now, as a desperate last resort, he is covering his pigs at a farm property in Wynarka, 80 miles (130km) east of state capital Adelaide, in engine oil to protect them from the mice — with the rodents apparently turned off by the taste.
“The mouse problem got really bad in April,” the 50-year-old father of four said.
“We went away in the school holidays and when we came back we drove up the driveway and it looked like the ground was moving — there were hundreds of thousands of them.”
Mouse bait isn’t cheap, though, so farmers are utilizing homemade methods of pest control; aside from rubbing his pigs in engine oil, Gregory mixes confectioner’s sugar with cement. “The icing sugar attracts the mice, they eat it and then the cement clogs them up.”
Link |Image: Wikipedia Commons
A Pennsylvania Pizza Shop Owner is being accused of trying to sabotage the competition. It is alleged that Nikolas Galiatsatos went into a rival pizza place and stashed a bag of live mice in the bathroom. The incident is being called “food terrorism by mice.”
How was he caught?
Chitwood said two of his officers happened to be eating lunch in Verona Pizza on West Chester when Galiatsatos, 47, entered the business carrying a bag and then asked to use the bathroom.
When the owner of the shop inspected the bathroom, he found footprints on the toilet. The owner checked it out and discovered a bag stashed in the ceiling of the bathroom.
Researchers led by Harvard Medical School geneticist Ronald A. DePinho have managed to partially reverse the physical degeneration that results from aging:
[...] they achieved the milestone in aging science by engineering mice with a controllable telomerase gene. The telomerase enzyme maintains the protective caps called telomeres that shield the ends of chromosomes.
As humans age, low levels of telomerase are associated with progressive erosion of telomeres, which may then contribute to tissue degeneration and functional decline in the elderly. By creating mice with a telomerase switch, the researchers were able to generate prematurely aged mice. The switch allowed the scientists to find out whether reactivating telomerase in the animals would restore telomeres and mitigate the signs and symptoms of aging. The work showed a dramatic reversal of many aspects of aging, including reversal of brain disease and infertility.
Link via Gizmodo | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user woodly wonder works used under Creative Commons license
In an article in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, two researchers described how mice in an experiment tended to get greater enjoyment out of rewards that were more labor-intensive:
Mice were trained to push levers to get either of two rewards. Press one lever, out comes a drop of sugar water. Press the other and they get a drop of different tasting sugar water.
Then things got interesting. For one of the treats, scientists gradually increased the amount of effort required for the payoff—from one lever-press to five, then 10, then 15. So by the end of the session, one type of sugar water cost 15 times more effort than the other.
The mice then retired to their home cage where both treats were freely available. And they showed a strong preference for whichever reward they’d worked harder to obtain. Based on how fast the mice sipped, they appeared to find the costlier sugar water more tasty.
Link | Photo by Flickr user Steve Berger Photography used under Creative Commons license
OK, the snakes are not supposed to be there, and the mice are not suffering from or enjoying the drugs because it’s Tylenol and they’re dead anyway. The brown tree snake is native to Australia, but hitched a ride to Guam after World War II and became so invasive that some native wildlife species were driven to extinction. The government has tried many methods to control the snake population, but nothing has worked well so far. Now they are planting dead mice with 80 milligrams of acetaminophen stuffed inside in the jungle areas of Guam. Brown tree snakes will scavenge dead animals, unlike most snakes, and even a child’s dose of acetaminophen will kill one.
In the U.S. government-funded project, tablets of concentrated acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, are placed in dead thumb-size mice, which are then used as bait for brown tree snakes.
In humans, acetaminophen helps soothe aches, pains, and fevers. But when ingested by brown tree snakes, the drug disrupts the oxygen-carrying ability of the snakes’ hemoglobin blood proteins.
“They go into a coma, and then death,” said Peter Savarie, a researcher with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Wildlife Services, which has been developing the technique since 1995 through grants from the U.S. Departments of Defense and Interior.
Some of the mice are equipped with radio transmitters, so the success of the program can be tracked. Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
(Image credit: George Grall/National Geographic)
A new road near Pontypridd, UK obstructs the travels of dormice — a mouse species that lives in the area. So to accommodate the dormice, the local government built wire mesh bridges that the rodents can use over the road:
The bridges consist of wire mesh tubes suspended between trees and tall poles.[...]
When completed, the tubes will be solid mesh to stop the dormice falling out.
As dormice live in trees as opposed to on the ground, their routes have to stretch between trees instead of along underpasses used by, for example, hedgehogs and badgers.
Link via DVICE | Photo: Wales Online
Adam Savage of the TV show Mythbusters explains an experiment that the Discovery Channel rejected. Did your mother ever say “The box is more nutritious!” when you asked for sugary cereal? Adam and Jamie set up a test to find out if that’s true, which turned out completely different from anything they expected. This is an excerpt from Savage’s speech at Maker Faire. Subject matter may be disturbing to some viewers. You can watch the entire speech at FORA.tv. Link -via Digg
Medical researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, altered a single gene in female mice. The mice did not change anatomically, but their ovaries began producing testosterone:
The study was carried out on mice but the implications are relevant to humans, the scientists said. By switching off a gene called FoxL2, which exists in all mammals, the ovary cells of adult female mice developed spontaneously into the fully developed, testosterone-producing cells found in male testes, although they could not produce sperm.
“We take it for granted that we maintain the sex we are born with, including whether we have testes or ovaries,” said Robin Lovell-Badge, from the Medical Research Council’s National Institute of Medical Research in north London, who was part of the international team led by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg.
The scientists noted that their research contradicts the claim that female is the default gender among embryos without a male sex-determining gene.
Link via Popular Science | Photo: US Department of Energy
Charles Q. Choi of Live Science writes that scientists working for NASA used a superconducting magnet that simulates some of the effects of gravity to lift a mouse into the air. The agency has been working on such technology in the hope of alleviating the bone decay that would affect astronauts in zero-gravity environments for prolonged periods of time:
Scientists working on behalf of NASA built a device to simulate variable levels of gravity. It consists of a superconducting magnet that generates a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside living animals, with a space inside warm enough at room temperature and large enough at 2.6 inches wide (6.6 cm) for tiny creatures to float comfortably in during experiments….
Repeated levitation tests showed the mice, even when not sedated, could quickly acclimate to levitation inside the cage. After three or four hours, the mice acted normally, including eating and drinking. The strong magnetic fields did not seem to have any negative impacts on the mice in the short term, and past studies have shown that rats did not suffer from adverse effects after 10 weeks of strong, non-levitating magnetic fields.
“We’re trying to see what kind of physiological impact is due to prolonged microgravity, and also what kind of countermeasures might work against it for astronauts,” Liu said. “If we can contribute to the future human exploration of space, that would be very exciting.” They are now applying for funding for such research with their levitator.
Link via Popular Science
Image: U.S. Department of Energy
I’ve certainly heard of training dogs, cats, parrots and almost every other animal under the Sun to do tricks but trained mice is something new to me. This little video presents Brain Storm who has been trained to run through a dastardly tough looking course. However, she prevails with the awesome Olympic Fanfare Theme by John Williams playing in the background to help her speed to victory and glory! Oh, and please don’t get too squeamish over the mouse or the mousey leftovers on the table.
And the judges have their score cards ready: 9.0, 9.0, 9.5, 9.0, 10.0! It’s a new record!
More info on Brain Storm and other mice here – Link
