Top 10 science stories I wish I'd blogged about in 2013

As 2013 grinds to an end, the internet fills with reminiscence of the year's top stories and moments. I, for one, especially can't resist ruminating about the past, especially when packaged in a brain-tickling, "top n"  list form. Without further ado, here is my Top 10 list of the year: Science Stories I Wish I'd Blogged About.

Bonus. A List of Reasons Why Our Brains Love Lists. By Maria Konnikova.

To start off, why are we drawn to lists anyway? Is it due to the clean, structured organization that helps us navigate the material efficiently? Or is it more a product of our current "bite-sized" information culture? Maria has the answers.

10. Can we lessen the effects of fearful memories while we sleep?

Sleep therapy can change bad memories. By Helen Shen (original paper here)

Spontaneous activation of memories during sleep is generally thought to strengthen them. However, when researchers in Northwestern University repeatedly brought up a recently learned fear memory in their sleeping participants by presenting a fear-associated odour, the participants showed a smaller fear reaction to the odour after they awoke. According to the researchers, this is the first time emotional memories have been successfully manipulated in humans.

Similar: A gene for forgetting. MIT researchers identified a gene Tet1 that is critical for memory extinction in mice. Original paper in Neuron.

9. Men and women's brains are wired differently. Is THAT why men can read maps better (or so the cliché goes)?

Here's one cover of the study that would let you believe that (gasp) it is indeed so!

Here are a few level-headed analyses that tackle the nitty-gritty of the study and how its conclusions got blown out of proportion. The bottom line? Brain scans don't tell us anything about behaviour. Here's the original paper for reference.

Are men better wired to read maps or is it a tired cliché? By Tom Strafford.

Men, Women and Big PNAS Papers. By Neuroskeptic.

Getting in a Tangle Over Men’s and Women’s Brain Wiring. By Christian Jarrett.

8. Mice inherent fears of their fathers. (And update) By Virginia Hughes.

You know how you are what your grandpa ate? Epigenetics offers an answer to how our interactions with the environment can influence the expression of our and our offspring's DNA. However there is little evidence that stress and fear can directly change the germline, so that offsprings inherit the fear memory (or something akin to it) of their parents. (There was this interesting report earlier in the year on how cocaine-addicted sires lead to cocaine-resistant male pups through a purely epigentic means, though I remain skeptical.)

Virginia Hughes broke this story at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience conference. Since then, it has garnered plenty of attention from media and neuroscientists alike, with opinions from "deep scepticism" to "awe-inspiring". Here's the original paper if you'd like all the juicy details.

7. From Club to Clinic: Physicians Push Off-Label Ketamine as Rapid Depression Treatment. By Gary Stix

Ketamine, the clubbing sweatheart and horse tranquillizer, is now being repurposed as a fast-acting antidepressant; this is perhaps THE most breakthrough new treatment for depression in the last 50 years. In this 3-part series, Gary Stix explains the uprising of grassroots ketamine prescriptions, big pharma interest in the drug and how ketamine is directly the development of next-generation antidepressants.

6. Computer Game-Playing Shown to Improve Multitasking Skills. By Allison Abbott.

Rejoice, gamers of 2013! Not only has the year given us PS4 and Xbox One, this study from Nature has also given us an excuse to game (uh, or not): in subjects aged 60-85, playing a 3-D race car-driving video game reduced cognitive decline compared to those who didn't.

Commercial companies have claimed for years that brain-training games help improve cognition; yet whether their games actually work is hotly debated (I'm looking at you, Luminosity!). In this new study, researchers from UCSF show that a game carefully tailored to a specific cognitive deficit can be useful, even months later. Unfortunately this doesn't mean any ole' video game will do. Shame.

5. 23andme versus the FDA.

I'm sure by now you've heard about the fight of the year.

David Dobbs has a full page of links over the 23andme and FDA food fight. What's the big deal? Why did the FDA issue a cease and desist order? Is it simply a clash of cultures between the company and government department? Or are we selling out our own genetic data to the next-generation Google, and should we fear the services the company offers?

4. Sleep: The Ultimate Brainwasher? By Emily Underwood (Here's another cover by Ian Sample).

Why do we sleep? Reasons range from learning and memory, metabolism and body-weight regulation, physiology, digestion, everything. A study this year proposes that sleep has another function: nightly cleaning, in which the cerebral spinal fluid washes a day's worth of brain waste down the sewers. That is, if you're a rat.

3. Death by sugar? by Scicurious.

With fat making a come-back, sugar and/or carbs are the devil this year. This study in Nature Communications says yes: when mice consumed a diet that has an equivalent amount of sugar to that of many people in the US, the animals' health and reproductive ability declines.

However, as Scicurious astutely asked, can we really directly translate conclusions derived from mice to humans? Is sugar really that evil?

Here is another article on the topic by Ferris Jabr that's well worth a read.

2. False memories implanted in mouse's brain by linking portions of two real memories together. Wow. Just, wow.

False memory planted in mouse's brain. By Alok Jha

Scientists Plant False Memories in Mice--and Mice Buy It. By Joel N. Shurkin

This is one paper I REALLY wish I had the time to cover when it first came out. An MIT group artificially connected the memory of a safe box and the memory of a footshock in another box to generate a new hybrid memory. This is not "implanting" a de novo memory - that is, researchers didn't use electrical stimulation (or something similar) to generate a memory from scratch. The study also can't tell us how false memories are generated biologically in our brains (ie linking imagined material to actual memories), but the study is genuinely fascinating all the same.

Here is a link to the paper, and here is the lead author doing an "ask me anything" interview on Reddit.

1. Knockout blow for PKMzeta, the long-term memory molecule. 

Single protein can strengthen old faded memories, Exposing the memory engine: the story of PKMzeta, and Todd Sacktor talks about the memory engine by Ed Yong

In a nutshell, previous studies have identified a single protein called PKMzeta that helps maintain long-term memory. Unlike other kinases (a type of protein involved in many cellular processes, including memory) PKMzeta is always active, and seems to help sustain the strengthening of connections between neurons during memory formation. Inhibit PKMzeta, and the memory's gone.

These results spurred HUGH interest in the "memory molecule", often with references to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. However, things went for a downward spiral at the 2012 Society for Neuroscience conference, when researchers presented the first evidence that mice without PKMzeta had no impairments in LTP (long-term potentiation, widely considered a cellular mechanism for learning and memory) could still form memories. The two groups published their findings in early January 2013 in Nature (here and here).

These observations don't necessarily mean that PKMzeta is not a memory molecule - it very well could be one of the MANY memory-associated proteins. Given the redundancy that often comes with evolution, it's hard to believe that one particular molecule would be the sole guardian of our memories. The question remains whether PKMzeta is a MAJOR player, but overall, the debate is a cautionary tale against putting one molecule on the pedestal. So if (or when) you see another article with the headline "erasing a bad memory", remember there're plenty of other players in memory that you haven't been told about.