When Gül Dölen first gave ecstasy to octopuses, she didn’t know what to expect. Dölen is a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who studies how the cells and chemicals in animal brains influence animals’ social lives. Ecstasy, also known as MDMA, interests her because it’s known to make people feel more sociable, more interested in others, and less defensive. The same effects also occur in rats and mice—the animals that Dölen usually studies. But octopuses are very different creatures. They’re clearly intelligent and their behavior is undoubtedly sophisticated, but their brains have a completely different architecture than those of mammals—for one thing, they’re shaped like donuts. “It’s organized much more like a snail’s brain than ours,” Dölen says. With such a dissimilar anatomy, she wondered whether these animals would respond to drugs in unpredictable ways. And to find out, she needed a way of assessing how sociable an octopus is. She and her colleague Eric Edsinger put five Californian two-spot octopuses individually into the middle of three connected chambers and gave them free rein to explore. One of the adjacent chambers housed a second octopus, confined inside an overturned plastic basket. The other contained an unfamiliar object, such as a plastic flower or a Chewbacca figurine. Dölen and Edsinger measured how long the main animal spent in the company of its peer, and how long with the random toy. This is exactly the kind of setup that neuroscientists use to test social behavior in mice, but Dölen had no idea whether it would work with octopuses. “It might be that they are so smart that the kind of task we’d use for a mouse would be boring to them,” she says. “Maybe they’d take one lap around the chambers and stop.” Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. The free-moving individuals thoroughly explored the chambers, and from their movements, Dölen realized that individuals of any sex gravitate toward females, but avoid males. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf17OWmudOQ

Welcome to Finest News. Subscribe to the channel at https://goo.gl/VjHw6T SAN FRANCISCO — Just days after taking a victory lap for successfully shepherding a landmark bill to beef up sexual harassment investigations in the California legislature, two leading female Democratic legislators in the #MeToo movement wrote generous political checks to their Democratic colleague, Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia — the subject of an ongoing sexual harassment investigation. Assemblywoman Laura Friedman, chair of the Joint Legislative Subcommittee on Sexual Harassment Prevention and Response, and state Senator Holly Mitchell, the committee’s vice-chair, each donated $2,500 each to Garcia’s reelection campaign last week within two days of Gov. Jerry Brown‘s signing of a law they had pushed calling for the establishment of new investigative procedures for harassment victims, according to records on file with the CA secretary of state’s office. + We report daily news, the latest news. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVurZBo38uY