Upcoming events

Now that the Olympics are over, I thought some of my loyal readers would be interested in competitive events to be held in the near future:

6 September: London Championship Show, Rivermead Leisure Centre

20 September: Annual Cup Show, St Christophers Church Hall

12 October: Peterborough Agricultural Show

25 October: Swindon Mouse Club, Hermitage Village Hall

1 November: Greater Manchester Mouse Club, Methodist Church

22 November: Yorkshire Mouse Club

21 December: Stafford Poultry Show

These events are under sponsorship of the National Mouse Club. Although the phenomenon peaked in the Victorian era, fancy mice are alive and squeaking. As I have posted previously, fancy mice--mice bred for mouse beauty pageants--were instrumental in the introduction of mice into biomedical research. In fact, mice of the common breed C57BL/6 are direct descendants of fancy mouse number 57.

I'd love to attend the December 21 show, if only to see why the National Mouse Club would sponsor a poultry show.

Mouse Mouse

When I'm cruising the web for blog fodder, I'm often confronted with the "other kind" of mouse. You know, the kind that makes your cursor move around. Well, here's how to marry the two concepts. Mind you, it's a little gruesome.

Really big rodents

OK, it's not even September yet, and the scrabbling in the walls has started. Maybe the mice know something we don't know about an early winter.

At least it's not rats. I remember seeing some really big rodents hanging around the dining hall dumpsters in college. I'd hate to have those scrabbling in the walls.

If you want to see some really really big rodents, you need to get away from mice and rats and look at capybaras, which can weigh up to 140 pounds. Imagine the holes this guy could chew in your walls:


For some really really really big rodents, we can look to the fossil record and find Josephoartigasia monesi, which had a 21-inch skull and could have weighed as much as 2,200 pounds:

I don't think these things would scrabble in the walls. It would probably be more like this:

Guns don't kill people...

From foxnews.com:

Woman Shoots Herself While Trying to Kill Mice

POTTER VALLEY, Calif. — A Mendocino County woman who was trying to kill mice in her trailer with a gun ended up shooting herself and another person.

The 43-year-old woman pulled out her .44-caliber Magnum revolver after she saw the mice scurrying across the floor of her trailer on Highway 20 in Potter Valley, sheriff's officials said.

But she accidentally dropped the gun, which went off as it struck the floor. The bullet went through the woman's kneecap, bounced off the keys sitting on the belt loop of a 42-year-old man in the trailer and grazed the man's groin before ending up in his coin pocket.

Authorities did not release the shooting victims' names.

The mice escaped the shooting unharmed.

Fly through a mouse brain!

What do you do when you want to see what is inside a mouse's head?

In the past, you had to:
1. Find a mouse.
2. Kill said mouse.
3. Remove brain (the mouse's, not your own).
4. Fix brain (even if it wasn't broken to begin with) in formaldehyde or some other chemical.
5. Embed brain in wax.
6. Cut brain into teeny tiny slices.
7. Try to get one of those slices to sit flat on a slide.
8. Stain the brain slice.
9. Look at it under an expensive microscope.
10. Try to figure out what you are looking at.

Now, through the wonders of modern Interwebology, you need not go through the toil and trouble and smell. Now we have The Mouse Brain Library. For the librarians among my loyal readership, this is not the kind of library where you walk through the stacks until you find a brain on the shelves that might look interesting, then check it out with your library card.

No, indeed. This is the kind of library that lets you look inside a mouse's brain without leaving the comfort of your favorite coffee shop. You can even watch movies.

Here's my favorite. It's a trip through a mouse head, starting at the top and going down. This one shows structure of the surrounding head, as well as the brain. The nose is to the right and the back of the head is to the left. You can see the eyes, white circles at the top and bottom of the image. Between them lie the olfactory bulbs, responsible for smell. (The sense of smell that is. The smelliness comes from the other end of the mouse.) You can also see the spiraling chambers of the nasal cavities.

And that ends our tour through a mouse's head. I hope you enjoyed it. Watch your step as you leave the tour bus.

Yeah, but what happens if you smoke it?

A compound in oregano and basil has been shown to have antiinflammatory effects in mice. The compound, called (E)-beta-caryophyllene or(E)-BCP, is also found in large amounts in rosemary, cinnamon, and black pepper. And Cannabis sativa, a.k.a. marijuana.

The most well-studied components of marijuana, cannabinol and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), exert their effects by binding to two receptors, CB1 and CB2. CB1 is expressed in the brain and other tissues and is responsible for the ...elevating...effects of Cannabis sativa. CB2, on the other hand is primarily found in tissues outside the brain. Activation of CB2 has been shown to inhibit inflammation.

This paper describes some experiments showing that (E)-BCP binds to CB2, but not CB1. They did all the stuff you are supposed to do in the lab to demonstrate its binding qualities, then they tested the compound in mice.

They dissolved (E)-BCP in (appropriately) olive oil and fed it to mice. Then they injected the footpads of the mice with carrageenan, which makes the footpads swell. The feet of the mice that had been fed (E)-BCP had much less swelling than the mice that had been fed olive oil alone. This antiinflammatory effect was not found when they used mice in which the CB2 receptor had been knocked out, demonstrating that it was the CB2 receptor activation that was responsible for the beneficial effect.

I knew pesto pizza had to be good for you.

Did they make it to the top?

Here's a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the murine Everest ascent.
Here's a blog about it.
Here's some video.

The answer: almost.
The real answer awaits the arrival of the mouse blood from Nepal...and some lab work. Not as glamorous as mountain climbing, I know, but that's science for you.