Rats

By 2013, Garry Stanley was running out of options. An out-of-work jobbing actor, Stanley was working part-time as a litter-picker and a sign-holder for Pizza Hut in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens. In search of extra pub money, he had the idea of forming a busking band with a couple of mates. “One of the lads was on benefits,” says Stanley. “He didn’t want to get done.” The solution? They bought large rat face masks from a fancy dress shop. The Piccadilly Rats were born.Over the next five years, the band would become a…

Scientists have completed a brain cell transplant, combining lab-grown clumps of human brain cells with those of newborn rats. The experiment is disturbing, but there’s a good reason behind the move. The scientists working on the investigation say they hope that the research will help them learn more about human neuropsychiatric disorders. Julian Savulescu, a bioethicist at the National University of Singapore, wasn’t involved in the study. But, Savulescu told MIT Technology Review that the research is an…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died When Aaron Drake flew from Arizona to the Yinfeng Biological Group in China in 2016, he was traveling there to guide China’s first forays into cryonics, or freezing corpses for reanimation.Drake had spent the previous seven years as the medical response director of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a small nonprofit that…

It’s a tricky one. The scientists behind the work argue that there’s nothing really human about these rats. Throughout the study, the team examined the rats to see if those with human cells were any smarter, or experienced more suffering, than rats that didn’t receive organoid transplants. They found no sign of human traits or behaviors.But the whole point of implanting human cells is to get some insight into what happens in the human brain. So there’s a trade-off here. Essentially, the animals need to represent what…

“It’s an important step forward in progress into brain diseases,” says Julian Savulescu, a bioethicist at the National University of Singapore, who was not involved in the study. But the development also raises ethical questions, he says, particularly surrounding what it means to “humanize” animals. Sergiu Pașca at the University of Stanford has been working for more than a decade with neural organoids—small clumps of neurons, grown in a dish, that resemble specific brain regions. These organoids are often created from…

The tiny blobs of lab-grown human brain tissue were just specks, each measuring a few millimeters in diameter. Researchers at Stanford University made them by cultivating human stem cells into three-dimensional clumps of tissue. Called brain organoids, these simplified structures contain some of the cells and properties of a real human brain, offering insight into development and neurological conditions.But they’re not nearly as complex as the real thing, so to boost their realism, researchers elsewhere have tried…

Rats were a defining feature of A Plague Tale: Innocence when it first came out in 2019, a physical embodiment of the Plague that was sweeping through Europe and a swarm that had to be avoided at all costs. For the upcoming sequel, A Plague Tale: Requiem, developer Asobo Studio has revealed how it has used current-gen console and PC power to push the limits on its unique rat technology, dialing up the number of rodents to a disgustingly impressive new level."For this second game we wanted to push new-gen…

Past research in humans shows that damage to our squishy brain tissue is already done with even just one knock to the head.But repeated concussions can also thicken the skull bone, according to a new study looking at how multiple head injuries affect rats.Whereas severe brain injuries can result in skull fractures, in this case, the researchers were interested in how repetitive concussions, a type of mild traumatic brain injury, might deform the bones of the skull."We have been ignoring the potential influence of the…

Born in London, James Norton, 37, studied theology at Cambridge University. In 2015, he was Bafta-nominated for his performance in Happy Valley, the BBC drama that is returning for a third series. His other television work includes War & Peace, Grantchester, McMafia, The Trial of Christine Keeler and The Nevers. His recent movies are Little Women, Nowhere Special and Rogue Agent, which is out on Netflix. He lives in London and is engaged to the actor Imogen Poots.Sign up to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an…

French colonialists decided to modernize French Indochina, especially its capital, Hanoi, in order to make it a symbol of France’s “civilising” mission in the country. The sewer network built by colonialists became a rats’ paradise, as there were no predators. The French administration decided to implement a bonus program for the general public, depending on how many rats each person killed. This caused massive concerns for the French as just a few years earlier, in 1894, Alexandre Yersin discovered the link between rats…