“If we go back to the early 1900s, this is when the idea was first proposed that memories are physically stored in some location within the brain,” says Michael R. Williamson, a researcher at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. For a long time, neuroscientists thought that the storage of memory in the brain was the job of engrams, ensembles of neurons that activate during a learning event. But it turned out this wasn’t the whole picture.

Williamson’s research investigated the role astrocytes, non-neuron brain cells, play in the read-and-write operations that go on in our heads. “Over the last 20 years the role of astrocytes has been understood better. We’ve learned that they can activate neurons. The addition we have made to that is showing that there are subsets of astrocytes that are active and involved in storing specific memories,” Williamson says in describing a new study his lab has published.

One consequence of this finding: Astrocytes could be artificially manipulated to suppress or enhance a specific memory, leaving all other memories intact.

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Evolution has turned out bizarre and baffling creatures, such as walking fish. It only gets weirder from there. Some of these fish not only walk on the seafloor, but use their leg-like appendages to taste for signs of prey that might be hiding.

Most species of sea robins are bottom-dwellers that both swim and crawl around on “legs” that extend from their pectoral fins. An international team of researchers has now discovered that the legs of the northern sea robin, Prionotus carolinus, double as sensory organs. They are covered in bumps called papillae (similar to those on a human tongue) with taste receptors that detect chemical stimuli coming from buried prey. If they taste something appetizing, they will dig for their next meal.

There is more to this fish than its extraordinary way of hunting. Analysis of P. carolinus genes found that a gene that may date back to the origin of animals controls the formation of both legs and sensory papillae, which hints at how they might have evolved.

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