There is a growing community of individuals who self-administer the nootropic aniracetam for its purported cognitive enhancing effects. Aniracetam is believed to be therapeutically useful for enhancing cognition, alleviating anxiety, and treating various neurodegenerative conditions. Physiologically, aniracetam enhances both glutamatergic neurotransmission and long-term potentiation. Previous s...

The corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) system mediates stress responses. Extrahypothalamic CRF1 receptor activation has anxiogenic-like properties, but anxiety-related functions of CRF2 receptors remain unclear. The present study determined the effects of intracerebroventricular administration of a CRF2 agonist, urocortin 3, on behavior of male Wistar rats in the shock-probe, social interacti...

Introduction: The World Health Organization estimates that about 25 million pregnant mothers are currently at risk for malaria, and that malaria accounts for over 10,000 maternal and 200,000 neonatal deaths per year. The current hypothesis of early life programming supports the premise that many developmental delay and disorders may have their origin In-utero. Therefore, the current study aimed...

1. Immunity may trade-off against other important life history traits, with recent work suggesting that reproduction and parental care in particular impinge on immune defence. However, whereas the effect of parental care on immunocompetence has been intensively studied in birds and mammals, virtually nothing is known about how it affects insect immunity. 2. Burying beetles provide extensive bip...

How much should an individual invest in immunity as it grows older? Immunity is costly and its value is likely to change across an organism's lifespan. A limited number of studies have focused on how personal immune investment changes with age in insects, but we do not know how social immunity, immune responses that protect kin, changes across lifespan, or how resources are divided between thes...

The evolution of mantle composition can be viewed as a process destruction whereby the initial chemical state is overprinted and reworked with time. Analyses ocean island basalts reveals that some portion has survived this process, retaining chemically “primitive” signature. A question remains how primitive signature four half billion years vigorous convection. We hypothesize Earth's buried wit...