Stressed Out Rats Drink More Alcohol

Sound Familiar?

We've all been there: after a particularly long and stressful day, nothing sounds better than heading to the nearest watering hole for a drink. There's a reason for this—stress and alcohol target similar neural systems, particularly the brain's reward center. The problem is chronic stress, rather than just the occasional bad day, actually alters the brain's reward circuitry, creating a feedback loop that leads to increasing alcohol consumption.

The link between chronic stress and alcohol abuse is pretty well established, but the underlying brain chemistry responsible for this connection is not well understood. To tackle this problem, a team of neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania exposed rats to an acute stress and then allowed the rodents to self-administer alcohol after being stressed while the team monitored the rats' neuronal activity.

As the team detailed in a paper published in Neuron, the rats were exposed to a restraint stress (in which a rat is basically put inside a tube only slightly larger than its body) for one hour, and then 15 hours later the researchers measured how much sugar water laced with alcohol the rats consumed.

What they found was that the stressed out rats drank significantly more alcohol than non-stressed rats and increased their alcohol intake over the course of several weeks.


http://motherboard.vice.com/read/stresse...d-familiar

...the making of Rat Park

Firstly, all rats were painted with coloured dye (not shown in my artwork), with a particular pattern used for each individual rat. Food was available to Rat Park rats in the main area of the enclosure, however the only way which the rats could obtain fluids was to climb a ramp and enter a small transparent tunnel through the wall at one end of Rat Park. This tunnel was only big enough to accommodate one adult rat at a time. This prevented the rats from observing the drinking habits of their neighbours.

http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/carto...-rat-park/

http://wanna-joke.com/wp-content/uploads...-angel.jpg

Rats? Sounds like this thread needs a cat or two...and maybe a few more animals to add to the farm.



Most cat owners will tell you that they love their cats, but that it’s unlikely the feelings are reciprocated. This is because cats are well known as one of the snottiest species we have yet observed, whether in the wild or in captivity. That might all be about to change. In a recent study done by Dr. Dwayne Taylor at the University of Michigan, researchers have isolated the gene that makes cats so arrogant. The gene was given the name Farad's Oil Ploy (abbreviated as FOP), which appears to be some sort of inside joke among the staff that worked on the project. (Dr. Taylor is known for slipping jokes and hidden meanings into serious scientific papers.)

When FOP becomes active in the brain of a kitten (usually at about two months old), it releases chemical compounds that act as selfish catalysts; they're only looking out for themselves from that point on. This is the cause for plenty of heartbreak among cat owners. FOP continues to release the selfish catalysts for the rest of the cat's life, but Dr. Taylor developed a drug that he believed would inhibit the FOP gene indefinitely.

So he rounded up the surliest cats he could find and split them into two groups, a control group and a test group. Only three hours after the drug entered their systems for the first time, every single cat in the test group was cuddly and “totally lovable, according to the report. Cats that had been initially characterized as “snooty and rude were crawling all over the researchers, licking their faces, and nuzzling everything in sight. Dr. Taylor (who's longed for a loving cat ever since his childhood cat rejected him) was overjoyed at the success and was reportedly carrying off one of the cuter cats and whispering to it, “I'm never gonna give you up.
 
This discovery has huge implications for human applications. A similar gene exists in humans during their teenage years, although it is later overridden after puberty. It is suspected that use of the drug in teenagers and pre-idiots could drastically reduce the struggles most teenagers experience. The drug is currently slated for small-scale testing in middle schools around the country. Is your child's school on the list?

http://listverse.com/2015/04/01/10-real-...rs-of-joy/