Empathic rats spring each other from jail

You enter a room with two cages. One contains a friend, who is clearly distressed. The other contains a bar of chocolate, which clearly isn’t. What do you do? While a few people would probably go for the chocolate first (and you know who you are), most would choose to free the friend. And so, it seems, would a rat.

What the mouse eye tells the mouse brain

Tübingen researchers have shown that image processing in the eye is more extensive than previously thought. They investigated the channels that transmit information from the eye to the brain. In the course of this investigation, they not only identified numerous new cell types: they also found that the retina seems to possess some 40 different channels into the brain, twice as many as previously assumed. The results of their study are published in the latest edition of Nature.