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- Lab rats and pet rats are the same rat species, so our pets are potentially just as smart as their scientific cousins, especially if they’ve been bred for a lively curious temperament.
www.animallama.com/rats/how-smart-are-rats/How Smart Are Rats? Facts Backed By Science ... - Animallama
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The study: Ben Vermaercke and his colleagues at KU Leuven gave two cognitive-learning tasks to lab rats and students. With both tasks, the subjects were trained to distinguish between “good ...
Oct 15, 2014 · For at least a hundred years researchers have used rats in their psychology experiments, assuming that they were the smarter of the two lab rodents. But new research shows that that might not...
Oct 8, 2014 · Most biologists, for example, assume that rats, with larger brains, are smarter than mice. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) scientists now challenge this belief. They compared mice and...
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By modifying a single gene, scientists have made Hobbie-J the smartest rat in the world, a new study says
For years scientifically smartened rats have skittered through movies and books such as Flowers for Algernon and The Secret of NIMH. But Hobbie-J is anything but fiction.
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Rojas Montecinos Evy recently captured what she called an “amazing act of love of a mother.” Whether we call the motive love or maternal instinct, it inspired a fierce struggle. LEARN MORE: Watch a Mother Rat Rescue Her Baby From a Dramatic Snake Attack
When Hobbie-J was still an embryo, a team led by Joe Z. Tsien at the Medical College of Georgia injected her with genetic material that caused the overexpression of the gene NR2B, which helps control the rate at which brain cells communicate.
Years earlier Tsien and colleagues had given a similar brain boost to a mouse named Doogie, after TV whiz kid Doogie Howser, M.D.
Like the rats of NIMH—"NIMH" being shorthand for the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health—Hobbie-J and Doogie were given intelligence in hopes that the experiments would lead to cures for human brain disorders.
"NR2B functioned as a switch to improve learning and memory skills in Doogie, and it is showing the same results in Hobbie-J," Tsien said via email.
"This suggests that using drugs to target this gene may help to resolve disorders like dementia and Alzheimer's disease," he added.
Neuroscientist Guosong Liu, who worked on the Doogie project, said: "The research is all very exciting, because it raises the possibility for us to potentially enhance memory in humans, and that is exactly where my lab is going."
But there are two major challenges ahead, said Liu, of Tsinghua University in Beijing and the University of Texas, who was not involved in the new study.
- Matt Kaplan
- 52 sec
Jul 21, 2023 · Lab rats and pet rats are the same rat species, so our pets are potentially just as smart as their scientific cousins, especially if they’ve been bred for a lively curious temperament. Let’s look at some of the smart things pet rats get up to.
Oct 4, 2024 · Are rats smarter than hamsters. Rats and hamsters both exhibit intelligence, but rats typically come out ahead in terms of problem-solving abilities and adaptability. While hamsters have their own charm, rats have shown remarkable cognitive skills in various experiments.
Sep 14, 2023 · If you’re short on time, here’s a quick answer to your question: rats have excellent memories, can learn complex tasks, use tools, and even show empathy, suggesting they are highly intelligent animals despite their small brains. In this article, we’ll look at various experiments and research that reveal the startling smarts of rats.
