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Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

nature.com

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Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#51

Post by Turing_Machine »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #43
Simon_says wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought some live lobsters to kill (humanely, with a knife to the brain) and steam. I only had him in my custody for a couple hours, but I got attached. I had a bad experience thinking about taking a life, and it kinda fucked me up. I don't think I'll be doing it again. If I had to kill everything I ate, I'd be vegetarian. But I have no problem buying it at the store.

Is that intellectually honest, to hide from the truth you know about your food?

Probably not any more dishonest than someone who knows that a lot of "organic" food is grown with manure, but would prefer not to see (or worse, smell) the animals actually defecating, with the feces then being applied to something they're going to eat.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#52

Post by nikhilsimha »

wsc981 wrote: post #49
Taniwha wrote: post #3

Before anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher, don't in a fume hood, do always in a fume hood with a human male's t-shirt. It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents ...

But this doesn't make sense. Gender is a social construct.

roflmao

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#53

Post by rodrodrod »

wsc981 wrote: post #49
Taniwha wrote: post #3

Before anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher, don't in a fume hood, do always in a fume hood with a human male's t-shirt. It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents ...

But this doesn't make sense. Gender is a social construct.

The research is concerned with sex, not gender.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#54

Post by Taniwha »

wsc981 wrote: post #49
Taniwha wrote: post #3

Before anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher, don't in a fume hood, do always in a fume hood with a human male's t-shirt. It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents ...

But this doesn't make sense. Gender is a social construct.

yes it is, and in this case I think we're probably still figuring out the actual cause

But one assumes that in this case the cause might be that the pheromones that people all hopped up on testosterone give off is different those given off by people who aren't .... those people would likely be cis-males, trans-males who've transitioned, trans-females who haven't transitioned, and some trans people who are currently transitioning in either direction .... we don't really have one exact word that encompasses those categories

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#55

Post by ComputerGuru »

Declanomous wrote: post #9
Taniwha wrote: post #3

Before anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher, don't in a fume hood, do always in a fume hood with a human male's t-shirt. It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents ...

In college we used to joke that animal behavior should be called animal misbehavior. We literally had one member of our lab group that could work with the mice and get sensible results. Neither of the guys could get any data that made sense, one of the women owned a cat and none of the results she had made any sense, and the fourth person (a woman) had no problem. I'm not sure if anybody suspected that rats reacted d…

I just wanted to add another anecdote (because the plural of anecdote is, as we all know, data) that your profess isn’t the only one. I’ve heard a few similar stories about guys not being allowed to enter the rodent living chambers besides an initial, introductory visit in the past.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#56

Post by ComputerGuru »

ringaroundthetx wrote: post #26
BurningFrog wrote: post #19

Since they got the same effect with just a male worn shirt present, they should be able to isolate what chemicals cause this particular effect.

It could also be chemical + association. Or just association.

Easy enough to test with mice that have never seen/smelled males before.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#57

Post by mayank »

arkades wrote: post #39
Taniwha wrote: post #3

Before anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher, don't in a fume hood, do always in a fume hood with a human male's t-shirt. It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents ...

Hardly new. Feynman was criticizing psych research for this sort of thing - inadequate controls - half a century ago in his talk on Cargo Cult Science. http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

Inadequate controls = attempting to measure fine effects (gender normalized animal behavior) using crude methods (rat study).

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#58

Post by ComputerGuru »

mark_edward wrote: post #50
fjsolwmv wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that intellectually honest, to hide from the truth you know about your food?

It's not, I feel the same way, but it's hard to be intellectually honest. I will be a vegetarian soon I think, it's been getting harder and harder to manage the dissonance since I got a dog.

It’s funny; that’s never a problem with a cat since they’re natural hunters and carnivores.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#59

Post by ygaf »

DonHopkins wrote: post #48
ygaf wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>still acting like I 'come from' 4chan It must be great having cheap stock answers for everything. Flippant as I am, I was honestly curious about how you and another poster took the word "trap" as an insult to transsexuals. To me traps were a separate concept to transsexuals, a trap is something any man could be at any point in time. Forget the question about how you know Simon_says so well.

You said "haven't been there for years" which means you came from 4chan. So does your behavior, pretending you don't know the word "trap" or purposefully mis-gendering is an insult to transgender people. That bullshit doesn't play here. You still haven't asked any questions worth answering. https://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender >Defamatory Language >Defamatory: "deceptive," "fooling," "pretending," "posing," "t…

>pretending you don't know the word "trap"

I'm not pretending to not know the word; it made sense on sight to me as "someone who fools you". Easiest term around. And that is clearly a concept of its own not a synonym for transsexuals, hence my confusion when a poster gets flagged for an affront to them.

You have actually been helpful now though, despite thinking you're slamdunking me. Passing is a bad word now too? I think I'm getting the idea; transsexuals are their own sex. But then isn't the 'trans' in the word misleading?

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#60

Post by evincarofautumn »

cm2012 wrote: post #20

This reminds me of Feynman's story of the researcher who eliminated possible variables in rat experiments one by one, to find a surprising result (EDIT: To find that rats didn't need smell, spatial relationships, taste, or vision to find the cheese - the sound of the floor was enough) https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/02/the_rat_experi...

I suppose humans tend to underuse, or undertrain, their senses, so we fail to consider the possibility that other animals might be taking advantage of their senses in different ways.

In elementary school, I used to listen to the sounds of people’s pencils scratching on the desk, and could accurately determine what they were writing, especially if my head was near the desk and I knew what their handwriting looked like. Curves and lines, and strokes of different lengths and directions against the grain of the paper, have different frequency profiles; lifting and setting the pencil back down generates a tapping sound…that sort of thing.

People often don’t believe me when I tell them this, because they figure that human hearing just isn’t that sensitive, or that the sound of handwriting doesn’t convey that much information—but it does! You’ve simply never noticed or paid attention to it because you had no desire or reason to. Another animal might, for various reasons.

Once, my dad picked up my Magna-Doodle board as we stood outside my room, and started writing a message to me. I listened closely and said “…Clean your room?”—he had written “Cʟᴇᴀɴ Yᴏᴜʀ Rᴏᴏᴍ”—and I’ll never forget his perplexed look, first at me, then turning the board around to see if any light could be shining through. He still didn’t quite believe that I could do what I had just done in front of him!

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