© Pixabay
"Scientists put a
crocodile into an
MRI machine with
classical music" may sound like somebody playing a game of science Mad Libs, but it's now officially a
real experiment that real scientists have run.
And it's for a fairly interesting reason, too. Scientists always want to better understand our brains, which have evolved continuously over the ages as we branched out of past species and developed on our own. But to understand how our brains evolve, we'd need to look at an ancient brain, which isn't possible.
But in the rare case where this is a good thing,
crocodiles are old apex predators who haven't
needed to evolve much over millions of years, and their brains have seen minimal changes compared to other animals like birds and mammals. They share enough minor similarities with modern mammal and bird brains that researchers led by Felix Ströckens at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, decided a functional look at crocodile brains is worth the effort.
So that's how Ströckens and his team ended up
sticking a Nile crocodile into an fMRI machine (short for "functional magnetic resonance imaging"), the first time the device has been used on cold-blooded animals. This was not easy, for obvious reasons that involve manhandling a croc and less obvious reasons that involve keeping their body temperatures stable inside the machine.
Comment: Elsewhere recently lightning strikes have killed in Tirupati, ( 3 by a single bolt) while 2 children were fatally hit in Hyderabad (both incidents in India) and 2 succumbed in Nepal. Back in Pakistan 5 have died in 3 districts.