Science Blog

 "A cat parasite might be quietly editing your fear circuits."

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 31 July 2026, 1558 UTC.

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencemonitor.blogspot.com).

The Wait-What The pull you feel toward some things and the dread you feel toward others might be partly written by a parasite. 01 The reflex We treat attraction and fear as the most personal things we own — proof of who we are. Your gut says run, your heart says stay, and both feel like pure self, authored entirely by your own wiring and history. 02 The second layer Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled parasite that can only breed inside a cat. To get there, it has a problem: it often lands in a rodent, the cat's dinner. The evidence is that infected rodents lose their built-in terror of cat odour — and in some studies drift toward it, treating the smell of a predator almost like something appealing. The parasite appears to tweak the brain's fear-and-reward pathways, nudging a rat toward the exact danger that completes the parasite's life cycle. It doesn't erase the animal's mind; it quietly re-weights one circuit, so the rat still feels like it's making its own call.   03 Why it sticks Once you know a microbe can nudge a rodent toward the smell it should flee, the tidy line between "my instincts" and "something acting on my instincts" gets blurrier. It's a reminder that the feeling of choosing is not the same as proof the choice is fully yours — and that some of what runs in our heads may be borrowed hardware. Watch the film → Watch Your Taste in People Might Not Be Yours  Play on YouTube Also   Psychology says people without children develop a measurably different relationship to time Childlessness forces a reckoning with time that most people never face, one that neuroscience is only   There’s a reason every aeroplane window has a tiny hole in it, and it’s not the reason most What passengers mistake for a safety valve is actually solving an entirely different problem—one that keeps   The flu virus doesn’t just infect cells — it quietly dismantles a nuclear structure most For decades, scientists ignored a cellular structure the flu virus treats as essential—now we know why.   How did a captured wartime rocket fired from a New Mexico desert in 1946 return the first On October 24, 1946, a captured V-2 rocket carrying a 35mm movie camera reached 65 miles above the New Mexico What's one preference you'd swear is purely yours — and how sure are you? Science Blog Clear science for curious people scienceblog.com  ·  YouTube  ·  Unsubscribe 600 1st Ave, Ste 330 PMB 92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2246