Author:  Jennifer Charlicki

Every year, 211 million pregnancies occur around the world (WHO, 2007), and during pregnancy, one of the most commonly used drugs is marijuana (“Alcohol, drugs, and babies: Do you need to worry?” 2005). There has been an increase in the amount of pregnant women smoking marijuana to aid their morning sickness. However, marijuana use while pregnant has shown compensatory effects in how children prenatally exposed to marijuana perform tasks pertaining to executive functioning.

Author:  Adam Zhang

We have all heard Descartes’ famous quote “cogito ergo sum”—I think, therefore I am. But what does it mean to think? Or perhaps, what is it to think? To answer this question, the Allen Institute for Brain Science has released the Allen Brain Observatory, a collective, standardized “survey of cellular activity in the mouse visual system.” This first-of-its-kind open source database is unprecedented both in size and comprehensiveness, and it allows researchers all over the world to begin discerning the neural circuitry underlying how we experience the world around us.