It's Monday, June 17th, 2019, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Andravis Gontas.

And I'm Kishore Hari. Each week, we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space for science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to endeavor, what's left to discover, and why it all matter.

You can find us online at inquiring.com, on Twitter, at inquiring

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This is our monthly up-to-date episode where we talk about signs and the news that caught our eye.

And I have to say there is one story this week that I simply couldn't pass up.

And that is that there has been a on-off switch found in the mouse brain that makes mice sing.

I'm already seeing why you couldn't avoid this story. Wait, I thought singing was an

incredibly complicated set of behaviors sort of all strung together. How is there just one on-off switch?

So did I. But there is this vocalization that mice make when they court each other. So it's

very much specific to courtship. And these particular researchers found, they're from Duke,

and they found this cluster of neurons in the peri-acquoductal gray

region of the brain, which is in the midbrain. It's part of the reward pathway. It's part

of the motivation pathway. And it's part of the motor control pathway. And essentially,

when they used optogenetics to stimulate this area, the mice produced these vocalizations specific to court chips.

And if you turn those cells off using, you know, optogenetics too, you actually found that the

mice could still court other mice using other sexy methods, but not vocalizations. All right. I don't want to discuss the other sexy methods, but not vocalizations.

All right.

I don't want to discuss the other sexy methods mice have, but I'm very curious about this.

So obviously by sort of shining a light in this area like Optogenics works to activate a set of genes,

...