In the study, published in Science Signaling, scientists injected acetate into mice, then got the animals to perform two memory tasks that rely on the dorsal hippocampus, the brain's memory'forming region. The team introduced the mice to two matching objects and let them interact with these objects for ten minutes. Twenty-four hours later, the mice were exposed to the objects again, but one object had been moved to a new location, says co-author Gabor Egervari, an epigeneticist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. If the mouse had an intact memory, it remembered that the object was in a different location yesterday, he says. The mice demonstrated this by playing more with the object that had moved. However, if their memory was not intact, then they played with each of the objects for equal amounts of time, he adds. In another task, the mice were again introduced to two matching objects for ten minutes. Then, 24 hours later, the objects were brought back, but one object...
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