Comedies are often seen as simply light entertainment, and awards are rarely given to comedy programmes. Which is a shame, because, when you get a good one, they have the power to change the world, one giggle at a time.

While it might be a stretch to say that watching comedy shows is educational, sometimes we can learn some really important life lessons while having a laugh.

Here are 10 things you might have learned from watching comedy shows on TV.

10 Comedy Acts That Went Horribly Wrong

10 It’s OK to Be a Woman

I Love Lucy was a ground-breaking show in more ways than one. For starters, it was her show, and her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, who played her on screen husband, was always only a supporting act. Which, in the 1950s, was unusual. Arnaz did manage to get second billing by the time the late 1950s, when the show was reinvented as The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show. Which isn’t quite as catchy.

When their marriage ended in 1962, Lucille Ball bought out her ex-husband to own the production company outright, one of the few women to do so at the time. She was also one of the first women to appear on TV while pregnant, although she was not allowed to use that term. She was only allowed to be ‘expecting’, which was considered a much more seemly description.

The show featured a kooky Lucy doing silly things, while her straight-laced husband tries, and fails, to make her act like a married woman should. While those around her were sipping wine, she was having fun stomping the grapes the made it.^[1]

Sounds like much more fun.

9 It’s OK to Be Gay

Before Ellen Degeneres was a talk show host, she had her own sitcom, Ellen, which was incredibly popular. And then, in 1997, she told the world that she was gay. Almost at the same time, her TV character also announced that she was gay.

It’s probably fair to say that the announcement received a mixed reaction. The now famous ‘Puppy Episode’ where the announcement was made, led to her receiving death threats. It also won her awards. The show was picked up for a 5th season, but each episode now began with a warning that the comedy featured ‘Adult Content’.

Despite eventually being scrapped, the show has been widely applauded, and credited with paving the way for shows such as Will and Grace, which increased the representation of gay people on screen. Her contribution was rewarded by a Medal of Freedom, presented to her by President Obama in 2016.^[2]

Her show may have been cancelled, but Ellen Degeneres went on to become one of the most successful talk show hosts in the world.

8 It’s OK Not to Have a Life Plan

Friends changed a lot of things. The show made drinking coffee, in boutique coffee shops kind of cool. It made the term ‘on a break’, the subject of a million arguments between couples around the world. It gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘pivot’. But most of all, it said, it’s OK to be 30 and not have your life all mapped out.

With the exception of boring old Ross, all the friends had a go at a number of different careers before finding something that they loved. It was OK if they were broke, or out of work, or doing menial jobs to get by.

None of them (except Ross) knew what they were going to be doing in 5 years’ time, and they were OK with that. Sometimes its just nice to hang out with friends.^[3]

In a coffee shop.

7 It’s OK to be Bored at Work

Sometimes work is boring. And sometimes it’s REALLY boring. The Office did more than any other programme set in a workplace to show just how dull work can be.

So dull, in fact, that you might be compelled to hold your own Office Olympics.

With 8 hours to fill, and an endless supply of paper balls and coffee cups, what else are you going to do?

Not work, that’s for sure.

The Office showed that it is OK not to be enthusiastic about your job. You are there for the money. You are not really a team player. Don’t worry. No one else likes doing Team Building Exercises either.

Except, of course, Michael Scott.^[4]

And that’s OK too.

6 It’s OK to Be Neurotic

Seinfeld has regularly been voted the best sitcom ever. A fantastic achievement for a ‘show about nothing’. Despite the fact that almost every character on the show is neurotic in one way or another, the characters appear to be universally loved.

A group of psychiatry students ‘studied’ the programme, and concluded that Seinfeld himself suffers from OCD, with his obsessive compulsion for neatness, and Kramer probably has a schizoid personality disorder, while George is ego-centric to a fault. And then there is the original single-white-female “social justice warrior”, Elaine. She certainly has anger issues, but then she is the child of an alcoholic, which is a common trigger.

Apparently.

Despite the fact that the characters display some alarming mental health issues from time to time, they all seem to manage just fine.

Which is reassuring to the rest of us.^[5]

And it’s funny, too.

10 Hilarious Attempts To Rephrase Controversial Things

5 It’s OK to Be Pretentious

A programme about a couple of pretentious psychiatrists whose hobbies include wine-tasting, opera and not getting girls, doesn’t sound like the perfect recipe for a hit show. And yet Frasier, the most successful spin-off show ever, made it through 11 seasons of fierce sibling rivalry, classism, and constant references to Frasier’s Alma Mater (Harvard, just in case you didn’t know) in order to win an impressive 37 Primetime Emmys.

Despite living with his working-class ex-cop father and even more working-class British housekeeper, Frasier never quite manages to enjoy the less fine things in life. At the end of the 11th season, Frasier and Niles were just as pretentious and just as competitive as they had been at the beginning of season one.

There was that time they decided to write a book together. Or run their own restaurant. Or join the wine club. Every social occasion became an opportunity to get one over on each other or, even better, on someone else.^[6]

Despite that, the Crane boys were extremely likable, and painfully honest.

If only Frasier could manage to hang on to a relationship.

Happily, we can look forward to more from the hilarious brothers, as Frasier is set to return to our TV sets in a new series, date TBD.

4 It’s OK to Be a Nerd

The Big Bang Theory is said to have done more than any other TV programme to make scientists cool. Which is strange, considering that the cast consists of one genius with anti-social tendencies, one genius with anxiety issues, a genius who would like to be cool but knows he’s not, and an engineer.

Although they do share an unhealthy interest in dressing up like superheroes, watching science fiction and playing improbable games of chess, The Big Bang Theory really celebrates being smart.

And not only is it OK to be smart. You can also be a nerd. It’s OK to have your own spot on the sofa, or knock 3 times on a door. The characters bring academic rigor to the most banal situations, testing out theories that, really, just don’t need to be tested.

But it’s not just the characters who like to get the science right. The show employs scientific consults to ensure that the science is accurate. Because of this the show has regularly featured guest appearances by real-life scientists, including Stephen Hawking, who appeared on the show in Season 5 and had an entire episode named after him.

The show was so successful in making science look, if not cool, at least interesting, that interest in Physics received a huge boost in classrooms around the world.^[7]

3 It’s OK to Be a Dysfunctional Family

Although animated, The Simpsons is a classic sitcom based on the lives of a working-class American family. Having completed 32 seasons, and almost 700 episodes, the family have suffered almost every disaster it is possible to imagine. The father is lazy, a poor father and a worse husband. His wife doesn’t seem to notice. Possibly because she is so busy keeping the home and the children together, which, considering the children she was blessed with, is no mean feat.

Not only was The Simpsons the story of a family, however, it was also the story of an ever-expanding community of neighbors, work-colleagues, churchgoers, politicians and the media. Luckily for production costs most of the actors plays several characters, and celebrities compete for the honor of guesting on the show and being turned into a yellow caricature.

While The Simpsons are not the sort of neighbors you would want to live next to in real life, (what with the dog barking, saxophone playing and constant yelling), they have come to be one of the most loved families in America.

The show spawned a million memes, most of them beginning with Homer’s favorite word ‘D’Oh!’, but the phrase that made it to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations was one of Groundskeeper Willie’s. He described the entire French nation as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’.^[8]

Le ouch!

2 It’s OK for Old Women to Like Sex

In 1985 any sitcom that starred 4 women, was unusual, but a main cast of 4 old women was unheard of. The Golden Girls was a ground- breaking show. The 4 friends were all, one way or another, single, and, shock horror, they all quite liked sex.

They talked about having sex, about not having sex, good sex, bad sex and boring sex. Sex in all its forms, in fact.

The show was just as novel discussing gay issues, same-sex marriage, porn, and sexually transmitted diseases. Though the subjects were often thought to be controversial at the time, The Golden Girls managed to explore them with a mixture of innocence, interest and irony that made the show less threatening to many viewers.

Some audiences found the idea of people watching porn uncomfortable. But group of elderly ladies sitting in their living room watching a porn movie seemed somehow disarming.

Until, that is, one of them suddenly stood up, pointed at the TV and said, ‘I did that once’.^[9]

1 It’s OK to be silly

In 1969, Monty Python’s Flying Circus was like nothing ever seen before. In fact, the show is still considered to be the wildest, funniest, strangest sketch show ever made. Only 45 episodes were ever made, but they spawned a new brand of surreal comedy that inspired a generation.

The show has been a particular inspiration to astronomers, who named 7 asteroids in honor of the Pythons, and to paleontologists, who discovered a dinosaur-python fossil, and named it “Montypythonoides Riversleighensis”. John Cleese even had a woolly lemur named after him.

The term ‘Pythonesque’ was defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “resembling the absurdist or surrealist humor of Monty Python’.
Their lasting legacy, however, is the popularization of a word that does not describe an asteroid, a dinosaur, or a lemur. The word, certainly, is a Pythonesque one, that is used daily by millions of internet users to describe something that is unwanted and unappealing.

Thank you, Monty Python, for giving us Spam.^[10]

Top 10 Mandela Effects (Movie And TV Edition!)

Psychology is odd; it’s old enough to seem as though it’s been around forever but young enough so that there’s still an almost terrifyingly large amount of things that even professional psychologists don’t fully understand yet. When it comes to the general public’s popular image of psychology, a lot of folks hardly ever move past the timeless mantra of “lie down on the couch, and tell me how you feel” or Dr. Phil repeating people’s problems to them in a louder and slower voice on TV. While psychology and psychological disorders today are no longer kept in the corner like forbidden books of black magic, there’s still a long way to go in terms of actually spreading comprehensive knowledge.

Society has moved from tepidly prodding psychology with a long stick to an almost cult-like fascination and macabre fetishization of the concept. Comic books, TV shows, and movies almost always generate a buzz with the strategic use of the word “crazy.” Were that not the case, how much differently would Heath Ledger’s Joker performance have been received? Buzzwords like “psychopath,” “insane,” and “sociopath” are top contenders for words that are most frequently used despite a general misunderstanding of their meanings, right up there with “ironic” and “rhetorical.”

Schizophrenia is another one of those hot buzzwords that gets passed around corners in hushed tones but is rarely (accurately) expounded upon. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) defines schizophrenia as the presence of “two or more of the following symptoms for a significant portion of time during a 1-month period (or less if successfully treated): (1) delusions (2) hallucinations (3) disorganized speech (e.g., frequent derailment or incoherence (4) grossly disorganized or catatonic behaviour (5) negative symptoms, i.e., affective flattening, alogia (poverty of speech), or avolition (lack of motivation).” (Note: The DSM-V terminology is essentially the same.) The psychological community has examined schizophrenia with an increasingly stronger lens since the beginning of the 21st century, and they have made many surprising findings.

10 Schizophrenia Is The Result Of Over-Intense Mental Processing

A common misconception about schizophrenia is that those who suffer from it have weaker mental processing skills, which many believe is to blame for paranoid delusions and inaccurate memories. On the contrary, neural activity tests have provided evidence supporting the exact opposite explanation.

If you’ve ever been guilty of throwing back a shot or five too many on Cinco de Mayo, then you might be familiar with the phrase, “Follow my finger.” The follow-my-finger sobriety test is an example of more than just why you should usually have more water in your body than tequila; it’s an example of what psychology wizards refer to as saccadic eye movement. To put it simply, your brain processes resources and memories differently when your eyes are in motion, as opposed to a static point of view.

Scientists at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain conducted a test that focused on saccadic eye movement. The purpose of the study was to distinguish between the eye-movement (EM) brain activity of people with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects without the disease. All of the participants were asked to shift their eyes to a “target” in their peripheral vision, while avoiding a “non-target” closer to the center of vision—the catch was that they all had to keep a certain random color in mind during the exercise.

The hypothesis was that the non-target would be more distracting to the participant if its color matched the one that they were asked to keep in mind during the exercise. The results showed that the effect of matching color between the non-target and the imagined color was much more intense in participants with schizophrenia than those without. It was also observed that participants with schizophrenia were prone to hyper-focus on the space surrounding the main target’s position.

The findings served as more support to the belief that schizophrenic symptoms might actually be the result of a super-narrow, abnormally intense level of resource processing than normal.

9 Schizophrenia Is Linked With Brain Areas That Process Cannabis

Whenever somebody suggests that cannabis “kills the brain,” chances are that they’ve never heard of something called the endocannabinoid system (ECB). The ECB is a part of brain that modern science has found to be specially fine-tuned to reception of cannabinoids for emotional processing, memory maintenance, and learning.

The existence of the ECB is not evidence that lighting up in your parents’ basement actually makes you a genius, but its discovery helped us understand the brain a lot better and also raised many more questions. The existence of cannabinoid receptors provoked questions such as “why do we have cannabinoid receptors in the first place?” and “how do cannabinoid receptors interact with mental diseases?” Scientists at the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Western Ontario conducted a study to address the latter question, specifically focusing on schizophrenia.

The heavily cited report states that the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the basolateral nucleus of the amyglyda (BLA) are not only both cannabinoid receptor–heavy areas that are extremely important for emotional regulation but are also prone to serious distortions in cases of schizophrenia. In addition to the relationship between cannabinoids and schizophrenia-affective brain regions, research conducted at the University of Western Ontario’s labs also reported a strong interaction between cannabinoid transmission and dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that’s been found to be essential in explaining addiction and schizophrenic pathology.

8 Schizophrenics’ Memories Are More Resilient To Long-Term Substance Abuse

Up until very recently, there hasn’t been much research done on the effects of long-term substance abuse on the working memories of people with schizophrenia. The relationship between schizophrenia and poorer memory is well documented, as is the relationship between substance abuse and forgetting your entire weekend. Less well-studied is the impairment of base-level memory by substance abuse of schizophrenics.

Drs. Jessica A. Wojtalik and Deanna Barch of the Washington University School of Medicine conducted a study to provide some much-needed data in this area. Thirty-seven schizophrenia patients (17 with a history of substance abuse and 20 non–substance abusers) and 32 non-schizophrenic controls (12 with a history of substance abuse and 20 non–substance abusers) completed a working memory task while being scanned with an fMRI. The results of the study showed that the control group was much more divided in neural activation rates between past substance abusers and non–substance abusers than the schizophrenia group.

Whereas the memory-processing brain regions of the formerly substance abusing participants in the control group were far more active during memory tests than the non–substance abusing controls, there was little to no difference in neural activity between the formerly substance abusing schizophrenic participants and non–substance abusing schizophrenic participants. Schizophrenia patients were much less accurate than the controls on all tasks, but these findings indicate that substance abuse may have a relatively smaller impact on the base-level working memory of schizophrenics compared to those without.

7 Schizophrenics Have Trouble Identifying Facial Expressions But Process Them More

How many times have you awkwardly run into that one person whose name you just can’t ever seem to recall, but you recognize their face every time? It’s moments like those that seriously make you wonder about what your memory will be like a decade from now.

In a report on the interaction between cognition and emotions in schizophrenia, Dr. Quintino R. Mano and Dr. Gregory G. Brown cited a number of peculiar findings about the working memory patterns of schizophrenia patients, one of which had to do with simple facial recognition. It was found that while schizophrenia often causes those with the condition to have difficulty expressing and identifying facial emotions, schizophrenia patients also show a significantly heightened rate of automatic and implicit processing of facial emotions.

6 Siblings Of Schizophrenics Have Different Brain Activity Than Others

Dr. Alan Ceaser and associates conducted working memory tests with the participants split into three groups: schizophrenia patients, their siblings without schizophrenia, and a control group of healthy participants without the condition or any direct relationship to people with the condition. The results of the study showed that the patient and sibling group, but not the control group, exhibited different neural reactions to changes in dopamine availability than healthy controls. This supports the hypothesis of excess dopamine being a key player in the emergence of schizophrenic symptoms.

The most important implication of the study is that there are abnormal neural activity spikes in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), cerebellum, and striatum in both schizophrenia patients and those at risk for schizophrenia—this includes the brothers and sisters of those with the condition.

5 Male Schizophrenic Smokers Are More Susceptible To Nicotine Withdrawal

The subtle neurocognitive deficits of schizophrenia patients can even be observed in the brain’s reaction to nicotine withdrawal. The Clinical Psychiatry Research Center at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences conducted a study to examine the effect of short-term nicotine abstinence on schizophrenic smokers.

The 45 participants, all male schizophrenic smokers, were split into three groups: one group that would abstain from smoking for one night, a second group that would use a nicotine patch after avoiding smoking for a night, and a third control group with no intervention at all. Each participant was given a visuospatial memory test at the beginning of the experiment and the following morning, after the intervention.

The nicotine patch group and the freely smoking group showed no significant difference in scores between either test, but the group that was withheld from both smoking and nicotine patch use exhibited significantly worse test scores after the intervention. The study concluded that nicotine abstinence causes visuospatial deficits in male smokers with schizophrenia.

4 Gender Affects Schizophrenia Symptoms

Few people really take into account the subtle differences that gender can make on the manifestation of a psychological disorder, let alone schizophrenia, but the effects are very real. It’s understood by many in the field of psychology that schizophrenia often, if not always, accompanies visual perceptual organization impairment—particularly in those patients with rough social histories. Until recently, there was not a complete understanding of just how intensely gender differences can affect the visuospatial deficits in question.

Dr. Jamie Joseph and associates at Rutgers University conducted a study to investigate the relationship between disorganized schizophrenic symptoms and gender. The tools used to measure the relationship were specially designed perceptual organization tasks: the Countour Integration Task and the Ebbinghaus Illusion.

The participant sample consisted of 43 females and 66 males. The results showed that while females (with more relatively intact bottom-up grouping skills) performed more impressively on the Contour Integration Task, males (with more top-down-oriented grouping skills) performed better on the Ebbinghaus Illusion task. This supports the notion that sex differences are an important factor to consider when weighing in on the visual-perceptual impairments caused by schizophrenia.

3 Younger Schizophrenics Aren’t Being Treated As Effectively

Psychological treatment has come a long way since the mid-19th century. These days, we tend to lean more toward the clinical communication and behavior-analysis method of approach than the “let’s try poking your crazy out with a literal icepick” approach. Despite the advancements in technology and basic human decency, there is some evidence to show that the relationship between age and quality of psychological care doesn’t necessarily improve in a linear fashion as one gets older.

In 2013, the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry published findings that show the results of medical-administrative data analyses run over adult schizophrenia patients in Quebec for two years. The results showed that 77 percent of patients aged 30 and over were receiving adequate pharmacological treatment, compared to only 47 percent of patients aged 18–29. The fact that schizophrenia has been documented to be better-treated in the earlier phases of the disease makes this a concerning discovery.

2 Schizophrenics Have Lower Sex Drive

Scientists at the Clinic for Young Schizophrenics ran a study in 2014 measuring the psychosexual tendencies of 45 young adults with schizophrenia. The 45 young adults were compared to 61 young adults without the disease as a control group.

The results found that a smaller number of the schizophrenia patients had a sexual partner or had ever had sexual intercourse compared to the control group. More men with schizophrenia who were being treated with risperidone or olanzapine reported issues with arousal than men in the control group. Proportionally, the schizophrenia patient group demonstrated an increased chance of developing negative psychosexual tendencies compared to the control group.

This doesn’t mean that anyone should start substituting the word “schizophrenic” for prude—schizophrenia doesn’t erase sexual urges or instantly overstimulate them. These findings only serve to play down the misconception that mental pathology instantly implies hypersexuality.

1 Schizophrenia Is Related To Low Appetite Control

At the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Montreal, a study was conducted in 2012 in order to examine appetite regulation and metabolic differences between schizophrenia patients and a healthy control group. Even if you don’t have a doctorate hanging on your wall, chances are that you’re somewhat familiar with the horror stories that center on metabolism dysfunctions caused by psychiatric treatment gone wrong; the study took this into account as well, measuring the relationship between food cravings and antipsychotic medication dosages.

The results showed that only schizophrenic patients demonstrated specific cerebral responses in the parahippocamus, thalamus, and middle frontal gyri to appetite stimulation. Schizophrenic patients’ parahippocampal activity and related hunger levels both increased linearly over time. It was found that medication dosage had a strong positive correlation with food cravings, and also that the severity of the disease was negatively correlated with dietary restraint.

The findings show that not only does schizophrenia lend itself to a weakened ability to control the appetite, but also that the antipsychotic drugs used to treat the disease may also drastically exacerbate the dietary symptoms.

I was raised on the nation’s capital’s concrete, spent three years eating swordfish and terrible barbeque in the Massachusetts mountains, took a nap, and woke up in this weird dimension they call Long Island to get a doctorate in psychology. I can give you a rough play-by-play on what’s happening in a Spanish soap opera and teach you a lot of Chinese curse words. Slam poetry, rock climbing, marathon running, Muay Thai, Buddhism, electronic music, and stupid YouTube videos keep me sane—if you like any of those, you go on the pretty cool person list. You can also check out my website, Instagram, or Twitter.

Mice are great research tools. Scientists can inject them, infect them, dissect them, and learn all sorts of useful things relevant to human health.

A lot of diseases, though, just afflict humans. To study these diseases in mice, scientists have to get creative. Some of these creative maneuvers include hormone treatment, tissue transplants, or gene transfer. Afterward, the mice become just a little more human.

Sometimes, as with complex psychological disorders, the challenge is ridiculously hard. So scientists have to settle for just mimicking a few symptoms.

10 Gonorrhea

Gonorrhea is an STD caused by a bacterium, Neisseria gonorrhoeae. In nature, it only infects humans.

In the lab, scientists have used syringes to inject N. gonorrhoeae into the vaginas of many mice. But N. gonorrhoeae doesn’t really like living in mice. So the infection doesn’t usually take.

After a lot of troubleshooting, scientists discovered that there is a brief window during the estrus cycle when conditions in the mouse vagina are just right. During that window, N. gonorrhoeae can thrive.

Normally, that window passes quickly. By treating mice with a female sex hormone, 17β-estradiol, scientists can prolong this window. After this estrogen boost, the mouse vagina can host N. gonorrhoeae for many days.

With these mice, scientists have been able to test new medicines. They’ve also been able to study the curious fact that one infection often does not confer long-term immunity. Like humans, mice can often be infected again after recovering from their first bout.

In the real world, people rarely have gonorrhea in isolation. As much as 70 percent of the time, a gonorrhea infection is accompanied by a chlamydia infection. To study this problem, scientists have also made double-STD mice. To build these models, they inject two kinds of bacteria into the mice’s vaginas: C. muridarum and then N. gonorrhoeae.

9 Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease is a degenerative disease that affects the brain and can cause severe memory loss. In the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, many clumps of protein called plaques appear. These plaques are formed out of pieces of a protein called APP.

There are many ways to build Alzheimer’s mice. Several rely on a mutant form of APP, which is found in two Swedish families. In these families, Alzheimer’s arrives unusually early, while the patients are still in their fifties.

Many Alzheimer’s mice show memory loss. To measure this, scientists have used several tests. One is called the Morris water maze. In this test, mice must remember the location of a hidden platform set inside a pool of water.

Another test is called the novel object recognition test. A mouse is presented with two objects: one that it has seen before and one that it hasn’t. Normal mice spend more time exploring the new object. Alzheimer’s mice can’t seem to tell the difference.

8 Measles

Measles is caused by a virus. In most cases, it leads to fever and spots on the skin. In rare cases, it can also cause brain damage or death.

In the natural world, measles only infects humans. The virus enters human cells at one of two receptors: CD46 or CD150.

To render mice susceptible to the measles, scientists have introduced the genes for these receptors into mice. After infection, some of these measles-mice develop severe reactions.

In a 2006 paper, for example, scientists transformed mice with the human CD150 receptor. Then they infected these mice with the measles in two different ways: by injecting the virus into their nostrils or directly into their brains. After infection, many of the mice faded rapidly. They lost control of their movements, developed seizures, and died.

The severity of the case depended on the age of the mice. Newborn mice were always goners, but four-week-old mice always survived. In two-week-old and three-week-old mice, the death rate was somewhere in the middle.

7 HIV

To date, HIV has killed about 39 million people. Millions more are infected every year.

To infect a human cell, HIV binds to receptors on the cell surface. In chimpanzees, our close cousins, these receptors are similar. So HIV can infect chimps, too.

Mice, though, are much more distantly related. In the 90 million years since mice and primates split ways, these proteins have also changed. As a result, HIV can’t infect mice.

One way to fix this problem is to transfer human genes into mice. However, at least three human genes are needed to help HIV thrive in a mouse.

A more popular approach is to build mice with human immune systems. This involves some human-to-mouse cell injections and often some surgery. Such mice are called “humanized.”

One variety of humanized mouse is called BLT, a reference to the bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich. Unlike the sandwich, though, the BLT mouse contains a mixture of human cells taken from three sources: bone marrow, liver, and thymus.

To build a BLT mouse, scientists begin with a mouse with a faulty immune system. Then they take bits of liver and thymus sourced from human fetuses and transplant them under the mouse’s kidney. They also inject some stem cells sourced from human bone marrow.

After that, the mouse is transformed. It’s chock-full of human immune cells and 100 percent susceptible to HIV. Humanized mice can be infected with HIV via the vagina or anus or with a needle straight into their veins.

6 Acne

Acne is a human problem . Our closest cousins, the chimpanzees, don’t get pimples. Neither do mice.

Acne is triggered by a destructive back-and-forth between the human skin and the bacterium Propionibacterium acnes. Most of the time, P. acnes is harmless. However, when oxygen levels dip inside a pore, P. acnes attacks the skin. Then the immune system fights back. The result is a lot of pus.

To study acne, scientists have injected P. acnes into mice. The mouse ear is one popular injection site. Other scientists have used the mouse’s back.

But P. acnes doesn’t like living in mice. It much prefers humans.

To make mice more friendly to P. acnes, one group of scientists decided to introduce human cells into mice. They poked holes into Teflon cylinders, placed human cells inside them, and transplanted the cylinders into the bellies of mice. A week later, they injected P. acnes.

Inside the mice, the human cells survived. So did P. acnes. In response, the mice’s bodies mounted an immune response. It was somewhat similar to what happens in a human face before a pimple is formed.

5 Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) feel driven to repeatedly perform the same action. Some wash their hands hundreds of times a day. Others complete elaborate counting rituals every time they leave a room.

Mice don’t wash their hands. But they do engage in an equivalent behavior called grooming in which they rub themselves with their paws. Excessive grooming in mice is often used as a model for human OCD.

In many cases of OCD, a region of the brain called the orbital frontal cortex is abnormally active. To recreate OCD in mice, one group of scientists decided to stimulate the orbital frontal cortex with light pulses.

One pulse wasn’t enough. However, after many pulses spread out over several days, the mice began to groom themselves more frequently. Some of these mice also responded to a chemical treatment for OCD that has been shown to work in humans.

Scientists have also made mice with OCD by mutating certain genes. In some of these mutants, grooming can become intense. Hoxb8-mutants groom so vigorously that they remove their own hair. Sapap3-mutants repeatedly rub their faces until they inflict wounds.

4 Alcoholism

Alcoholics are physically dependent on alcohol. They experience intense cravings and drink heavily.

In humans, alcoholism sometimes runs in families. In mice, a love of alcohol also seems to be genetic. Some mouse strains drink little alcohol when given the opportunity. Other strains drink more.

Mice metabolize alcohol quickly, five times faster than humans do. So, short of forcing the alcohol down their throats, it can be hard to make mice really drunk.

One way to overcome this problem is to breed mice that absolutely love alcohol and drink tons of it voluntarily. To do this, scientists select the mice from each generation that drink the most. After several rounds of breeding, the result is high-alcohol-preferring (HAP) mice.

Some of these HAP mice do get drunk. After drinking for many hours, their blood alcohol can rise to over three times the legal driving limit. The mice’s movements become uncoordinated, and they struggle to walk a balance beam.

As in humans, all of this drinking is voluntary. HAP mice have the option to stick with water. But they are always drawn to alcohol.

3 Huntington’s Disease

Huntington’s disease affects the nervous system. Sufferers gradually lose the ability to control their movements and think clearly.

The disease is genetic, traceable to the huntingtin gene located on human chromosome 4. Normal versions of the huntingtin gene contain multiple repeats of CAG, a three-letter DNA sequence. In disease-causing versions of the gene, these repeats get out of control. In mutant huntingtin, more than 35 CAGs are present.

In one experiment, scientists introduced a mutant form of human huntingtin into mice. It contained 72 CAG repeats.

One mouse carrying this 72-repeat gene suffered motor problems. It couldn’t complete a beam-crossing test. When dangled by its tail and then returned to the ground, it struggled to find its footing. It also tended to walk in circles.

When scientists performed an autopsy, they found that the mouse’s brain had begun to degenerate, much like the brains of Huntington’s patients.

Scientists have made many other strains of the Huntington mouse, too. Some just contain fragments of the mutant gene or express the gene only in specific brain cells.

2 Autism

People with autism have a difficult time interacting with other people. Some also engage in repetitive behaviors like flapping their hands.

Many different genes contribute to a risk for autism. For example, Cntnap2 plays a role in early brain development.

In one experiment, scientists knocked out the Cntnap2 gene in mice. In these mutants, the brain developed differently. Some brain cells didn’t travel where they were supposed to go. Levels of one kind of brain cell called the interneuron were also reduced.

Mice without the Cntnap2 gene also behaved differently. Many of their behaviors resembled symptoms of human autism. For example, the mutants were less communicative as pups. When separated from their mothers, they gave fewer distress calls.

As adults, mice without the Cntnap2 gene were also less social. When normal mice are presented with an empty tube and a tube containing a mouse, they usually prefer to investigate the tube containing the mouse. But mice without the Cntnap2 gene showed no such preference.

Like many humans with autism, mice without the Cntnap2 gene also engaged in repetitive behaviors. They repeatedly dug at the ground. They also groomed themselves to the point of risking injury.

These mice also responded to the medication risperidone much as humans with autism do. After the mice received the medication, their repetitive behaviors were controlled. But the social problems remained.

1 Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a mental illness. Its most famous symptoms are delusions and hallucinations. Less dramatic symptoms include apathy and learning problems.

In people with schizophrenia, the MD neuron, a kind of brain cell, is less active. To recreate this mental difference in mice, scientists blocked the neurons chemically. After this blockage, mice had trouble adjusting to new set of rules for finding food. This difficulty may resemble the sorts of learning problems that people with schizophrenia have.

Schizophrenia also runs in families. Many different genes seem to play a role. In a Scottish family, a mutation in a gene called DISC1 seems to increase risk. To study this connection, scientists introduced a mutant form of DISC1 into mice.

In mice with the mutant DISC1, the brain developed differently. One set of structures called the lateral ventricles became larger than normal. This was particularly true on the left side. These kinds of brain differences are also seen in people with schizophrenia.

Mice with the mutant gene showed other symptoms, too. Sometimes, they were more hyperactive. When given an open field to run in, they scurried around slightly more manically than normal mice did. At other times, the mice were more apathetic. When dropped into a container of water, they put up less of a struggle than normal mice did.

These behavioral differences may have something to do schizophrenia, but scientists aren’t sure.

Whether mice will ever be engineered to display some of schizophrenia’s more famous symptoms—like hearing voices or believing that they are some famous historical figure—is unclear. You may need a human brain for that. But even if a schizophrenic mouse did come to believe that it was Elvis, it wouldn’t be able to tell scientists about it.

Rachel Rodman writes about transplanting weird things into lab mice: gazelle testicles, rat embryos, snow leopard cells, and so on. You can read more at her website, rachelrodman.com.

Since the 1920s, our understanding of the universe has greatly expanded. Edwin Hubble, the man who the famous Hubble Space Telescope was named after, helped to shatter the illusion that ours was the only galaxy in the universe with his observations of what would later be called the Andromeda galaxy.

With the James Webb Space Telescope finally launching and reaching its final cosmic docking spot in Earth’s L2 Lagrange point, we have an entirely new era of astronomy to look forward to, as once the telescope’s instruments are fully ready, it boasts the ability to peer back in time to the first luminous glows erupted after the Big Bang.

But that doesn’t mean that observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope will be out of the job, as even 32 years after the telescope’s launch, it is still being used to do groundbreaking scientific work.

Today we’re looking at the 10 most breathtaking images ever taken in the known universe.

10. Cosmic Cows

What is a cosmic cow?

No, we haven’t launched some poor hapless bovine into space, at least not yet, but rather, the term refers to an extremely bright form of supernovae. The first of these cow-like flashes of light was discovered in 2018 thanks to the efforts of astronomers operating two different telescopes, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array. 

The newly discovered celestial explosion was dubbed AT2018cow and the name just sort of stuck, becoming a catchall for any supernovae which match its unique description. 

Cow-like supernovae are very short-lived and AT2018cow was 100 times more luminous than a typical supernova, emitting brilliant ultraviolet and blue light. These newly discovered explosions also make up about 0.1 percent of all observed cosmic blasts in the night sky.

And, at the start of this year, another cow-like event was discovered in the Spektrum-Roetgen-Gamma (SRG) space telescope’s data. This one being 200 times as bright as the original cosmic bovine. 

According to Caltech astronomer Yuhan Yao, these events are more than likely the result of a collapsing star giving birth to a black hole or neutron star with a powerful magnetic field. 

9. Henize 2-10 Stellar Nursery

Black holes are typically depicted as silent monsters, lurking in the black of space waiting to gobble up unsuspecting worlds and stars. Yet, without them, we would likely not be here. For one, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way binds our galaxy together, making our very existence possible.

However, what was discovered by the Hubble Telescope in a dwarf starburst galaxy 34 million light-years from us is perhaps proof that black holes assist in the formation of new stars. 

Henize 2-10 has been the source of some debate since the discovery of what appears to be a massive black hole at the galaxy’s core, but the data suggesting that the object at the core could also suggest a supernova remnant. However, in these stunning recent images from Hubble, we see an outflow of gas coming from the object, leading directly to a stellar nursery. 

If this object is indeed a black hole, then it will prove that black holes play a pivotal role in new star formation.

8. N44 Nebula

Located within the Large Magellanic Cloud, the N44 nebula as it was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope is absolutely stunning to behold, but more important are the cosmic phenomena which contribute to its awe-inspiring beauty.

The titular super bubble spans nearly 250 light-years, and currently, there’s no one explanation for why N44 has a massive hole in it, but stellar winds coming from massive stars and a supernova remnant have been offered as potential explanations.

7. Centaurus A Radio Galaxy

The Centaurus A Radio Galaxy might be the fifth brightest galaxy visible in the Earth’s night sky, but it’s also one of the most heavily studied objects in all of astronomy. 

This particular image, which shows Centaurus A’s supermassive black hole’s powerful relativistic jets in all of their terrifying glory, is a composite of three different images captured by three separate instruments. 

Each instrument operates in different wavelengths of the light spectrum. The orange segments of the image are from LABOCA on APEX, the blue portions are from x-ray data captured by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and everything else was captured using the MPG/ESO telescope located in La Silla, Chile.

6. Intersecting Galaxies

Hubble has had an incredible run since its debut in 1990.

It is said that one day, the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy will collide and merge together (and some data suggests that that process has already started, but that’s neither here nor there). 

Speaking of Andromeda, the constellation not the galaxy. This image represents ARP 273, two colliding galaxies some 300 million light-years from our humble little solar system. 

While some places describe this interaction as having created what looks like a beautiful rose or flower formation, others describe the galaxy making up the “stem” of the flower as though it’s making a harrowing kamikaze dive into the other spiral galaxy. 

The gravitational forces at play here are actively distorting both galaxies into their current shape, offering us a preview of sorts for what might happen when the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy are further along with their merger.

5. Star Cluster R136

Located within the Tarantula Nebula which itself is located within the Large Magellanic Cloud, star cluster R136 is a sight to behold. 

This sector of the nebula features dozens upon dozens of newborn blue stars. These are some of the most massive stars in the entire universe. 

This particular image was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, through a partnership between NASA and ESA astronomers who were studying the Tarantula Nebula using Hubble’s spectrograph instrument.

Among these glowing blue stars, which are located 170,000 light-years from us, are 9 heavyweight stars with masses 100 times than that of our sun, Sol. 

4. V838 Monocerotis

V838 Monocerotis is a variable star and surrounding it is a structure of interstellar dust. Hubble was able to capture this incredible image after V838 Monocerotis brightened by an extreme amount at the start of 2002. 

For a brief moment in time (cosmically speaking, of course), the variable star was 600,000 times brighter than Sol. The brightening of this star lasted from January to April of 2002, and the cause for this flare is still a mystery. But, as a result, we have this stunning image of what’s called a “light echo” from the star’s brightening. 

According to NASA, light from V838 Mon “propagates outward. Each new observation of the light echo reveals a new unique “thin-section” through the interstellar dust around the star.” In other words, as that light travels to us, we see the star’s light reflected on the interstellar gas that surrounds the star, even after the star has quieted down.

However, V838 Monocerotis is still one of the brightest stars in all the Milky Way. 

3. Pillars of Creation

Located some 7,000 light-years from the Earth, the Eagle Nebula is also home to one of the most famous images ever taken by Hubble, the Pillars of Creation. 

Like the twisted and writhing hand of a dead god, the Pillars of Creation is composed of three trails of beautiful multicolored dust and gas that stretch on for four to five light-years. 

The Pillars are composed of nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, but the most incredible thing about this formation is the fact that it’s home to a bunch of newly formed stars.

Unfortunately, the light from those newborn stars is also eroding the structure. 

The structure was originally photographed by Hubble in 1995 and it’s been photographed two more times since then. The ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory photographed the structure in 2011, and after that, Hubble took another crack at it to celebrate the space observatory’s 25^th anniversary. 

2. Ring Nebula

The Ring Nebula sits 2,000 light-years from the Earth, and it’s a hint at the haunting future that awaits our own sun someday billions of years into the future. When stars like our own finally die, they don’t explode with the fury of a supernova.

They just aren’t large enough for that. 

Instead, they slowly lose their outer layers, until they come to spread out, much like we see in the Ring Nebula. They also leave behind a remnant of the star’s core, known as a white dwarf. 

All of these features are present in this stunning image taken by Hubble in 1998. Originally, it was thought that the Ring Nebula was shaped exactly how we see it, but in recent years it’s been revealed through careful analysis of the planetary nebula that the blue regions (which are composed of helium, hydrogen, and oxygen) are actually shaped more like a football that’s intersecting with the red colored donut-shaped nitrogen and sulfur gasses. If were we to observe the nebula from a different perspective, it might look more like someone had spiked a football right through the reddish gasses. 

1. M87 Supermassive Black Hole

Of course, no list of the greatest astronomy images ever taken (or in this case, generated) would ever be complete without the first image ever taken of a black hole.

M87 (or Messier 87) is a supermassive black hole resting at the center of a supergiant elliptical galaxy. The galaxy sits within the constellation Virgo and features a unique view at a single relativistic jet coming from one end of the galaxy. 

The relativistic jet is moving so fast that it creates an illusion when we observe it from the Earth, making it appear to be moving 4 to 6 times the speed of light. 

The first image of the black hole was made in 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope which is a collaborative effort made by multiple radio observatories around the globe. Essentially, the EHT has linked 9 observatories that function as an Earth-sized Interferometer. 

Since that first image from 2019, the EHT team has been studying M87 in even greater detail. Just last year, they released another image of the supermassive black hole showing how the stellar beast’s magnetic field disrupts the material in the accretion disk. The EHT team has since announced that it will be focusing its network of observatories on Sagittarius-A, the supermassive black hole that rests at the center of the Milky Way, which has never been directly imaged before.