Brainy mice

An Italian man was arrested for smuggling upon arrival at the Caselle airport in Turin, Italy.

The contraband found in the luggage of the man, who flew in from Miami, USA, was wrapped in brown packaging paper. Unwrapping it, security and customs officers discovered the dried head of a critically endangered crocodile, The Guardian reports.

“The item was seized because it had been imported without the required certificate or license,” the officers told The Guardian.

Charged with international trafficking in endangered animals, the man faces a fine of between 20,000 and 200,000 euros, or a prison term of six months to one year, according to The Guardian.

Meanwhile, neuroscientists in the US have bioengineered mice with an unusual head.

To find a treatment for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental diseases that occur only in humans, researchers needed to test it on a human brain, so they created mice that could be implanted with human brain cells.

They genetically engineered the lab animals to develop almost none of their own cerebral cortex — that outer layer of the brain that handles higher-level thinking, memory, and senses, according to BBC.

The researchers then used skin cells taken from humans and “reprogrammed” them to grow into pieces of brain-like tissue called organoids, which were then implanted into the mouse brains to become part of it.

Dr. Sarah Chan, a bioethics researcher at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the program, told BBC News there was “no indication that what’s being created here are mice that can think like humans, or a human brain in a mouse body.”

Neuroscientist Dr. Ilary Allodi, who also was not involved in the research, said the bioengineered mice behaved normally and didn’t have any enhancement.

Allodi said the lab animals with a part-mouse and part-human brain will serve as an alternative media to mice, cell culture, and neural networks on a computer in studying human neurological disorders.