We hope these findings are useful to those studying mouse social behavior! Congrats to former undergrad Stephen Batter, whose honors project kicked off this study. Thanks also to co-first authors Patryk Ziobro and Cass Malone, and to our current undergrads who helped bring this to the finish line!

Interestingly, there is past work showing that mice will forgo reinforcers (even cocaine and amphetamine) to gain access to a running wheel. So one possibilty is that running wheels are like crack for mice and decrease their sensitivity to other rewards, perhaps even social rewards.

These effects on social behavior are somewhat long-lasting, as they're not reversed by a 2-week period with running wheels removed and replaced with a standard paper hut.

Unexpectedly, we found that free access to running wheels in the home cage, either for 5-weeks over adolescence (weaning till adulthood) or even for a 2-week period in adulthood, inhibits social motivation in group-housed female mice when they are given the chance to interact with a novel female.

Controlling the media is one of the items on the authoritarian checklist; this includes not just hard news, and increasingly social media, but also threatening satirists who mock the regime.
The FCC is pushing this control, but corporations do not have to fold. open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

Agreed!!