Loosely Assembled

Location Aware Brain Cells: Trajectory & Memory.

An Ignite Talk at The National Geographic Society #WhereCampDC 2011 by yours truly.

I have been fascinated by “place cells” recently, and it seems the press has just caught on as well this week with many articles in major outlets covering the phenomena. I guess it takes a spectacle to get people to write headlines about science, and this VR setup for a mouse is just that.

Basically they are watching the mouse’s place neurons activate differently depending where it goes inside the virtual environment. The same patterns emerge when it returns to the same places.

I have read a similar story with fMRI and humans, but I guess what’s different here are direct neural sensors, and real time physical movement (it’s hard to get a mouse to use a joystick like the humans did). The physical movement piece is critical in learning how proprioception contributes to the activity.

There is also a video on the linked page, worth taking a peek at too.

(Via @kernull.)

(Via Stromatal image of type specimen TNS F-197981 | Cordyceps.us.)

An old story from 2007 still blows my mind. Lets get some artists working with this medium!

Here are a few snippets to get you to read this mind blowing article about Lene Hau’s work:

… slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic.

… brought light to a complete halt in a cloud of ultracold atoms.

… made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud then retrieved it from another cloud nearby.

Light and matter united

A robot scientist that can generate its own hypotheses and run experiments to test them has made its first real scientific discoveries.

via NewScientist

Can’t convince anyone that your brilliant idea will really work? Can’t find a convenient way to prove your point? Oh yeah, just try it on yourself.

There is a great collection of self-experimentation stories up at the New Scientist site. Get ready to read about people pouring yellow fever infected vomit into their eyes, stabbing themselves, inflicting themselves with radiation burns, suffering from oxygen poisoning, sleeping with cave-rats, dropping acid, trying to get ulcers, and letting hookworm larvae burrow away.