neurodudes

Today one of our readers brought a new blog to my attention.

LabRigger is a how-to blog with a fresh look (kudos for the design and typography) that already has many interesting and relevant posts up for scientists who like to build. (You know who you are…) Furthermore, it seems especially geared toward neuroscientists and physiology folks. I’ve already added this one to my browser’s bookmarks.

Here are some of my favorites from quickly perusing the site: Printable bolt size charts, Tips on intrinsic optical imaging, Comparison of high NA, low mag objectives, and my favorite, Catalogs as textbooks. (I still remember a neuroscience faculty member here at MIT who told me that he brings science catalogs along on his vacations as “leisure reading” to stay up-to-date on new tools and to generate ideas for experiments.) In fact, I wanted to read just about every post on this blog and I think you will too! And if you’re the author of this blog, please introduce yourself in the comments, too.

http://neuronbank.org/

A catalog of identified neurons, the circuits they form, and inter-species homologies.

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Neuroscientists love talking about recent papers (lambasting, exalting), but currently the options for doing this online are bad. You have to log in, with your real name, at whichever journal published the paper. So you’re not going to write anything critical, lest the author be angry at you, nor are you going to go back and follow it up, because it’s such a hassle to find the paper again on the journal site. Enter The Third Reviewer.

It’s a centralized commenting location for all major neuroscience papers. Every recently published paper has a page that you can find by browsing or searching. You can leave comments anonymously, and you can request follow-up emails when others comment. ThirdReviewer currently indexes all papers from 11 major journals, including Neuron, Nature, J Neurosci, and Nature Neuroscience.

Check it out and opine: The Third Reviewer
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NYTimes: I.B.M.’s Supercomputer Challenges ‘Jeopardy!’ Champions – NYTimes.com

IBM is building a massive question answering A.I., named “Watson”, that is going to play on Jeopardy in the fall.

Yusuf Tufail, Alexei Matyushov, Nathan Baldwin, Monica L. Tauchmann, Joseph Georges, Anna Yoshihiro, Stephen I. Helms Tillery, William J. Tyler. Transcranial Pulsed Ultrasound Stimulates Intact Brain Circuits. Neuron, Volume 66, Issue 5, 681-694, 10 June 2010.

In motor cortex, ultrasound-stimulated neuronal activity was sufficient to evoke motor behaviors. Deeper in subcortical circuits, we used targeted transcranial ultrasound to stimulate neuronal activity and synchronous oscillations in the intact hippocampus. We found that ultrasound triggers TTX-sensitive neuronal activity in the absence of a rise in brain temperature (<0.01°C). Here, we also report that transcranial pulsed ultrasound for intact brain circuit stimulation has a lateral spatial resolution of approximately 2 mm and does not require exogenous factors or surgical invasion.

Two neat tools concerned with the “connectome” (i.e. the pattern of connections in the nervous system):

Semantic wiki:
http://www.connectome.ch/wiki/Main_Page

Desktop viewer:
http://connectomeviewer.org/viewer “Multi-Modal Multi-Level Network and Neuroimaging Visualization and Analysis” (screencasts)

Expression data is now available for over 60K gene probes over the entire human brain. Click here to access this monster data set!

More info after the jump.

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Craig Venter has made a bacterium from an entirely synthesized genome (link is nice summary in WSJ). Here’s the paper in Science. Now, that that’s taken care of… who will be the first to design a “synthetic biological neural circuit”?

1. Beyond Brain Machine Interface: From Senses to Cognition
Co-sponsored by IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society and Army Research Office
June 20, 2010, Long Beach, CA
Travel fellowships, poster abstracts, and registration:

http://tnsre.bme.jhu.edu/

2. 39th Neural Interfaces Conference
Co-sponsored by NIH Deep Brain Stimulation Consortium
June 21-23, 2010, Long Beach, CA
Free registration for students (Faculty Advisor letter due May 21)
Program, registration, and further information:

http://www.neuralinterfaces2010.com/

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http://www.theaudeo.com/?action=technology

Detects subthreshold electrical activity from laryngeal muscles and attempts to recognize words from it, allowing a sort of silent cell phone, as well as command-and-control applications. They have a technical manual on the website, as well as a video demo of a “voiceless phone call”.