Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind.

While we’re all distributing scientific resources, I thought I’d point out that the KITP has a wonderful program on Emerging Techniques in Neuroscience, currently underway at UCSB. They have a great lineup of speakers with some overlap with the Allen Institute program. Videos of the talks are being posted online here.

So many good videos from good neuroscientists (including Chuck Stevens, John Hopfield, Clay Reid, Jeff Magee, Guoqiang Bi, and many more)… it’s going to take me a while to get through these. Enjoy!

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.

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.

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)

More info after the jump.

Press release:

Dear Colleague,

I am writing to let you know that we have just launched our first data set mapping gene expression across an adult human brain.   As with all Allen Institute Atlases, the data is freely available at www.brain-map.org For this first release, we have included:

· Spatially mapped microarray data for over 700 distinct anatomic locations throughout the brain and containing information for over 62,000 gene probes with 93% of known genes represented by at least 2 probes

· A hierarchical anatomic naming system (ontology) integrating leading schemes for different brain regions

· Searches by anatomic region, probe, or gene, as well as queries for comparing expression among pre-selected structure sets

· Expert neuroanatomic annotation of brain structures and delineation of areas sampled for microarray analysis

· An in situ hybridization study from a separate adult human brain that characterizes 55 genes in subcortical regions extending from the front of the caudate through posterior substantia nigra, and a smaller set of 10 genes through the hypothalamus. The 55-gene set focuses on the glutamatergic and GABAergic systems.

We hope that you might find these to be valuable resources, and will be continuing to add data from additional brains (8-10 in total) and improving our tools for analysis over the next few years.  As always, we appreciate your feedback, both good and bad.  If the tools and data have helped in some meaningful way, please let us know…though we can track basic usage of the data through web hits, your personal stories really help justify the continued support of the existing resources and our ability to create more.

Allan R. Jones, PhD
Chief Executive Officer
Allen Institute for Brain Science
551 N. 34th St.
Seattle WA 98103

This has been done for quite awhile but I thought I’d post about it because I think it’s a neat idea — genetically manipulate experimental subjects so that only some cells have the mutation, while others are wild-type.