http://neurodudes.com at the intersection of neuroscience and AI. Tue, 13 May 2008 04:25:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Salon has an interesting piece condemning a recent PBS show purportedly on Alzheimer's treatment but really more of a sketchy informercial. The program concerns a neurologist with tenuous ties to UC Irvine who advocates SPECT (single photon emission computed tomograpy, a technique which, similar to PET, uses a radiotracer) and ... http://neurodudes.com/2008/05/13/pbs-not-so-neuroscience-savvy/ BioNumbers - The Database of Useful Biological Numbers Here's a neat new website. It's a repository of quantitative information on biological things (eg. organisms, biomolecules, etc.) Some stuff I found while glancing through: Number of mRNA/cell in E. coli: 138 Volume occupied by all RNA in E. coli: 6% Average gene length in mammals: ... http://neurodudes.com/2008/05/09/quantitative-biology-database/ If the Fish Liver Can’t Kill, Is It Really a Delicacy? [NYT, login] Amazing. It looks like TTX (tetrodotoxin, a potent voltage-gated sodium channel blocker well-known to electrophysiologists) is not made by the pufferfish (which I had always assumed), rather it is from the bacteria/food consumed by the ... http://neurodudes.com/2008/05/05/the-truth-about-ttx/ Full agenda is available here. Speakers are mostly a mix of neurotech CEOs and VCs (and Rep. Patrick Kennedy). I've heard that there are no more free passes for students. (sadly) If anyone attends and would be willing to write-up something about the conference, please let me know and I'd be ... http://neurodudes.com/2008/05/05/neurotechnology-conference-in-boston-this-week/ The great Masao Ito, originator of one of the classic theories of cerebellar function, has published a new theory in the recent issue of Nature Neuroscience regarding how the cerebellum may be involved in control of cognition. The basic idea is that while the cerebellum has evolutionarily had a role of ... http://neurodudes.com/2008/04/29/control-of-mental-activities-by-internal-models-in-the-cerebellum/ An extremely interesting trend in neuroscience has been to use the language of Control Theory to explain brain function. A recent paper by Shadmehr and Krakauer does a very nice job of summarizing this trend and assembling a comprehensive theory of how the brain controls the body. Using ... http://neurodudes.com/2008/04/29/a-computational-neuroanatomy-for-motor-control/ Researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno have an interesting and ambitious set-up for doing research in AI that the describe in a recent paper. From the paper: We define virtual neurorobotics as follows: a computer-facilitated behavioral loop wherein a human interacts with a projected robot that meets five criteria: (1) the ... http://neurodudes.com/2008/04/28/virtual-neurorobotics/ Neurons come in many shapes and sizes. Frequently, the shape of a neuron is characteristic to its type. Several theoretical papers have demonstrated that the shape of a neuron can crucially determine its pattern of activity, independently of other factors (Mainen & Sejnowski, 1996, for example). Several ... http://neurodudes.com/2008/04/27/best-way-to-describe-neuron-shape/ A friend recently alerted me to The Journal of Visualized Experiments, a revolutionary way to present science by showing the actual experimental procedures. Poking around the site I already picked up tips for my own research just by watching others perform procedures that I do myself in the lab (eg. ... http://neurodudes.com/2008/04/21/youtube-for-biologists-journal-of-visualized-experiments/ This new technique from Cori Bargmann's lab is one of the neatest that I've seen in a while. The authors split GFP into two pieces, expressing one piece presynaptically and the other postsynaptically. This creates functional (ie. fluorescing) GFP only at sites of synaptic contact where the protein can reconstitute. ... http://neurodudes.com/2008/03/05/split-gfp-reconstituted-as-a-dynamic-synapse-label/