It’s going to be an interesting year.

Come funziona l’occhio, “Il secolo illustrato”, 1936
It’s going to be an interesting year.
Come funziona l’occhio, “Il secolo illustrato”, 1936
Stories of interest for September 28th
One of the unsolved puzzles of the brain is the question which code is being used when nerve cells communicate with each other. It has been known for more than a century that the basic unit of communication within the nervous system is the pulse-like fluctuation in voltage at the membrane of neurons. But there is still a hot ongoing debate on how these so-called action potentials are combined to form a code for the actual processing and transmission of information. Two forms of coding are popular candidates: one is based on the rate of action potentials (rate coding) and the other relies on the timing of their occurrences (temporal coding).
Researchers now propose that under certain conditions, both forms of coding can in fact be employed simultaneously.
Here is the full article spiking activity propagation in neuronal networks
Stories of interest for August 25th
I was up doing literature reviews (ugh) and came across this article by Joseph B. Martin. It is fascinating to me and resonates with me because Dr. Martin is advocating “cross pollination” of neuroscience, neurology, psychology, and medicine; basically, he wants us all to recover from the split that happened at the turn of the century (20th). In some ways the easiest way to explain the split would be to say that science split with philosophy–neurology and neuroscience developed into hard science and medicine while psychology and in some ways psychiatry took the philosophical route. I’m a big advocate of a unified field with sub specialties; psychologists would learn neuroscience and neurologists would learn therapy.
I found this awesome comic by cartoon by Dwayne Godwin, a professor of neurobiology at Wake Forest University, and Jorge Cham, the former researcher and cartoonist who created PhD Comics; it actually won the the informational graphics category of the 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. Must print it out 🙂 Visit Godwin’s public engagement page, where it and some others can be downloaded as PDFs.
Stories of interest for August 2nd