Mssv

Now this is why I love neuroscience. In a recent weekly paper presentation, one of the groups in my class presented a paper called Genetic enhancement of learning and memory in mice. After altering a single gene in mice, the authors of the paper managed to improve their learning and memory significantly, by up to [...]

Today I had to give two presentations; one summarising a paper about systems consolidation in memory, and another covering my research project this year. The research project presentation had been prepared for quite a while in advance, but as luck would have it, yesterday afternoon we struck on a different way of statistically analysing my [...]

Today I had an interesting and unique experience - I had my brain scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The point of this was to take part in one of my friend’s psychology research experiments, earn �27 and also (arguably most importantly) get a picture of my brain.
Doing an fMRI is an unusual thing. [...]

While doing some research into neural coding, I came across a reference for a paper that claims bats have nanosecond acuity with echolocation.
Say what? Nanosecond? Apparently so. I can’t really tell how they came to this conclusion by the abstract, but it’s been reliably cited in another paper. I’m definitely going to check this out [...]

Yet again, people are being confused by Kevin ‘Captain Cyborg’ Warwick’s work. Wired has just published an article about Tech Predictions for the Decade, and here’s a quote:
Other futuristic technology poised for human consumption is the implanted sensor. Gantz pointed out that University of Reading professor Kevin Warwick, who has a sensor implanted in his [...]

A major part of my project involves me taking recordings of a signal (in this case, electrochemical spikes from a neuron) and discriminating them from the noise inherent in the system…

An interesting quotation from this week’s New Scientist confirms what I’ve suspected* for a while:
The latest 42 inch widescreen flat plasma panel screens cost around $7000, not counting a $250 wall mount and the digital tuner needed to receive broadcasts. Yet customers appear unconvinced of their quality. It turns out you cannot see the difference [...]

New words and terms I’ve heard at my lab:
Fiascotorial, adj.: combinations or permutations of fiasco-like situations. e.g., “And then the squirrel fell into the bowl! Just imagine the fiascotorial possibilites!”
Gene-jockey, n.: derogatory term for a geneticist or molecular biology. e.g., “Those gene-jockeys working on the squirrel genome project, they don’t understand that the real discoveries [...]

Saw Donnie Darko a second time today, with a friend from Leeds; it survived rewatching quite well.
Afterwards, I described my ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ theory of cognitive development to her. It’s a little like Piaget’s controversial theory (although obviously much sillier). Jean Piaget was a psychologist who believed that children when through qualitatively different levels of [...]

During one of our classes today, we talked about the possible causes of Parkinson’s disease. One of the lecturers mentioned that in Kentucky, researchers thought they’d found a possible link between eating squirrel brains and Parkinson’s; 12 out of 42 people they surveyed with Parkinson’s ate squirrel brains, leading them to think that perhaps Parkinson’s [...]