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Reith
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2–3 minutes·
3 comments on ReithOnce again, it’s the wonderful time of year when the BBC’s Reith Lectures are being presented. I’ve followed the Reith Lectures on my weblog for quite a few years now, so when I discovered that this year’s lecturer is none other than my old San Diego research supervisor, Prof. Vilanyanur Ramachandran, I was pretty damn…
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Front Page
I was feeling a little depressed and annoyed today when I was told that my entry for the college Science Essay Prize hadn’t won. So, to cheer myself up, I submitted it to the Kuro5hin community website and to my delight, my essay about synaesthesia has met with their approval and been posted on the…
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The Drugs Don’t Work
Over the past two days I’ve had an excellent two-part workshop in my neuroscience course on addiction, covering what we know about the causes of drug addiction at a molecular, cellular and cognitive level, reward pathways in the brain and possible treatments, vaccines and cures for drug addiction. Definitely one of the most thought provoking…
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Mutant Intelligent Mice!
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…
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Adrian’s crazy day
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…
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Magnetic Attraction
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…
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Nanosecond bats
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…
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Misunderstandings
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…
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Pattern Recognition
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…
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Digital TV
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…
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