A catalog of identified neurons, the circuits they form, and inter-species homologies.
Monthly Archives: June 2010
The Third Reviewer
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Neuroscientists love talking about recent papers (lambasting, exalting), but currently the options for doing this online are bad. You have to log in, with your real name, at whichever journal published the paper. So you’re not going to write anything critical, lest the author be angry at you, nor are you going to go back and follow it up, because it’s such a hassle to find the paper again on the journal site. Enter The Third Reviewer.
It’s a centralized commenting location for all major neuroscience papers. Every recently published paper has a page that you can find by browsing or searching. You can leave comments anonymously, and you can request follow-up emails when others comment. ThirdReviewer currently indexes all papers from 11 major journals, including Neuron, Nature, J Neurosci, and Nature Neuroscience.
Check it out and opine: The Third Reviewer
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I.B.M. building A.I. to play Jeopardy
NYTimes: I.B.M.’s Supercomputer Challenges ‘Jeopardy!’ Champions – NYTimes.com
IBM is building a massive question answering A.I., named “Watson”, that is going to play on Jeopardy in the fall.
Transcranial Pulsed Ultrasound Stimulates Intact Brain Circuits
Yusuf Tufail, Alexei Matyushov, Nathan Baldwin, Monica L. Tauchmann, Joseph Georges, Anna Yoshihiro, Stephen I. Helms Tillery, William J. Tyler. Transcranial Pulsed Ultrasound Stimulates Intact Brain Circuits. Neuron, Volume 66, Issue 5, 681-694, 10 June 2010.
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.
neurodudes 