The touchdown of Atlantis at Kennedy Space Center today marks the end of an era. After 135 missions, NASA’s 30-year Space Transportation System (STS) program has come to an end. The Space Shuttle fleet delivered the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station, and dozens of satellites, space probes, crew and supplies. We trawled through hours of archive footage from NASA, and digitised dozens of VHS tapes, in order to show every single mission in chronological order. This video is our tribute to the shuttles and to the men and women who traveled in them.

Two teams of neuroscientists have reconstructed the wiring of tiny pieces of the brain and related it to the function of individual cells. To understand how the brain works, you need to know what connects to what. But the brain has so many cells, making so many connections, that this is a big challenge. Using a souped-up electron microscope with a sophisticated slicing system, along with lots of computing power, the scientists mapped tiny specks of the mouse visual system. The team at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Germany focused on the retina, while researchers at Harvard University in Boston looked at a bit of the visual cortex, the area of the brain where information from the retina is processed. The teams confirmed previous ideas about how neurons in these areas help mice to see. The pair of papers is published in this week’s Nature.

Marvel at the detail of the brainy reconstructions in this Nature Video. The video also shows how the new technique works, and how the research is part of ‘connectomics’, which aims to map the brain at many different scales.

Scientists often study penguins to gauge how climate change is affecting the marine ecosystem. To keep track of individual birds they use flipper bands. But a 10-year study shows that these bands reduce the penguins’ breeding success and survival, thus biasing the data. To find out more about the study and see the cute king penguins that took part, check out this video.

The findings are published in Nature and there’s an interview with the researchers on this week’s Nature Podcast

See also the Nature news story ‘Band of bothers’.

A technique that enables scientists to control the behaviour of cells using flashes of light has been named Method of the Year 2010 by the journal Nature Methods. Optogenetics, as it’s called, has already been used by neuroscientists to show which nerve cells fire when a sleeping mouse wakes. The technique is also expected to shine light on the interactions of proteins inside cells.

This video explains how optogenetics works and shows how it’s been used to control behaviour in mice, worms and flies.

This stunning slow motion footage shows how bats use echolocation to find water. It was made by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology whose work was published in Nature Communications today. We know how bats echolocate to hunt insects, but this is the first study to show how they recognise large, flat objects like ponds. Moreover, by testing young bats that had never encountered a pond or river before, the researchers show that bats seem to have a built-in ability to recognize these important features of their environment.

In this week’s Nature, a team from California show how it’s possible to control images on a screen using just the power of thought. Working with patients who had electrodes implanted for surgery, they fed signals from the patients’ brains into a computer, and then watched as they learned how to use these signals to fade in an image of Marilyn Monroe, or fade out Michael Jackson. This video about the work was made by first author Moran Cerf:

Read the Nature News story and the original research paper.

Guessing how a protein will fold up based on its DNA sequence is often too difficult for even the most advanced computer programs. Now scientists have created Foldit, an online game that lets human players do the work. Meet two Foldit gamers and researcher David Baker in this video:

Read the original research and find out more about the ‘citizen science’ trend in this Nature News Feature

On Monday we reported the death of Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider. In his memory, I thought I’d re-post this video interview, shot at last year’s climate change meeting in Copenhagen. In the interview, Schneider tells Nature’s Olive Heffernan about his recent book ‘Science as a Contact Sport’ and explains why in his view, keeping global warming below 2 degrees is unrealistic.

A new primate fossil from Saudi Arabia could bring us one step closer to dating the divergence between apes (including humans) and Old World monkeys. Here’s the video – you can also read the original research paper and the Nature News story.