SfN 2009: The attention of owls
Sudden movements and sounds can trigger a battle between neurons in the brain, and the winners get to decide where an animal will look, according to new research. Read the full story on Nature News. Read more
Sudden movements and sounds can trigger a battle between neurons in the brain, and the winners get to decide where an animal will look, according to new research. Read the full story on Nature News. Read more
The stimulation of a tiny number of neurons can evoke entire memories, new research in mice suggests. Read the full story on Nature News here. Read more
There are heaps of posters and presentations this year about optogenetics — the technique developed just a few years ago at Stanford by Karl Deisseroth and Ed Boyden, in which neurons can be engineered to respond to light. There’s even a section of the press book on optogenetics. If this had been a year ago, I might have rolled my eyes and thought, “optogenetics is so 2005”, but it looks like the technology is riding on its second wave: it’s out there, people trust it, and now labs are using it in quite creative ways and actually discovering new things about the brain. A few people at the conference are already murmuring about a Nobel for optogenetics. Read more
In a first for the SfN conference, the director of the NIH — who ultimately holds the purse strings for most of the people here — made an appearance and addressed the crowd. Francis Collins began his talk with a facetious reference to some of the criticism he’s fielded since his appointment just months ago. Read more
Functional MRI has been getting a bad rap lately, with recent papers and posters critical of fMRI analyses receiving a frenzy of media attention. These have generated a harsh reaction from the public; many journalist friends of mine have declared they’ll never write about an fMRI study ever again. Read more
The massive annual conference of the Society for Neuroscience hit the ground running today in sunny and crisp Chicago. It’s only day one and the conference center is already clogged with neuroscientists. Attendance is supposedly around 30,000 this year — a staggering number, but down from the conference’s peak a few years ago in Washington, D.C. when attendance almost hit 35,000 (and when travel budgets were a bit more generous). Read more
Nature reporter Lizzie Buchen will be covering this year’s Society for Neuroscience conference from Chicago. Look for updates from her on all things brainy from 17-21 October. Read more
Some fantastic work was presented at the press conference on stem cells, but it all fell rather flat – the only conference I was at that finished early for lack of questions. Read more
Last year there was wild buzz about some new techniques predicted to transform biology. The Brainbow, of course, but even more the light-activated channel rhodopsins which allow you to activate or deactivate key proteins with the flash of light of particular wavelength – you could watch the consequences of opening membrane channels, for example, in a live animal. Yet close to nothing is being presented on this at this meeting. Read more
The History of Neuroscience lecture this afternoon was one I had been really looking forward to. McGill University’s Brenda Milner was to speak on the field of memory, which – when she began to study it in the 1950s – was rather unfashionable and certainly understudied. Read more