Monthly archives: October, 2012

Light synthesizer

Above, theory.
Below, practice.

(source)



figshare is taking off

Figshare is an online database for storing figures, data, and papers. It’s been around for a while, but recently its really been taking off.

–You can post images, or entire paper PDFs. Also datasets.

–It’s citable. Useful…



Labrigger shirts

Against middle management’s better judgement, Labrigger shirts are available now. Link to the store.

Just two designs right now. The one above, and the popular Guide to Neuroscientists,…



Post publication peer review

Post publication peer review has yet to really take off, but Labrigger hopes it does. One of the newest sites is PubPeer.

PubPeer does it right, allowing for anonymity. This is important in order to obtain…



Aftermarket iPhones and Canon camera software for scientific applications

Sometimes it’s possible to use aftermarket software (or firmware) to make consumer products function for lab applications. In this post, I’ll cover some software for iOS cameras and Canon cameras that add functions useful for scientific…



Some polls matter more than others

A flurry of posts on the topic culminated in this from Lars Engstrom:

Turnout at the polls this year was low… but here are the results:

How would you complete this sentence:
using confocal and light sheet…



Hubbian for SfN abstracts

Hubbian is an alternative interface for browsing the abstracts for the upcoming Society for Neuroscience meeting. It tracks abstracts views and has an interface for comments and voting. It’s a product of four members…



Use 50 ohm BNCs, not 75 ohm

Coax BNC cables come in two flavors, 50 ohm and 75 ohm. For experimental rigs (PMTs, DAQs, amplifiers), always buy 50 ohm cables. The 75 ohm versions are for video applications,…



GCaMP5: Already old news?

The GCaMP5 paper is out now. The paper looks fantastic. There’s tons of helpful information and impressive demonstrations of its performance in several popular model systems.

But isn’t GCaMP6 the best thing going? Is this old…



Fraud

New analysis in PNAS is used to support several new conclusions:

Fraud is increasing. “The percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud has increased 10-fold since 1975.”
“…for articles in which the reason for retraction…



Interview with the developers of HelioScan

Last Monday, Labrigger covered HelioScan, a LabVIEW-based, two-photon laser scanning microscopy software suite.

Marcel van ‘t Hoff (left) and Dominik…