Category: Uncategorized

Markram’s Millions

Henry Markram got his wish. He was just awarded 500,000,000 Euros to build a computer model of the brain. In NIH terms, that’s over 100…



Cellophane as a half-wave plate

The last post on cheap optics reminded me of this 2003 paper where they showed that kitchen grade cellophane acts as a half-wave plate.

It was experimentally verified that an ordinary 25-????m-thick cellophane sheet possesses properties of…



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…



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…



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…



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…



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…



Olympus president pleads guilty, Sony to swoop in?

The AP is reporting that

Olympus Corp.’s former president Tsuyoshi Kikukawa admitted guilt Tuesday in a cover-up of massive investment losses

There are also reports that Sony may swoop in with about 0.6 billion…



Sequestration = 41% cut in new and competing NIH funding

It’s hard to find any objective analysis that says that the US government can keep paying its bills without some combination of tax increases and cuts to entitlement programs. It’s also hard to find any objective analysis that would predict that politicians would get reelected for doing such things. With that in mind, congress inacted…



Meanwhile, at Labrigger Labs

Safety first, people. srsly
Via

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Open access soon to be free?

PeerJ is a new open access journal and their killer feature is that they charge less.

What does this mean for publishing? It means it’s getting cheap fast. PLoS journals charge $1400+ for each…



We used to dress up for conferences



Words of advice from the US Forest Service



New CDC plan for zombies

From the CDC:

We continue to reach and engage a wide variety of audiences on all hazards preparedness via Zombie Preparedness; and as our own director, Dr. Ali Khan, notes, “If you are generally well…