Imaging Course at Max Planck Florida

The Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience is holding an imaging course Jan 11-20, 2016.
They have a really excellent line up of lecturers. A range of topics will be covered: two-photon imaging, FLIM, FRET, endoscopy, uncaging, optogenetics, SPIM, image analysis, instrumentation (alignment, system design), …

Applications are due in a few days, Nov….



Cute trick for spinning down tubes

The web site is in Japanese, but the pictures and gif are self explanatory.



Neurolabware SfN party v2.0

Neurolabware is having another SfN party this year.



2015 Kavli Futures Symposium for Neurotechnologies

The 2015 Kavli Futures Symposium on “Next Generation NeuroTechnologies” will be Sept 26 in NYC. Freeman, Ji, Svoboda, Pillow, and others are all speaking. Here’s a link. Registration is filling up fast.



Calcium imaging analysis GUI for MATLAB

Stephan (currently in the Gilbert lab @ Rockefeller) wrote in to share his code for analyzing calcium signalling data in MATLAB. Thanks, Stephan!

Stephan writes…

I made a MATLAB GUI that automatically extracts ROIs from…



CodeV, Zemax, OSLO, or …

Trying to decide which optical design software to use? Just try them out and decide for yourself. I like how Steve Eckhardt (great guy, btw, in case you’re looking for someone to consult…



PackIO for NI devices

Adam Packer wrote some LabVIEW software for acquiring and generating data from National Instruments cards called PackIO. It is meant to trigger and synchronize equipment as well as record any data, with a…



Voice control

Voice control has just recently become interesting to me. Ikuko bought me an Amazon Echo and I’m surprised at how useful I find it. I’m also surprised at how well it works– it can…



Preprints and the wide field of view 2-photon

The preprint for the wide field of view 2-photon system we built has been updated. Check it out at bioRxiv.org.

Preprint servers are a great way to share work-in-progress. ArXiv and…



an hdf5/matlab file browser

Michael Graupner has coded a nice program for browsing and managing hdf5 files (closely related to MATLAB files) called hdf5Manager. And it’s open source.



A custom swivel/gimbal for luers

This from Matt Palmatier:

Drug self-administration labs need swivels and there are plenty of medical devices (rotating luer fittings) that perform this function for pretty cheap. However, suppliers-that-shall-remain-nameless charge quite a bit for simple luer…



Raspberry Pi mini monitor

Labrigger has been experimenting with Raspberry Pis. We still find a lot of uses for Arduinos for little jobs around experimental rigs. Their simplicity and predictable performance (no background processes) make them easy to implement…



Clearing out a gmail account

If your gmail account gets filled up and you need more space, you could pay for an upgraded gmail account with more storage. Or you can clear out space. For clearing out space, there are…



New spike inference for SIMA

Following up SIMA, which has been covered here before:

The SIMA team has released a new version of its toolbox that includes a spike inference algorithm developed by Eftychios Pnevmatikakis and Liam Paninski’s



Inexpensive IR viewer options

From Benjamin Judkewitz:

I needed an IR viewer to see a Ti:S beam and was really surprised to find that most viewers still sell for > 1000 € (or $). Visualizing NIR used to be…