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…



The collective intelligence of world-leading neuroscientists

That’s who is credited with creating Boston-NeuroTalks (look at the bottom of their page). It turns out that Boston’s a bit of a college town, and thus it’s difficult to keep up with all…



A custom two photon scope on a wall



The Labrigger General Electronics Troubleshooting Guide

This is a work in progress, please contribute additions, thoughts, and criticism (constructive and otherwise) in the comments.

Step 0. RTFM.

Step 1. Turn it off and back on.
Congrats. There is a 99%…



Raspberry Pi – Arduinolike form and price, but with way more power

RDUINO A



DIY Superresolution, part III

Enrico Stefani’s lab at UCLA has a couple of crack engineers on board, Yong Wu and Pedro Felipe Gardeazábal Rodríguez. These two fellows built a custom STED system and have documented the setup on…



3D printed Titanium at iMaterialize

Looks good. Should be handy. And a bit pricey. These metal powder-based 3D printing materials aren’t bad. The products are much more brittle than real, solid metal is. But they’re also very light, and…



DIY Superresolution, part II

This paper (York et al. 2012) came out earlier this year, but I thought it’s worth highlighting here, give the subject matter.

We present a hybrid technique, multifocal SIM (MSIM), that combines the resolution-doubling…



Meanwhile, at Labrigger Labs

Safety first, people. srsly
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Getting NEURON to run on OS X with Python support

UPDATED!
This question has come up a number of times recently: how does one get NEURON to run with Python support on OS X.

At this time, there’s no simple way to install NEURON with Python support any more because Eilif’s package is outdated and won’t run with current EPD and XCode versions. The…



Micro-Manager

Micro-Manager (µ-Manager) is an open, ImageJ-based suite of code for controlling microscopes and associated instrumentation. Check out the list of supported equipment.



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…



Three quick productivity tips

There’s probably a 10:1 ratio between productivity tips and people implementing them. So this’ll be short.

– Stay organized, but keep it simple. E.g., one text file with a few lists. Don’t go in for complex software or systems.
– This book “Getting Things Done” is a quick read with some good tips.
– Use…



We used to dress up for conferences



DIY Superresolution

Quickpalm is an open source software package for DIY PALM and STORM implementations. They’re responsive on their discussion forum and have a wiki with a decent amount of technical information.