BCG Matrix

Here’s a BCG Matrix for scientific papers. One paper is plotted on the graph. At Nature’s Action Potential blog, the editor explains why they accepted it. This…



MATLAB Mobile for iOS

On the topic of iOS apps, MATLAB has released v3.0 of their mobile app. The most apparent changes are UI usability improvements.
(MATLAB link, App Store link)



Spectra viewing app for iOS

Zeiss released an iOS app for viewing spectra.

No Android version yet, but Johannes Amon said:

of course I can’t tell you any specifics but at the moment we are evaluating a native port…



NIH stats

Success rate for all grants at NIH in 2011 = 18 %
Success rate for New Investigators = 15%

More stats at Sally Rockey’s blog.



Software for visual psychophysics

This site has a nice big list of software for visual psychophysics. It’s very extensive and includes free as well as commercial solutions: visual stimuli, analysis, teaching, hardware, and more.



Virtual desktops on Windows

Virtual desktops are used to manage screen real estate. A user might have a bunch of web browsers open on the desktop, and then hit a key to switch to a nice clean…



More MATLAB learning

On the topic of MATLAB learning materials (covered previously here and lots more MATLAB stuff here), MIT has some online courses freely available. Here’s an “aggressively gentle” intro to MATLAB,…



Use ScanImage? Support it. It’s free.

ScanImage is an excellent software package for controlling 2p scopes. It’s free and open source. It’s been actively developed and released to…



Optimizing pulse frequency for 2p imaging

The lasers used in multiphoton imaging deliver their photons in pulses. Many commonly used systems pulse at 80 MHz. However, there are good reasons to try different frequencies.

In 2007, Donnert, Eggeling, and Hell published a Nature Methods paper where they used low frequency pulses to get more…



Optics Planet and Braintree Scientific and New Era syringe pumps: Inexpensive scientific equipment

Optics Planet has a nice selection of inexpensive microscopes and other lab equipment. Such as these chubby, potential Cute…



Visualizations

Visual.ly recently posted a list of the top visualizations of 2011. This is a map of the world in which Twitter…



Teaching MATLAB

In a previous post, I gave the two line MATLAB code to generate a Gabor patch. At the other end of the spectrum, this web page spends an entire MATLAB tutorial on…



Raster plots and MATLAB

A colleague once told me: “in MATLAB, drawing a raster plot is a trivial, one line command”. True, but then you spend another 10 lines of code trying to make it not look like…



Tycho Brahe

Like the Mayan astronomers over 600 years before him, Tycho Brahe was a data factory. A data factory in the same vein as…



An Arch-based voltage sensor

The newest voltage sensor is from Adam Cohen’s lab and based on a microbial rhodopsin, a class of light sensitive proteins already being put to use in optogenetics.

In this case, they’ve…