Monthly archives: December, 2011

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 fluorescence…



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 Overload stars from…



Visualizations

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



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 making a…



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 complete crap….



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 the …