Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Cellular imaging at Krasnow


I’m pleased to report that we’ve taken delivery of our Nikon C1 confocal microscope and that very shortly we’ll be opening a cellular imaging core at the Institute to complement our MRI facility.

So what’s the deal with confocal microscopy? The short version goes like this: biological specimens, especially living tissue ones, are thick. Classical microscopes have a problem with this and internal organelles get blurred out. With confocal microscopy, we can get around that problem and look into the sample with all the detail of the cell’s three-dimensional structure preserved. Used in consort with our ability to molecularly engineer biological components of the cell to fluoresce, this becomes an incredibly powerful tool for our neuroscientists who work at the neuronal or cellular level.

Fish are smart!

From today’s NY Times (and with good timing with the on-going Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago)–this piece by Sean Carroll.

My thesis advisor, Bernard Agranoff, became famous studying the goldfish brain. Now I know why.

Here’s the money quote:

A series of studies has recently revealed that reef fish are surprisingly adaptable. Freshly caught wild fish quickly learn new tasks and can learn to discriminate among colors, patterns and shapes, including those they have never encountered. These studies suggest that learning and interpreting new stimuli play important roles in the lives of reef fish.

Disciplinary Walls: Physics compared with Economics

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution. Here is a very interesting blog entry from orgtheory.net on how two disciplines handle their own publishing outside the normal boundaries of the field. Read all the comments–they are excellent.

Here at Krasnow we have three very excellent physicists who work on neural dynamics. We also have an economist working cognitive neuroscience and another economist (also affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute) who does agent-based models of social complexity.

Jim

How bad exactly is the ice on your next commercial flight?

From Revere at Effect Measure on bacteria counts aboard commercial aircraft:

Shortly thereafter the news carried stories that the US EPA had determined that 15% of water on a sample of 327 aircraft flunked the total coliform standards and inspections showed that all aircraft were out of compliance with the national drinking water standards.

Too bad we can’t bring our own beverages any more.

Jim

A talk at the National Defense University

I gave a talk for my friend and colleague Professor Margaret Polski at NDU today for her class on planning for what’s ahead in Afghanistan. Margaret is also an affiliate here at the Institute. I was delighted to find out that her mentor at Indiana was none other than newly minted Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom.

The class was really tough. I found that making the case for the importance of neuroscience to a bunch of practical smart folks about to be deployed to Afghanistan is a difficult proposition!
Here’s a plug for Margaret’s book.
Jim

Follow up on nuclear physics

As a follow-up to the previous post, here’s an excellent essay on what’s gone awry for the field of nuclear physics over the last sixty years.

Money quote:

The story of nuclear physics is one of the most remarkable marketing disasters in intellectual history. In the space of a few decades, the public perception of the atom’s promise to serve humanity, and the international admiration that surrounded the many brilliant people who unraveled the mysteries of matter, had collapsed. So pronounced was the erosion of attitudes toward nuclear physics that, by the late 1990s, several European physicists felt it necessary to establish an organization called Public Awareness of Nuclear Science for the explicit purpose of improving the public image of their discipline.