Monday, October 19, 2009

Cool Stuff on Them Interwebs

OK, this is a lazy post.

Popular Science's Most Amazing Medical Images.
Some of these are cheesy, others touching, and others very, very cool.

This is pretty cool just from an experimental setup standpoint. I briefly worked in a neuroscience lab where we had mastered how to image clusters of neurons in genetically engineered mice -- every time the neuron was activated, it fluoresced, and we could see local-scale firing patterns. The problem was being able to do this while the mice ran in mazes, etc. We used fiber optics, but they would often either pull the tube out of their heads or push it further in and kill themselves. This solution reminds me of the "locomotion compensator," invented by Ernst Kramer and Peter Heinecke in the 70's to track insect movement. (Can't find the original article but here are articles that cite it.) Insert joke here about "reinventing the sphere."

1 comment: