Wednesday, September 25, 2013

a red disk never comes alone

The disk industry has undergone an incredible consolidation: there are only three companies left. Toshiba is focused on laptop disks, while Seagate and Western Digital manufacture the whole range. In this battle to the last tooth, the color of disks has become an important survival tool.

a red disk never comes alone

Thursday, September 19, 2013

maintaining glossaries

It used to be that scientists in the average took seven years to enter in a field and make a contribution, after which they would hit a ceiling. Their institution would then offer them a sabbatical that would allow them to either get to the next level through osmosis and synergy, or change the field.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

A new class of bipolar cells

Neuroscientists reconstructed the arrangement of neurons in a section of mouse retina after imaging the tissue with electron microscopy. FABIAN ISENSEE, JULIA KUHL; HELMSTAEDTER ET AL.It took 225 undergraduates more than 20,000 hours of work to map the wiring diagram of a 117 µm by 80 µm patch of a mouse retina. They did discover a new class of bipolar cells, however the patch was too small to determine its exact function: a larger patch is necessary. They will try to achieve this through a crowd-sourcing project known as EyeWire.

News article: Making connections in the eye