Wired Magazine’s current issue (poetically titled, “Why Things Suck”) has a nice little piece on the conflicts between the human brain and science. Essentially, Thomas Hayden, the author, notes that our brains have evolved to prefer neat stories and fantastical explanations to numbers, abstractions and statistical norms.

“…thanks to evolution, half of all Americans don’t believe in evolution. That’s the universe for you: impersonal, uncaring, and ironic.”

Drosopholist extraordinaire Ralph Greenspan will be signing copies of his latest books at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press booth (Booth 207) at the Neuroscience Meeting in San Diego, Monday, November 5 at 2 PM. Greenspan is probably best known for his book “Fly Pushing: The Theory and Practice of Drosophila Genetics”. This book teaches the essentials of working with flies and does so in an impressively readable and engaging manner. Ralph’s recent book, “An Introduction to Nervous Systems” has been met with rave reviews (read Nature’s, Nature Neuroscience’s and Bioessay’s). It’s a wonderful primer for Neuroscientists, teaching the principles of nervous systems from an evolutionary viewpoint, starting with the simplest single-celled organisms and adding complexity up to the level of invertebrates like flies. And because that wasn’t enough work, Ralph has also served as an editor, along with Geoffrey North, on a contributed monograph on “Invertebrate Neurobiology”, which gives an up-to-date snapshot of the state of this rapidly expanding field.

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October’s issue of CSH Protocols is now online. I’m very happy about one of the featured freely available protocols, Preparation of Rodent Hippocampal Slice Cultures. I’ve been digging through our Neuroscience Imaging protocols for months now, and have been unable to post many of them on CSH Protocols, because they deal with slice cultures. Each seems to start with an established culture and proceeds to explain an imaging technique that can be used with it. Each referenced the Stoppini et al., paper from 1991 that doesn’t seem to be available online, other than as an abstract. Luckily for us all, Michael Dailey and his lab at the University of Iowa were willing to write up a modern update of the method. They’ve included a very useful movie showing one of the tricker parts of the technique. With this in place, you can now expect more neuro-imaging to turn up in CSH Protocols over the next few months, including this month’s protocols for Imaging Microglia in Live Brain Slices and Slice Cultures, Imaging FM Dyes in Brain Slices and Imaging Zinc in Brain Slices.

As neuroscience methods continue to improve by leaps and bounds, researchers are starting to dissect behavior on a molecular level. These types of experiments call for highly defined, repeatable behavioral assays, something that’s not always easy to establish. As author Carol Ann Paul and colleagues note, “The behavioral approach to solving neuroscience questions, unlike cellular and molecular approaches, is difficult to define and is therefore sometimes considered a less-disciplined approach. Methods describing behavioral procedures are often thought to be crude when compared to the precision of physiological or molecular methods.” This month CSH Protocols presents a series of rat behavioral protocols to address these issues. Read the rest of this entry »

CSH Protocols is meant to be a dynamic set of information. If it’s just a static collection of articles that never changes, then it’s no better than the paper manuals that came before. Just reproducing books online seems a waste of the potential that online publishing offers. So expect things to continuously evolve… Read the rest of this entry »