Hippocampal Neurons Keep Track of Two Things—One Moving, One Not—Simultaneously

Hippocampal Neurons Keep Track of Two Things—One Moving, One Not—Simultaneously

Animals move, and because they do, they must be masters of multiple frames of reference. As the monkey vaults himself through the air, his eye must be on the stationary branch looming into view; as the child circles on the merry-go-round, her eye must track the brass ring just around the curve. Each frame provides its own stream of spatial information—the moving limb, the fixed target—and proce...

Membrane Oscillations Keep Neurons on the Right Track

To use FRET for picking apart the pathways involved in phagocytosis, the researchers made mouse phagocytes that expressed engineered proteins— versions of ADP ribosylation factors (ARFs) 1 and 6 had fl uorescent protein attached, and fl uorescent marker proteins that would bind to either ARF1 or ARF6, when they had been activated inside the cell. Binding of the activated fl uorescent ARFs to th...

Editorial Keep on Moving

High-Density Cursor: a Visualization Technique that Helps Users Keep Track of Fast-moving Mouse Cursors

As bigger screens and multi-monitor configurations become more popular, users employ higher mouse accelerations in order to traverse the screen reasonably quickly. The faster the mouse cursor moves, however, the more it seems to jump from one position to the next, as it is updated only at the refresh rate of the monitor. This lack of visual continuity increases the risk of users losing track of...

How bacteria keep proteins moving

Bacteria contain large numbers of negatively-charged proteins to avoid the electrostatic interactions with ribosomes that would dramatically reduce protein diffusion.