Tripping the light fantastic

Light fantastic

postdoctoral experience. It is important to stay close enough to your background to facilitate continuity and, at the same time, to take a different path that demonstrates originality and growth. The choice of research problems to address is obviously crucial. There will be many distractions and it is necessary to be a good citizen and accept responsibilities but also to stay focused and produc...

Fly Courtship Song: Triggering the Light Fantastic

In a study in this issue, Clyne and Miesenböck (2008) apply an ingenious optogenetic technology to activate neurons that generate male-specific courtship song in flies. This work sheds new light on the neural circuitry underlying sexually dimorphic behaviors in Drosophila.

The Light Fantastic: Using airborne lidar in archaeological survey

The light fantastic: PHOTON materials for technician education

Project PHOTON has developed a set of instructional materials suitable for a onesemester laboratory based introduction to photonics course. The textbook, laboratory experiment kit and laboratory manual have been thoroughly field tested by participating high schools and two year colleges. All materials have been aligned to national Math, Science, Technology and Language Arts standards. OCIS code...

Tripping the HCN Breaker

Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels regulate neuronal excitability, pacemaking, dendritic integration, and homeostatic plasticity and are culprits in aberrant neuronal activity in certain epilepsies. In this issue of Neuron two manuscripts (Santoro et al. and Zolles et al.) report that HCN channel gating and expression are controlled by Trip8b (Pex5R) but with a b...