Category Archives: Methods

September 29

How model organisms are chosen

Intro Mice, fruit flies, worms, and monkeys. These are just some of the many animal species that are commonly used by scientists to learn about the nervous system, often with the goal of uncovering something about the human nervous system. If that’s the case, then the species being used is said to be a model […]

June 10

What is a topology and why is it in my neuroscience?!

[En Español] Time to go back to math class and into a world where a coffee mug and a donut are the same thing. If you ignore distances and shapes, and instead focus on continuity and relations, a donut can easily be morphed into a coffee mug, making them “topologically equivalent”. The hole is the […]

May 27

How to Write a Scientific Paper

Most people learn how to write a scientific paper or proposal through trial and error. This guide hopes to make that process easier.

April 01

How do we use magnets to take pictures of the brain?

Magnets are everywhere – they exist in our electronics, cars, refrigerators, and so on. The Earth itself is one giant magnet, which is why we can use compasses to navigate! They also have many incredible biomedical applications, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which allows us to take pictures of biological tissues and organs in a […]

December 31

Life After Death(?): From Strokes to Sci-Fi

Death is not a singular event, as implied when we refer to the “time of death” or “moment of death”. It is a relatively long, drawn out, active process: these terms merely simplify and provide a hard boundary. Not everything in the brain (or the rest of the body) dies at the same time, at […]

August 13

Diffusion MRI: Mapping the structural highways of the brain

Some of my favorite scientific images to look at come from scanning the human brain with a tool called diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (or diffusion MRI). These images depict the long fibers that connect one part of the brain to another in a color-coded fashion, with a beautiful result: a colorful map of the brain’s […]

April 23

I Can See it in Your Face: Facial Expressions in Mice

How do you know what an animal is feeling? Unfortunately, you can’t ask a dog, mouse, or fly how they are feeling or what they are thinking. This is one of the chief problems in animal research – we just don’t have ready access to their internal thoughts and feelings. This inability to access the […]

June 13

BrainEx: Restoring Brain Circulation After Death

[En español] In May of 2018, headlines across the internet warned of a creepy new “brain in a bucket” experiment, in which scientists had “reanimated” the disembodied brains of pigs from slaughterhouses, and surely promised a “living hell” for humans. Very little was known about this study at the time, as the lead scientist, Nenad […]

March 14

Me, my cells and I: a love poem

  matte black curtains are taped tightly to the windows the only light allowed here is the gentle yellow glow that illuminates the stage   gracefully getting into position I delicately balance between thumb and forefinger a thin disk carried with a careful reverence placed gently on the altar humble sighs aside my hands rise […]

December 27

The Trouble with Drug Development

Open a new tab, load up a science media site you know. What do you first see across the front page? You will almost certainly find a headline blaring “NEW FINDINGS SHOW AUTISM’S DAYS ARE NUMBERED” or “UNIVERSITY RESEARCHER CURES PARKINSON’S DISEASE”. Open the page up next week, and you will almost certainly see some […]