A neutrino entered Earth and reached the South Pole from the wrong side. This muon neutrino was detected by IceCube sensors buried in the Antarctic Ice. Its source was triangulated to be TXS 0506+056, which is, to quote from the story in Nature, 'a blazar, a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at the centre and a known source of γ-rays. In a blazar, the black hole stirs gas up to temperatures of millions of degrees and shoots it out of its poles in two highly collimated jets, one of which points in the direction of the Solar System'. The tiny bright speck in the centre is Earth as photographed by Cassini from its orbit around Saturn. A single human would be a tiny speck on top of it. A single neuron would be a tiny speck in the human body. A bunch of specks of neurons working together, in a bunch of specks of humans working together have made this image possible! (Image courtesy NASA via BBC)
Venus is the disk on top. There were lot more sunspots at that time. The image was taken with an Olympus pocket camera, the same way as for the Mercury transit below.
Here is a quick and dirty image taken with iPhone 5S. Mercury is the little dot at one o'clock position.
(iPhone lens was held in front of the eye piece of a refractive telescope with objective covered with a solar filter. Celestron NexStar 80mm, 10mm eye piece; taken at 5.31 pm, location 28.4250, 77.0397) Our lab recalled Dr Vernon Mountcastle’s seminal contributions to neuroscience on his first death anniversary. He is, of course, best known for the proposing columnar organization of the cerebral cortex, besides many other path breaking discoveries. So radical were his ideas that in Mountcastle's own words,
“Many friends have inquired why the description of this general principle is contained in a paper authored by me alone. The answer is... my two colleagues were so apprehensive over my proposal of such a radical hypothesis that they sought to disavow themselves from it.” During the presentations of Mountcastle’s papers, everybody was also comparing the state of knowledge, technology, style of writing, and norms of neuroscience research with their own experiences. Four papers were discussed. Priyabrata presented, Modality and topographic properties of single neuron's of cat's somatic sensory cortex. MOUNTCASTLE VB. J Neurophysiol. 1957 Jul;20(4):408-34 This was followed by John, who discussed Some aspects of the functional organization of the cortex of the postcentral gyrus of the monkey: a correlation of findings obtained in a single unit analysis with cytoarchitecture . POWELL TP, MOUNTCASTLE VB. Bull Johns Hopkins Hosp. 1959 Sep;105:133-62. Sounak gave a presentation on Visual input to the visuomotor mechanisms of the monkey's parietal lobe. YIN TC, MOUNTCASTLE VB. Science. 1977 Sep 30;197(4311):1381-3. And finally Atanu talked about The influence of attentive fixation upon the excitability of the light-sensitive neurons of the posterior parietalcortex. MOUNTCASTLE VB, ANDERSEN RA, MOTTER BC. J Neurosci. 1981 Nov;1(11):1218-25. We were joined by the some of the first year M.Sc. and Ph.D. students for part of the morning. |
This is our irregular blog. We will post about space, cartoons, science, happenings or whatever takes our fancy. Any comments can be e.mailed to neeraj[dot]jain4e4a[at]gmail[dot]com
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