From ebrenner from nybg.org Fri Aug 1 09:00:53 2008 From: ebrenner from nybg.org (Brenner, Eric) Date: Fri Aug 1 10:24:15 2008 Subject: [Neuroscience] Do you have a voltage clamp amplifier to spare? Message-ID: Hello All, I am a young scientist setting up a small plant electrophysiology lab at the new Pfizer Plant Research laboratory at the New York Botanical Garden. I have scrounged around to gather much of the equipment need for this purpose, but am in desperate need for a voltage clamp amplifier. I was hoping that someone in the New York Area might have an extra amplifier that they could graciously donate or give as a loan to me. With much appreciation, -- Eric D. Brenner, Ph.D Assistant Curator Project Director The New York Plant Genomics Consortium International Plant Science Center The New York Botanical Garden 200th Street and Kazimiroff Blvd., Bronx, NY 10458 ebrenner@nybg.org From jalegris from sympatico.ca Sat Aug 2 08:22:59 2008 From: jalegris from sympatico.ca (J.A.Legris) Date: Sat Aug 2 13:04:06 2008 Subject: [Neuroscience] Re: Do you have a voltage clamp amplifier to spare? References: Message-ID: <55e179a3-c26d-4c3e-8d61-629e8aa0f0cc@p25g2000hsf.googlegroups.com> On Aug 1, 10:00?am, "Brenner, Eric" wrote: > Hello All, > ? ?I am a young scientist setting up a small plant electrophysiology lab at > the new Pfizer Plant Research laboratory at the New York Botanical Garden. > I have scrounged around to gather much of the equipment need for this > purpose, but am in desperate need for a voltage clamp amplifier. ?I was > hoping that someone in the New York Area might have an extra amplifier that > they could graciously donate or give as a loan to me. > > With much appreciation, > > -- > Eric D. Brenner, Ph.D > Assistant Curator > Project Director > The New York Plant Genomics Consortium > International Plant Science Center > The New York Botanical Garden > 200th Street and Kazimiroff Blvd., > Bronx, NY 10458 > ebren...@nybg.org In case all else fails, there's one on eBay, as is, for $10. http://cgi.ebay.com/WORLD-PRECISION-VOLTAGE-CLAMP-NICE-LITTLE-MACHINE_W0QQitemZ140253983954QQihZ004QQcategoryZ26230QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem From edzska from gmail.com Fri Aug 8 13:46:42 2008 From: edzska from gmail.com (Ewa Z-ska) Date: Fri Aug 8 14:37:17 2008 Subject: [Neuroscience] pulse heka Message-ID: <3bee93df0808081146j6a21ce00t8fe0e9cab349613@mail.gmail.com> Hi All, I have some data recorded in Pulse (Heka). Unfortunately I do not have a copy of this program on my PC anymore. How to use open this data? Thanks. Ewa From Michael.Ferber from gmx.de Fri Aug 8 16:27:49 2008 From: Michael.Ferber from gmx.de (Dr. Michael Ferber) Date: Fri Aug 8 18:15:31 2008 Subject: [Neuroscience] pulse heka In-Reply-To: <3bee93df0808081146j6a21ce00t8fe0e9cab349613@mail.gmail.com> References: <3bee93df0808081146j6a21ce00t8fe0e9cab349613@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200808082327.49860.Michael.Ferber@gmx.de> On Friday 08 August 2008 20:46:42 Ewa Z-ska wrote: > Hi All, > > I have some data recorded in Pulse (Heka). Unfortunately I do not have a > copy of this program on my PC anymore. How to use open this data? > > Thanks. > Ewa > _______________________________________________ > Neur-sci mailing list > Neur-sci@net.bio.net > http://www.bio.net/biomail/listinfo/neur-sci Afaik there is a "plugin" for igor which you can use to read the data. Just have a look on the wavemetrics homepage. there should be a link somewhere.... Good luck Michael From connelly.bill from gmail.com Mon Aug 11 03:12:14 2008 From: connelly.bill from gmail.com (Bill) Date: Mon Aug 11 11:15:11 2008 Subject: [Neuroscience] Re: pulse heka References: <3bee93df0808081146j6a21ce00t8fe0e9cab349613@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: I think you're best bet would be either axograph, which you can download for free (and use for 4 months) or one of either winWCP or winEDR from strathclyde http://www.axograph.com/ http://spider.science.strath.ac.uk/sipbs/page.php?show=software_winWCP On Aug 9, 9:27?am, "Dr. Michael Ferber" wrote: > On Friday 08 August 2008 20:46:42 Ewa Z-ska wrote: > > > Hi All, > > > I have some data recorded in Pulse (Heka). Unfortunately I do not have a > > copy of this program on my PC anymore. How to use open this data? > > > Thanks. > > Ewa > > _______________________________________________ > > Neur-sci mailing list > > Neur-...@net.bio.net > >http://www.bio.net/biomail/listinfo/neur-sci > > Afaik there is a "plugin" for igor which you can use to read the data. Just > have a look on the wavemetrics homepage. there should be a link somewhere.... > > Good luck > Michael From connelly.bill from gmail.com Fri Aug 15 23:52:24 2008 From: connelly.bill from gmail.com (Bill) Date: Sat Aug 16 16:35:54 2008 Subject: [Neuroscience] Re: Gender Differences in the Human Brain References: <97d7a9c6-db3b-4585-9965-3e4fa0dc1df6@s50g2000hsb.googlegroups.com> Message-ID: <8afc9551-9f62-4edd-84b2-c4fd88c57922@t1g2000pra.googlegroups.com> This was something I wrote a while ago for a semi scientific audience: But it doesn't really say too much To most people, the fact that men and women are frankly different, is pretty obvious. However declaring that there are differences in the brains of men and women has been decidedly unfashionable since some time in the 1960s, presumably because if you say there are differences, then someone has to have been dealt the better hand. So first off, if you're offended by the suggestion the men and women have different brains, please go back to 1450 and stop Johannes Gutenberg inventing movable type printing, because I'm sure someone who hates the truth as much as you must think that is a good idea. So back in 1966, when Scientific American wasn't tripe written for idiots who think an episode of CSI is an educational experience, an article by Seymour Levine summarized the extent of the known sex differences in the brain. His answer was essentially none, apart from in a little place called the hypothalamus, an evolutionarily ancient structure that controls all sorts of things like body temperature, food intake, sleep and sexual function. Cut forward 40 years and a lot of things have changed, it's still a bad idea to say the word "homosexual" when requesting funds from the US government, but the list of brain differences between the sexes is as long as my arm. To start with, men have bigger brains. Not really that surprising, as men have pretty much bigger everythings, because men are just bigger. However, before any men in the audience start celebrating, this difference can largely be put down to differences in the volume of white matter, rather than the grey matter in the cortex (white matter being the wires that pass information to the cortical grey matter, where the actual processing happens) [1]. But of course, when you look at things in a more detailed fashion, you find that some cortical regions are thicker in women (the primary sensory and motor cortexes, that process incoming sensations from the skin, and outgoing motor control) and some areas are thicker in men (a small area in the left medial temporal lobe, that should be involved in dealing with visual information) [2]. Is there any functional relevance to this? I would be very careful is ascribing a purpose to this difference, but one doesn't need look at brain scans to find real differences in the way men and women think. It is widely agreed that males perform spatial tasks more proficiently than women. The mental rotation task is often claimed to be the most divergent. This task involves the subject being shown an abstract shape and then being required to pick the image that shows the object rotated in unknown directions from several dummy images. Interestingly, it seems that women use different parts of their brain, when attempting mental rotation, men seem to use the parietal cortex more, while women use the frontal cortex [5]. Men are generally expected to perform spatial perception (such as judgment of line orientation), maze navigation, and targeting and intercepting tasks better too [3, 4]. On the other hand, women excel at high interference memory tasks, such as problems where one is shown a complex field of objects, with a short period to memorize them, and then shown a similar but subtlety different field, where objects may have been moved or subtracted, and is then required to state the differences. Biochemical differences abound too. Men seem to be about 50% faster at synthesizing the neurotransmitter serotonin (a chemical which may enhance mood and sleep), which may explain why women suffer from approximately 2x the rate of depression [5]. Amphetamine releases more dopamine in men than women, while women seem to have higher activity in the proteins that inactive dopamine (both transporters and metabolic enzymes) which may explain why men report to enjoy a dose of amphetamine more than women and experience higher rates of dopamine related disorders like schizophrenia, OCD and Tourette's [6, 7, 8]. The differences truly go on and on (get down to your local library and read Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7, 477-484 (2006) for more). I'd love to wow you with the fact that in the nucleus in the hypothalamus that is 4 times as big in men as it is in women (called INAH3), is much larger in gay men than in straight men, (i.e. gay men have female brains) as was reported by LeVay in 1991 to much excitement. However, subsequent attempts to repeat this finding have failed [9, 10]. A similar paper reported that in an area of the brain called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, that is also significantly larger in men than women, male-to-females transsexuals had a female sized nucleus [11]. Finally, a doubly exciting pair of papers in PNAS showed that two putative pheromones, an androgen (which men presumably excrete) and an estrogen (which women presumable excrete), when smelt by females and males respectively, excites the hypothalamus. Furthermore, the estrogen that excites male brains had no effect on homosexual men, while they were excited by the androgen that excited females [12]. This observation was reversed in homosexual women, whose brain were excited by the estrogen that normally excites male brains [13]. It really should be very obvious that men and women are different, we evolved to do different things. Most animal species on earth have huge differences between the sexes, why should we be any different? On Aug 11, 4:11?pm, kiwasabi wrote: > Hey everybody, > > I'm a Game Designer who is very interested in Neuroscience. I have > read around 8 or so books on the brain so far. I was wondering if you > guys could answer a question for me: What are the differences between > a female and male brain? I have read that males have better developed > visuospatial skills while females have better developed social and > communicative skills. What else is there that I'm missing (a ton, I'm > sure ;))? > > Thanks, > > Adam From connelly.bill from gmail.com Sat Aug 16 18:22:26 2008 From: connelly.bill from gmail.com (Bill) Date: Sun Aug 17 12:32:01 2008 Subject: [Neuroscience] Re: Gender Differences in the Human Brain References: <97d7a9c6-db3b-4585-9965-3e4fa0dc1df6@s50g2000hsb.googlegroups.com> <8afc9551-9f62-4edd-84b2-c4fd88c57922@t1g2000pra.googlegroups.com> <1218893203.147322@irys.nyx.net> Message-ID: <9a4576fd-40db-4ed6-b6f9-26b7dd9b7b0f@a8g2000prf.googlegroups.com> Here is another post on a similar subject A while ago, I read an article in PLoS Biology, by Dr Peter Lawrence called "Men, Women, and Ghosts in Science". Not only was it interesting to me because it stated many facts I didn't know, and also because it expounded it's argument extremely well, but it truly amazed me because it seemed to me such a controversial view and I was surprised it was published in one of the highest impact journals available. Dr. Lawrence suggested that there are more men than women in science because, at least in part, men are simply better at it that women. He pointed out numerous studies that show that men and women are different, and importantly, difference since birth. Like the findings that in 1 day old infants, girls preferred to look at a picture of a face, while boys preferred to look at a mobile [1]. If you read my post Sex in the brain you'd know that men and women have different aptitudes, men excel at spatial tasks, while women are better at high interference memory tasks. This again is likely to have a biological etiology. The male hormone testosterone, which babies are exposed to from around three months of gestation, improves the spatial ability of older men [2]. It was also argued that autism, a disease that men suffer from 4-9 times more than women, can be seen as an extreme form of maleness, where sufferers have trouble communicating and empathizing and tend to treat people as objects and be obsessive (also men develop OCD earlier than women). Finally, he states that these traits help men excel in science, i.e. you need to be a ruthless, obsessive bastard to be a good scientist. So cut to today, I'm reading the latest issue of Nature and I stumble across a very interesting reply by Dr. Ben Barres. What makes this reply so spellbinding is that Ben Barres (a neuroscientist at Stanford), used to be a women. Dr. Barres tells many interesting anecdotes about his transformation and the change in people's view towards him: "I was the only person in a large class of nearly all men to solve a hard math problem, only to be told by the professor that my boyfriend must have solved it for me. I was not given any credit. I am still disappointed about the prestigious fellowship competition I later lost to a male contemporary when I was a PhD student, even though the Harvard dean who had read both applications assured me that my application was much stronger (I had published six high-impact papers whereas my male competitor had published only one). Shortly after I changed sex, a faculty member was heard to say "Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister's."" Now while this article is an excellent read, it is missing an important factor that most articles in scientific journals have: science. And the reason for this is obvious, Dr. Barres feels that a statement that women on average are less capable at progressing in science is a personal insult, indeed he says "The comments of [Dr.] Lawrence about women's lesser innate abilities are all wrongful and personal attacks on my character and capabilities". They are not. Dr. Lawrence repeatedly and carefully uses the words "on average". Men are more likely to rape, kill, assault and steal on average, but that doesn't not mean that I am a rapist, a murdering or a violent thief. When I say there is a lack of science, I mean that there was a lack of careful research. Dr. Barres states "There is no scientific support, either, for the contention that women are innately less competitive". Again, this is not true. Men enjoy competition more than women [3]. Men score higher on antisocial competitiveness scales [4]. Interestingly, women with higher testosterone tend to be more competitive [5]. All men astronaut teams are more competitive than mixed gender teams [6]. And there is less competition between female same-sex friends than male same-sex friends [7]. While none of these studies are complete enough for me to happily conclude that men are more competitive than women, it certainly shows that the statement "there is no scientific support for the contention that women are innately less competitive" is a falsehood. Ultimately, I don't know why there are less women than men in science. I suspect elements of both sides are true. There will certainly be sexism, both from men and women. I suspect women find the idea of being an obsessive scientist, on the whole, less appealing than men. What is more important though, is making sure that the science that does get published, is free from discrimination of all kinds, not what sex the authors are. Finally, men and women are obviously different, and I would be shocked if men and women were exactly as apt at each other at all areas of science. From claudioez from gmail.com Fri Aug 22 17:50:37 2008 From: claudioez from gmail.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Claudio_Elgueta_Zu=F1iga?=) Date: Fri Aug 22 19:47:04 2008 Subject: [Neuroscience] CURRENT CLAMP IN epc7 PLUS Message-ID: Hey guys: I?m wondering if it?s possible to do decent current clamping with this amplifier (HRKA EPC7 plus). I?m patching retinal ganglion cells and when aplying a square current pulse, the spikes are incredibly filtered. ???? Regards... -- Claudio Elgueta From r_s_norman from _comcast.net Fri Aug 22 20:08:02 2008 From: r_s_norman from _comcast.net (r norman) Date: Sat Aug 23 12:59:31 2008 Subject: [Neuroscience] Re: CURRENT CLAMP IN epc7 PLUS References: Message-ID: On Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:50:37 -0400, "Claudio Elgueta Zu?iga" wrote: >Hey guys: > > I?m wondering if it?s possible to do decent current clamping >with this amplifier (HRKA EPC7 plus). I?m patching retinal ganglion cells >and when aplying a square current pulse, the spikes are incredibly >filtered. > >???? > >Regards... You don't just have insufficient negative capacitance compensation, do you? From f.windels from uq.edu.au Mon Aug 25 17:04:56 2008 From: f.windels from uq.edu.au (Francois Windels) Date: Mon Aug 25 22:19:58 2008 Subject: [Neuroscience] intracerebral injection Message-ID: <812D66C7-52BA-4EFB-A4A7-0E0A63CF0C1D@uq.edu.au> Hi, i'm doing intracerebral injection in small animals using the device on the picture attached to figure out the volume of injection. i need to buy another one of those but i'd like first to identify it. it has a vernier scale on the Z axis and an optic attached to it, it's good enough to see the liquid meniscus in a glass pipette does someone know the name of such device ? Thanks Francois -------------- next part -------------- From Matthew.Kirkcaldie from removeutas.removeedu.au Tue Aug 26 04:19:22 2008 From: Matthew.Kirkcaldie from removeutas.removeedu.au (Matthew Kirkcaldie) Date: Tue Aug 26 13:35:05 2008 Subject: [Neuroscience] intracerebral injection References: Message-ID: In article , Francois Windels wrote: > i'm doing intracerebral injection in small animals using the device on > the picture attached to figure out the volume of injection. > i need to buy another one of those but i'd like first to identify it. > it has a vernier scale on the Z axis and an optic attached to it, it's > good enough to see the liquid meniscus in a glass pipette > does someone know the name of such device ? No picture came through, but injecting a small volume usually requires a Hamilton syringe. They have a conventional hollow needle but use a fine wire as a piston inside it, and can accurately deliver tiny volumes. Any smaller and you would need a picospritzer. ** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **