Yuri is an author on a new paper from Jan Hemmi's group, on fiddler crab photoreceptors. Super cool work!
By Karin
Yuri is an author on a new paper from Jan Hemmi's group, on fiddler crab photoreceptors. Super cool work!
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By Karin
Apparently Perth is experiencing a lot of hoverflies, so ABC radio interviewed me yesterday. You can listen to be rambling on about hoverflies about 2:14:00 into the clip. I sound pretty excited. By Joseph
Sometimes analysing neuronal data is easy, but sometimes it isn’t. One thing that frustrates me almost daily is when people use the difficulty or complexity of some kind of analysis as a justification for not doing it. Our approach to analysis needs to be based on what makes the most sense based on the question we are asking, not what is the easiest or what we have experience doing in the past. Neuroscience is unbelievably complicated; it would be silly to think that we can answer all questions by just counting spikes in arbitrary windows. If the question is – which stimulus parameters alter the strength of neuronal responses, then the classical approaches of counting spikes in windows usually work perfectly. However if the question is – What are the responses of this neuron used for, or how might responses of this neuron be interpreted by downstream neurons, spike rates over a window make almost no sense at all. Neuronal communication cannot ever be broken down to spike rates over arbitrary windows, even in neurons that use a rate code (which many would argue don’t even exist). This spike rate will be correlated with the volume of information being transferred, but it gives you absolutely no insight into the real question, what does that information tell us (or more importantly, tell the downstream neuron)? I personally think so many neuroscience questions are held back by analysis which is simple, but completely misses the main point. So many of us chose to be neuroscientists because neuroscience is so complicated and amazing, but then run and hide when our data needs complex analysis. By Yuri
To improve my writing skill, Sarah shared with me to attend a writing webinar hosted by Prof. Brian Martin at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Firstly, it was good to know that writing is a skill needed to be developed as it is not a natural skill. It means I have (huge) room for improvement. Like athletes, we need to practice day by day and can be more productive without procrastinating or bingeing. I had always tried to write up a whole in a short period and got stressed. He suggested that establishing a regular writing schedule will help to do so. New writing habitat should be no more than 20 min, and we should not look back to make sentences perfect. This is because editing is much easier than producing new lines in our doc. During the webinar, his PhD students shared their experiences, and it was helpful to hear tips from non-native English speakers. The most useful advice was I should write sentences without checking grammar mistakes or uncertain words; even sentences become a mixture of English and Japanese. Another thing I need to keep in mind is just writing without reading literature. It can clarify ideas and reduce the time to read. I was grateful to learn these things before a big ARC grant writing comes. I always take more than one hour to write this blog, but I am finishing in 20 min this time by showing another improvement in gardening skill. -By Richard
A recent article on ABC News describes a pretty dire situation approaching for the field of bee taxonomy in Australia. It seems there are only four bee taxonomists remaining in Australia, all working part-time. Only one of them is paid for their work, and all of them are reaching relatively advanced years. Taxonomy is of course crucial in underpinning all the work that biologists do; it's a kind of background assumption that animal species have been identified and delineated, and placed in their positions in the tree of life. But the problem is funding. The risk seems to be that taxonomy is not regarded as equally worthy or groundbreaking as other research in biology, and so doesn't attract any resources. And the work on Australian bees is far from "finished". While 1600 species have been identified already, it is estimated that there may be almost a thousand other species that are yet to be described. It's quite sad that something as important as this for supporting the more "glamorous" research is being sidelined because of a lack of anyone valuing its contribution. There is some hope that the existing specialists may be able to train up a new generation, and the article describes how they have started a training course in bee taxonomy that has been drawing a lot of interest. The problem of course is still how to find a position as a taxonomist afterwards. You can read the full article here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-10/bee-taxonomy-in-australia-a-dying-art/12647676 By Malin
So after becoming a parent January 2019 I naturally started looking for insect related children's books, since the important stuff needs to come in to play early. We have a few encyclopaedia styled books with pictures of different kind of insects, spiders and other creepy crawlers and then we have Astrid. Astrid a blowfly and the main character in a series of books for kids at age ca 1-3 years. Astrid isn't a 100% anatomically correct blowfly sure, but she is a blowfly and a main character in a book series and my toddler can now say blowfly (in Swedish since that's the language of the books, so spyfluga) so I cannot express my love and joy for this little insect enough. Go Astrid! |
Hoverfly Vision
The hoverfly vision group can be found at 2 locations: At Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and at Uppsala University in Sweden. Archives
January 2022
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