Congratulations on your new position, Richard!
Best wishes on your new journey!! We will miss you. Keep in touch! and Keep collaborating!
Congratulations on your successful honours completion, Jason!
Congratulations on your new position, Richard! Best wishes on your new journey!! We will miss you. Keep in touch! and Keep collaborating!
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By Sarah The brand new Flinders Train station opened late last year, with services now running regularly to take passengers from the City to Flinders in 20 minutes. The redevelopment also includes a new walking and bike path from Flinders to Tonsley and improved pedestrian access from South Road (and eventually Carpark 12) to Flinders Medical Centre. Today was the first time I wandered down to have a look and I was quite surprised by how good this redevelopment looks. The artwork on the bridge piles (including one piece with a familiar face) looks fantastic and nestled adjacent to the train station is a large area of green space, which provides a nice alternative to waiting at the station benches on beautiful days like today. By Karin
Martyna Grabowska came from Queensland to help us set up the LFP recordings. So exciting, and fun! By Yuri
Unprecedented 2020 is ending with a slight hope to overcome the COVID-19 outbreak at least in Australia. I have worked on my project, which is to understand how neurons work during a real pursuit, with enthusiasm throughout this year. The project contained uncountable challenging steps for establishing the naturalistic visual stimuli; getting high-quality neural response data with electrodes, that were contaminating defective products as we realised later. Finally, we are undertaking data analysis and interpretation, which have not been straightforward either. Although this year is unprecedented and my cat became my only co-worker for at least three months, we could move this project forward this far in an excellent lab. I am grateful to Karin and my lab mates for their support and positive influence and inspiration throughout 2020. We are planning to get this out as a paper early next year, which should be a lot safer and better year. There is another thing I want to remember as a representative of 2020. That is Japan's Hayabusa2 mission. Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched a spacecraft named Hayabusa2 in 2014 to explore the origins of the planets as well as the origin of the water of Earth's oceans and the source of life. Unmanned Hayabusa2 went to the asteroid Ryugu to observe it and to grab subsurface materials. After travelling more than 5.2 billion kilometres over six years, Hayabusa2 came back close enough to Earth for releasing a capsule containing the materials of Ryugu into Earth's gravitational grasp. The return capsule landed on the Woomera Prohibited Area about 500 kilometres north-west of Adelaide at about 4 am on last Sunday. Since the Hayabusa2 project members arrived in Adelaide to prepare for the capsule return, I had been very fascinated to welcome the return and to witness the achievement. Therefore, I waked up at 3 am and went up a hill to see the direction where the capsule would make a trajectory while watching live streaming from JAXA. I could not see the trajectory apparently since it was too far and raining. However, I could experience the exciting moment together with everyone who was watching. I was impressed by the astounding technology to predict and manipulate the landing position and time incredibly correctly; how carefully the project team prepared for finding the capsule with at least three back-up plans. Moreover, it was striking to see smiles of scientists achieving astonishing goals. I hope many children saw them and knew how science is exciting and how scientists fulfil the challenge with enthusiasm. It is ashamed that I cannot share that kind of moments with the public as live streaming, because it often occurs in a small dark room. After delivering the capsule, Hayabusa2 skipped away and is continuing its journey for a rendezvous with the asteroid 1998 KY26, which will be 11 years later. I cannot wait to see the smiles again in 2031. https://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/en/ https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-05/hayabusa2-space-capsule-to-return-to-sa-after-asteroid-mission/12939698 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/japan-s-hayabusa2-capsule-lands-carbon-rich-asteroid-samples By Jason
Since beginning my midlife educational experience, or crisis if you like, here at Flinders College of Medicine and Public Health. I have discovered, while sipping hot chocolate, that I believe in miracles – and yes! It’s a rather sexy thing. No matter your ‘ist’ persuasion, a creationist, an atheist or evolutionist, everyone agrees that the mere existence of life on earth is nothing more than an astounding miracle. After devouring the many books and articles written about this evolving biochemical soup, we call life. I have gained a reverent appreciation for the almost impossible task of treating the large number of diseases and conditions that have plagued the earth since the beginning of life itself. It’s a miracle physicians and medical scientists can even diagnose the diseases we know about. What many may not realise is I have also been studying a massive array of topics far beyond the courses I have enrolled in over the past 4 years. These extracurricular topics include psychology, philosophy – from the classics to the modern, anthropology and abstractions used in psychoanalysis. It’s not often that one gets the chance to take a moment out of life to study full time, so I made sure it was jammed packed – FULL. I recommend to everyone starting University as a full-time student to go broad and suck up as much information as you can – I for one am much less ignorant for it; mind you, I’m still ignorant. Eventually, most of this information I have learnt over the past 4 years will fade off into the past and become distant memories difficult to recall. That’s just a neuroscientific fact – use it or lose it. Memories of people, however, seem to last much longer than dry facts. Maybe because people are not – dry facts that is. I have met the most interesting, kind, weird, wonderful, loving, intelligent, shy, strong willed, over the top, competitive, normal, naughty and nice human beings one can imagine, and many of them are old enough to be my children. Ah yes! Old enough to be my children – how life wakes you up with a slap in the face like that. So, I finish my journey this year as an honour’s student in vision neuroscience, studying how hoverflies process visual information. Hoverflies are just that – flies that hover. They may not be as complex and large as we are; nevertheless, their complicatedness as an animal is far more than miraculous. Even the nervous system of a fly can be considered as one of the most complex systems in the known universe - the mind baffles to comprehend the sheer enormity of a statement like that. Understanding the nervous system of animals should keep neuroscientists busy for the next several hundred years and even then, I’m not sure they will know everything. So much for Elon Musk’s neurolink - uploading and downloading memories - good luck with that. I would like to thank Professor Karin Nordström, Sarah Nicholas, Dr Yuri Ogawa, Dr Joseph Fabian, Dr Richard Leibbrandt and Luke Turnbull for accepting me as a member of the Motion Vision Neuroscience team here at the Flinders Medical Centre. You have all become an important part of my life, a mind-bending thought-provoking experience I will never forget. -Luke
It has been a busy time of year for me involving lots of study over the current exam period. I’m now looking forward to spending more time focusing on my lab work. This will involve dedicating more time to developing a range of computer skills relevant to my areas of research. Richard and Karin's guidance has been beneficial in this regard, and I’m looking forward to further extending my knowledge and skills. My research is primarily focussed on tethered flight experiments in the hoverfly and more specifically behavioural responses to visual stimuli. A large part of this involves presenting visual stimuli, recording flight data with a camera, and then calculating data with the Kinefly software. This enables various parameters to be analysed such as head/body movements and the angle of wing edges (left and right) from which wing beat amplitude can be determined. Much of this underlies the importance of building the appropriate skills to formulate, test and analyse scientific questions most effectively. By Karin
Yuri is an author on a new paper from Jan Hemmi's group, on fiddler crab photoreceptors. Super cool work! 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. |
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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