Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout | Lauren Redniss | It Books, 2010

Chemical atlas, or, The chemistry of familiar objects

exhibiting the general principles of the science in a series of beautifully colored diagrams, and accompanied by explanatory essays, embracing the latest views of the subjects illustrated ; designed for the use of students and pupils in all schools where chemistry is taught

by Edward L. Youmans

D. Appleton & Company: New York, 1856

Anti-connectome-ism →

jtotheizzoe:

That sure is pretty. 

Do we really stand to learn as much as claimed from deciphering a map of all the brain’s neural connections? Researchers like Sebastian Seung are banking on it. However, not everyone agrees that the “connectome” holds the potential Seung and company claim. 

Aside from the technical difficulty of creating such a map, Mo Costandi notes that even with all the connections traced, the mystery wouldn’t be unraveled:

“… a connectivity map is unlikely to tell use everything we’d like to know about the brain. In the late 1980s, researchers published an almost complete connectome of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, after years of laborious work involving slicing the organism into thousands of ultra-thin sections then examining the sections under the microscope and reconstructing them. This tiny, millimetre-long organism doesn’t even have a brain as such – its entire nervous system contains a grand total of 302 neurons. And yet, the nematode connectome has taught us far less than we thought it would about how this apparently simple nerve net generates the worm’s behaviours.”

In a dynamic organ such as the brain, whose synapses and connections are always changing, adapting and morphing, there’s certainly the question of whether spending so much time and money on connectome science will pay off in the end. We have to get more than just pretty pictures out of this, you know.

I highly recommend reading Mo’s full piece, if just for the bit at the end where he shares a rather scathing anti-connectome email. The term “pukeworthy” is invoked. 

Finally, connectome evangelist Sebastian Seung sat down to debate the idea with neuroscientist Tony Movshon a few months back, moderated by Carl Zimmer and Robert Krulwich. Revisit BrainBrawl 2012.

Sound and science with Jad Abumrad

(heard live tonight at BAM. awesome talk. pynchon, anyone?)

A cross-section of a mouse eye reveals complex signs of metabolism—chemical changes in cells that release energy—in the eye’s tissues.

wired:

ninjies:

a while ago i mentioned i had some anatomical drawings and some people requested them but i forgot to upload them until now!

- DOWNLOAD HERE: http://www.mediafire.com/?o1tdax14yrar4hr

included are roughly 100 anatomical drawings, all of them 300 DPI. someone on /ic/ posted these a couple years ago so i take no credit for acquiring or scanning them, only sharing them.

these are really useful for artists studying anatomy or medical buffs looking for cool stuff to look at. enjoy!

These are just beautiful. They don’t make anatomical drawings like they used to.

infinity-imagined:

Axons and dendrites in a Cortical column, the modular subunit of the mammalian neocortex.

This brain slice from a human autopsy has taken on vivid color in the hands of a neuroscientist: green from infection by a lentivirus, red for neurons, blue for the nuclei of brain cells. Red and blue were introduced with a technique called immunohistochemistry, which uses antibodies that bind to specific proteins in order to highlight certain cells or parts of cells.

"…there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it."

George Eliot | Middlemarch 

NYT | The Upside of Dyslexia | 2.4.12 →

“The compelling implication of this finding,” wrote Dr. Von Károlyi and her co-authors in the journal Brain and Language, “is that dyslexia should not be characterized only by deficit, but also by talent.”

Study of the Skull

Leonardo da Vinci

biocanvas:

The leaf of a soybean infected with Phakopsora pachyrhizi, the fungus that causes soybean rust.

Image by Torri Hancock, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

(via infinity-imagined)

biocanvas:

Neurons (in red) extending from cultures of human embryonic stem cells.

Image by Daniel Webber, University of Cambridge.

(via infinity-imagined)

The Autism Enigma: Nature Neuroscience Special Issue →

(Source: houseofmind)