Ed Boyden, leader of the Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Group at MIT, has just started a blog.
I wrote about some of Boyden's work earlier this year. His is one of several groups that have used a light-sensitive bacterial protein called channelrhodopsin to develop an "optical switch" that can activate or inhibit neurons.
More like this
Excitement, then irritation. That was my reaction to a news article in Nature about a technique using a protein to switch off nerve firing when activated by light:
Lali's Laboratory
Frog Blog
d(PhD)/dt
Work 'em hard, play 'em hard, feed 'em up to the nines and send 'em to bed so tired that they are asleep before their heads are on the pillow.
- Frank L. Boyden
A fascinating paper from Gradinaru et al describes a genetically engineered mouse model of Parkinson's disease that expresses a photoreceptor in the neurons of a particular part of the brain - the subthalamic nucleus (STN).