Oooh — historical squid science

I've got to get back to my meeting, but Cosma just had to distract me with these classic video clips on dissecting the squid giant axon, including movies of one of my personal heroes, JZ Young (pronounced, as everyone knows, as jay-zed), in action. It's beautiful stuff.

More like this

Currents carried by sodium and potassium ions through the membrane of the giant axon of Loligo. Get more documents Docstoc is a useful tool for sharing PDFs, PowerPoint presentations and Word and Excel documents. It can also be used to embed files of these formats into a blog post in a…
While many folks 'round these parts have been focusing on tweets and posts from the Society for Neuroscience meeting, several of our geology blogger colleagues have been at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA). Geobloggers rock and we've got a great outcrop at ScienceBlogs…
Once upon a time, as a young undergraduate, I took a course in neurobiology (which turned out to be rather influential in my life, but that's another story). The professor, Johnny Palka, took pains at the beginning to explain to his class full of pre-meds and other such riff-raff that the course…
People, don't do this to me. I've got all this work I've got to get done so that I'm free to go on a date this evening, and you keep sending me these distractions. Like, for instance, this link to a collection of Marine Invertebrate Video and Film Stock Footage. Cephalopods and nudibranchs and…

I don't think I'll be watching the rest of those, but that first video is certainly interesting... giant axons, not exactly what I thought I'd be learning about today!

I certainly didn't think I'd be learning about giant axons today either.

I thought it was interesting to learn that experiments by Hodgkin and Huxley in England on the squid giant axon in the 1940s "unraveled the mechanism of the action potential".

Well I learned about squid giant axons in physiology lectures back in '85. It is also in all the physiology textbooks I have.

By Peter Ashby (not verified) on 05 Aug 2007 #permalink