techniques

THE latest issue of Technology Review contains a photo essay by yours truly, called Time Travel Through the Brain, in which I look at how techniques used to investigate the brain have evolved during the 100 year history of modern neuroscience. The essay begins with a drawing by the great Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who used the staining method discovered by Camillo Golgi to establish that nervous tissue is composed of cells, then goes on to describe more recent methods such as fibre tracing, Brainbow and various types of microscopy. This image from the piece graced the…
In an earlier discussion on the merits of megapixels, commentator and snail guru Aydin notes: Megapixel counts matter if you need to crop out large sections of an image & still need to retain enough pixels for a large enough print. To illustrate Aydin's point, I've taken a full photo of an Australian Monomorium nest and cropped it away to show just the queen ant: Viola! Instant magnification. I can get away with a tight crop because the original photo spans over 6 million pixels.  Blog photos only need 100,000 pixels.  Plenty of pixels to spare.  Once I get my hands on the Canon 50D…