Academic publishing was definitely a contributing factor to why I left academic research.

I also believe we should incentive peer-review. Maybe every researcher should be evaluated on how many articles they peer-review each year, relative to the amount they publish. I knew some researchers who would publish dozens of articles every year, would peer-review zero of them, and then complain about poor quality peer review.

+1 for Endeavour, apart from the unfortunate update of legacy NVIDIA drivers (10xx series of cards losing mainline support) this December I’ve had 0 issues

It gets better - the local minor league baseball team is called the Florence Y’alls. And their mascot is a water tower. It’s so Midwest.

Jimthew.

By the time I finished graduate school, reddit was dead so I never bothered getting verified on the Science subreddits. It was a bummer!

I’ll be the pedant no one asked for - the sodium and potassium channels in the neuron respond to voltage changes in the membrane, so the author isn’t wrong.

Action potentials are generated when dendritic (input) channels sense neurotransmitters like glutamate and GABA released by the axon terminal (output) of the pre-synapse cell. When these channels open, the let in ions like Calcium, Sodium, and Chloride.

These ions change the electric potential across the cell membrane, once this passes a key threshold, the sodium channels in the rest of the cell open up.

Not quite, an iron lung replaces a dysfunctional organ. I’m saying we can already grow neurons onto circuits, and it’s difficult (not impossible) to implant neurons into a body. I don’t easily see how these bio-engineered neurons make those processed easier.

Credentials: I published in this field, but I don’t have time to read the entire paper right now.

This is exciting work. Based on the key highlights, it sounds like their work focuses on how plausible it is to construct the bio-artificial neuron, and they have done so with great success.

What I would like to learn about is what advantages this technology has compared to just cultivating neurons on a microelectrode array. Are the artificial cells easier to maintain? Do they interface with electrodes without developing glial scarring like our brains do? Can they bio-engineer special proteins (e.g. optogenetic channels) easier in these cells than in mouse lines?

Until these advantages are spelled out, it feels like we’re re-invented the biological wheel. We already have cells that can integrate and fire at low voltages. They’re called neurons. Why did we need artificial ones?

I was about that age when I was gifted a microscope. No idea if you can still find them that cheap, though

This happened with an academic conference (physics iirc). A professor was asked to speak and she submitted a headshot for use in their advertising, but the conference wanted a different aspect ratio. Rather than crop the image, the materials designer asked ChatGPT to expand the photo to the correct size. It gave the professor a low cut shirt, and no one at the conference company noticed until the promotional materials were distributed and the professor contacted them.