Loren Looger and Scott Sternson became collaborators, and fast friends, after coming to Janelia Farm as group leaders in 2006. By Looger’s account, their partnership might be science’s version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. read story
Scott Sternson has always wondered what drives behavior, especially those fundamental motivations required for survival. Hunger, for example, is so crucial that it must be evolutionarily “hard-wired” deep within the brain. After all, as Sternson observes, “if the animal doesn’t eat, it dies.” read story
Combining high-resolution serial electron microscopic tomography, neuroelectrophysiological measurements, mathematical modeling, and computer graphics, a multi-institution team led by HHMI investigator Terrence J. Sejnowski at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies has overturned a half-century’s dogma in neurobiology.
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Although he has never taken a biology class, Gene Myers’s work gets a lot of notice from biologists. Fifteen years ago, Myers, whose formal training is in computer science, mathematics, physics, and engineering, co-wrote an article for the Journal of Molecular Biology that would become the most highly cited scientific paper of the decade. read story
Meet Toddler, a walking robot that mimics the human gait. Created by computer engineer Russ Tedrake in the lab of computational neuroscientist and HHMI investigator H. Sebastian Seung at MIT, Toddler uses customized learning software to teach itself to walk in less than 20 minutes. The robot “doesn’t walk too much like a human, but we think it learns like a human,” Tedrake says. read in full issue (pdf)