Incoming links: eLife
The hard part then is how to make any predictions from it:
- 2024 www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02935-z Fly-brain connectome helps to make predictions about neural activity. Summary of "Connectome-constrained networks predict neural activity across the fly visual system" by J. K. Lappalainen et. al.
2024: www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y Largest brain map ever reveals fruit fly's neurons in exquisite detail
As of 2022, it had been almost fully decoded by post mortem connectome extraction with microtome!!! 135k neurons.
- 2021 www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/science/drosophila-fly-brain-connectome.html Why Scientists Have Spent Years Mapping This Creature’s Brain by New York Times
That article mentions the humongous paper elifesciences.org/articles/66039 elifesciences.org/articles/66039 "A connectome of the Drosophila central complex reveals network motifs suitable for flexible navigation and context-dependent action selection" by a group from Janelia Research Campus. THe paper is so large that it makes eLife hang.
In this section we list charitable organizations that support education or research:
- elifesciences.org/labs by eLife
- www.digital-science.com/investment/catalyst-grant/ by Shuttleworth Foundation.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS
- www.chanzuckerberg.com/ Zuck has already invested in education previously:
- openuk.uk/
- Hmm, some/all of it is a copy of LibreTexts but with URLs shorter than a million characters, e.g.:
- Sir Peter Lampl, Education Endowment Foundation and Sutton Trust
- Jacobs Foundation, by German-Swiss coffee mogul Klaus Johann Jacobs
- joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/what-open-education_en
- www.non-trivial.org/ "Launch Your Own Impactful Project CHOOSE YOUR CAUSE. GET EXPERT GUIDANCE. FIND A SOLUTION AND MAKE IT HAPPEN."
- by United States Government:
- FY 2024 Education Innovation and Research:
- Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Notices Inviting Applications
- oese.ed.gov/offices/office-of-discretionary-grants-support-services/innovation-early-learning/education-innovation-and-research-eir/fy-2024-competition/
- www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/05/06/2024-09797/applications-for-new-awards-education-innovation-and-research-eir-program-early-phase-grants
- FY 2024 Education Innovation and Research:
PuntSeq is a side project led by a few University of Cambridge PhDs that aims to determine which bacteria are present in the River Cam.
In July 2019, the PuntSeq team got together with the awesome Cambridge Biomakespace, an awesome biology makerspace open to all, to create a two day science outreach activity showing their procedures.
The data collected in this experiment, together with other collection sessions done by the organizers actually led to a publication on eLife: elifesciences.org/articles/61504 "Freshwater monitoring by nanopore sequencing" by Lara Urban et al. (2021), so it is awesome to see that were are actual being part of "real science".
Ciro knows nothing about biology, but since he is very curious about it, he jumped at this opportunity, and decided to document things as well as his limited knowledge would allow.
All participants chipped in some money to help cover the experiment's costs. Ciro suspects that this activity was done partially to help crowdfund the experiment, but it was a worthy investment!
The impressions you get from the experiment as a software engineer will be:
- OMG, this is so labour intensive, why haven't they automated this
- OMG, this is frightening, all the 8 hours of work I've just done are present in that tiny plastic tube
- Amazing! Look at that apparatus! And the bio people are like: I've used this a million times, it's cheap and every lab has one, just work faster and don't break you piece of junk!