Archives for February 2012

Normally we try to limit our blog posts to those directly relevant to the lab, but this was just too cool to pass up. Check out this amazing interactive program for exploring the scale of objects ranging from quantum foam on the small end to the totality of the observable universe on the large end here. It obviously owes much to the Eames’ beautiful short film The Powers of Ten, a favorite from childhood linked below. One of the neat things about the program is that you get to play around with scale directly, although it is less effective at conveying one of the cooler insights in the Eames’ movie, which is that there are lots of scales at which nearly nothing exists.

Back in the spring Bob gave a public lecture as part of the Harvard Medical School Longwood Lecture Series, which is intended to bring the science and medicine done at HMS to a community audience – the series in which Bob took part included talks about each of the five senses. Video of this lecture, which includes the Department of Neurobiology’s own Marge Livingstone talking about vision, and our good friend Steve Liberles talking about taste, is below. Note that for a variety of copyright-related and other reasons this video has been heavily edited by the HMS public affairs office, including the substitution of a number of slides (making the talks look uglier than they really were) and the deletion of a really cool optogenetics experiment at the end of Bob’s talk.