A Genetic Push to Understand Motion Detection

A Genetic Push to Understand Motion Detection

Two articles in this issue of Neuron (Eichner et al. and Clark et al.) attack the problem of explaining how neuronal hardware in Drosophila implements the Reichardt motion detector, one of the most famous computational models in neuroscience, which has proven intractable up to now.

A Push to Understand Gravity: A Heuristic Model

I present a new version of the Le-Sage-Brush-Tommasina hypothesis of gravitation that emphasizes a two-fold role of the baryons in a particular region of a celestial body that I call the effective volume. I do not treat the celestial bodies as point-like masses. Instead I propose that only the baryons in an effective volume of a spherical celestial body participate in the gravitational response...

Using great circles to understand motion on a rotating sphere

Motion observed in a rotating frame of reference is generally explained by invoking inertial forces. While this approach simplifies some problems, there is often little physical insight into the motion, in particular into the effects of the Coriolis force. To aid in the understanding of three-dimensional inertial forces, motion on a rotating sphere is considered from the points of view of an in...

Using developmental trajectories to understand genetic disorders

Synthesizing a novel genetic sequential logic circuit: a push-on push-off switch

Design and synthesis of basic functional circuits are the fundamental tasks of synthetic biologists. Before it is possible to engineer higher-order genetic networks that can perform complex functions, a toolkit of basic devices must be developed. Among those devices, sequential logic circuits are expected to be the foundation of the genetic information-processing systems. In this study, we repo...