The big idea: can you inherit memories from your ancestors?
“Scientists working in the emerging field of epigenetics have discovered the mechanism that allows lived experience and acquired knowledge to be passed on within one generation, by altering the shape of a particular gene. This means that an individual’s life experience doesn’t die with them but endures in genetic form.”
The Cooperative Neuron: Cellular Foundations of Mental Life by William Phillips, 2023
The Cooperative Neuron is part of a revolution that is occurring in the sciences of brain and mind. It explores the new field of cellular psychology, a field built upon the recent discovery that many neurons in the brain cooperate to seek agreement in deciding what's relevant in the current context.
So I just learnt that J Physiol requires figures to be made with Biorender (https://www.biorender.com/), a VC backed subscription SaaS extend and extinguish of scientists drawing pictures!
Is this a thing now!? Complete privatisation of the publication workflow!?
Am I the only one enraged by this!? Pictures? We could have just made our own shared repository of useful graphics. Our own open source software. Uggghhh!
Bizarre, yes, but as I said in the original thread, it seems well designed to trick researchers into thinking that it’s a standard that they may as well just use like MS Word.
A relatively tech illiterate lab leader will often just tell their students to use it in the same way they do everything else to please the journals. Because as far as they know illustration already works like documents and MS Word.
@maegul @NicoleCRust@academicchatter
I find all the bad PowerPoint illustrations in biology charming, but I personally take great pride in my illustrations in my work (probably wont be doing biology for the forseeable future) and it makes me sad when people dont, whether that be because they are pressed for time or bc they dont see communicating ideas visually as part of the task of science.
I have tried to introduce diagramming markup like mermaid or graphviz/dot ti my lab to limited success, they are just used to PowerPoint I guess. My cracked copy of illustrator 2019 is basically always open. Turning figure design into some drag and drop biorender task (in addition to the platform capture element as u say) is sad to me bc it feels like the final flattening of illustration as a proud tradition in biology.
"Researchers publish largest-ever dataset of neural connections
A cubic millimeter of brain tissue may not sound like much. But considering that that tiny square contains 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses, all amounting to 1,400 terabytes of data, Harvard and Google researchers have just accomplished something stupendous."
Seeing the Mind: Spectacular Images from Neuroscience, and What They Reveal about Our Neuronal Selves by Stanislas Dehaene, 2023
A lavishly illustrated and accessibly explained deep dive into the major new findings from cognitive neuroscience.
Who are we? To this age-old question, contemporary neuroscience gives a simple answer: we are exquisite neuronal machines.