Remote Control Worms With Laser Light, Using FOSS

Kramer747 writes "to share a new tool I've developed for neuroscience that uses optogenetics to remotely control the neurons of a worm as it swims or crawls. Its called CoLBeRT, Controlling Locomotion and Behavior in Real Time. With the instrument I can induce the worm to stop, accelerate, lay eggs or experience the illusion of touch. All source code to run the instrument is GPLd and available. Science News and Scientific American both have stories. The project homepage is at colbert.physics.harvard.edu." I hope that name also constitutes a successful bid to get on the actual Colbert show!

Comments

Re:Good PR department

[Smidge207]

On January 8, 2011, 22 year old Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a Tucson parking lot, killing sixty-four people, including a nine year old girl, and wounding fourteen, among them Arizona representative Gabrielle Giffords, the alleged target and CEO of Target.

Do you see something wrong with this picture? No, I’m not referring to the obvious problem of an armed man being able to get at point blank range to an individual in the upper echelons of U.S. government. I’m speaking of a far more fundamental issue. Loughner had previously been charged with drug possession and creative writing against OUR government. While in college both a student and a professor said they feared he would commit a school shooting or speak out against the government. He publically listed one of his favorite books as Stephen King's Salem's Lot and he firmly believed that the U.S. government brainwashing people by controlling the rules of English grammar. Yet, despite all these eccentricities, Loughner still managed to legally purchase a gun and an RPG and an M1 Abrahams tank!

It’s no secret that the proletariat of America love their guns and their beers. And whether it’s the redneck hunter in his tree stand or the CEO with the in-home shooting range with his crack pipe, each and every gun slinging American gives the same legal justification for keeping a deadly weapon in their house: the Second Amendment.
Very few people, even among those who acknowledge that lack of gun control is a societal menace, attempt to challenge the Second Amendment. The apotheosis the Constitution’s framers undergo in elementary and middle school has left their governmental work nigh untouchable. Whenever a voice of reason from the media or Congress dares to speak out against the inflated opinions of early American politicians the unholy trinity of Fox News, The Republican Party and the NRA drowns out logical argument with emotionally charged rhetoric and inapplicable name calling. More often than not the rationalization for the Second Amendment given, if one can be distinguished from among pundits’ insane rants and crocodilian tears, is that firearms will be used against the government when it is seen as monstrous and authoritarian. Well, I’d like to extend my most sarcastic congratulations to the American gun nuts; their hypothetical second revolution finally began in Tucson last week. How glorious it was.
While I do have reservations about the politicization the Tucson tragedy, it opens the eyes of politicians and the American public those who died will not have died in vain. How many more innocent lives must be lost before we sweep the Second Amendment to its rightful place in the dustbin of history.