Julia Bair, 5th year double-degree student, publishes in Eur. J. Neurosci.

Just indexed in ISI Web of Knowledge and co-authored by Julia Bair, double-degree Bassoon performance/Neuroscience major from Glencoe, Illinois:

What subcortical-cortical relationships tell us about processing speech in noise.
Parbery-Clark, Alexandra; Marmel, Frederic; Bair, Julia; Kraus, Nina

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE 33 (3): 549-557  FEB 2011 [access @ OhioLINK EJC]

Bair's co-authors are based in various departments at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, including the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.  The team investigated the "effects of background noise on both subcortical- and cortical-evoked responses, and the relationships between them, in normal hearing young adults."

See a sample issue of the journal at Wiley Online Library.

Amanda Schmidt's latest post from China: digging for snails

Assistant Professor of Geology Amanda Schmidt is studying the properties of loess in China, as part of an effort to understand the natural hazards of a region characterized with this sediment. She writes from China: "These [samples] will be used to determine how strong [loess] is, what makes it break in blocks, and what makes it flow. We suspect that the original loess is rather weak and flows easily, but that once it has flowed and set up again, it is quite a bit stronger." Schmidt's posts appear in the New York Times Scientist at Work blog. The bit about snails refers to finding snails buried in undisturbed loess sediments, to use for dating the deposition age. Schmidt includes a great photo of the 3-year old daughter of the park science translator, enjoying her first time "playing in dirt," and helping to sort snails from sediment.

Basic Protocols Freely Accessible in JoVE

JoVE: Journal of Visualized Experiments is a peer-reviewed online journal of videos and other forms of visualization that demonstrate complex procedures, most of which are rather more specialized than needed for our curriculum -- but the "Basic Protocols" section includes 56 videos that are freely accessible and of potential use in the undergraduate laboratory.  See, for example, Generation of Single-Cell Suspensions from Mouse Neural Tissue, by Sandra Pennartz, Sandy Reiss, Rebecca Biloune, Doris Hasselmann, and Andreas Bosio. Free access to the protocol, which is accompanied by a written abstract and pdf describing the technique, is sponsored by Miltenyi Biotec.

Biology major Dylan Holmes co-author in Animal Behavior

About the Journal

Congratulations to junior Dylan Holmes, who co-authored a paper appearing in the current issue of Animal Behavior:

Sing softly and carry a big stick: signals of aggressive intent in the song sparrow.
Akcay, Caglar; Tom, Mari E.; Holmes, Dylan; Campbell, S. Elizabeth; Beecher, Michael D.
Animal Behaviour 82 (2): 377-382 August 2011 [access at OhioLINK EJC]

Also recently published is an article by chemistry professor Matt Elrod:
Kinetics Study of the Aromatic Bicyclic Peroxy Radical plus NO Reaction: Overall Rate Constant and Nitrate Product Yield Measurements.  Elrod, Matthew J.
Journal of Physical Chemistry A 115 (28): 8125-8130 July 21, 2011 [access at ACS Publications]

Diving bell spider, sea urchin, Arctic ground squirrel: on journal covers this week

View this cover online (subscribers only)

We maintain print subscriptions to many journals still, even for those we also access online.  Serendipitous discovery motivated by intriguing journal covers is one benefit of maintaining a print collection.  Three issues received yesterday have gorgeous photographs that are best appreciated in hand - stop by and pick one up!

Seymour, R. S. and Hetz, S. K. (2011).  The diving bell and the spider: the physical gill of Argyroneta aquatica.  J. Exp. Biol. 214, 2175-2181.  Photo, Stefan K. Hetz.

The cover of Development (July 1)  shows the "mouth of an adult sea urchin (Lytechinus variegatus) as the animal attempts to consume a fragment of seaweed.  This still frame from a rapid time-lapse sequence taken by Sarah A. Elliott and Nobuo Ueda at the 2010 Woods Hold MBL Embryology Course was chosen by readers of the Node."  (Cover explanation taken from the table of contents)

Arctic ground squirrel (Urocitellus parryii)

A hibernating Arctic ground squirrel graces the cover of The Journal of Neuroscience, July 27, illustrating an article beginning on page 10752.

Jinka, T. R., O. Toien, and K. L. Drew. (2011).  Season primes the brain in an arctic hibernator to facilitate entrance into torpor mediated by Adenosine A1 receptors.  J. Neurosci. 31, 10752-10758.

Photo by Lesa Hollen and Leone Thieman.