MIT researchers have come up with a new way to measure electrical activity in the brain. Their new light-sensitive protein can be embedded into neuron membranes, where it emits a fluorescent signal that indicates how much voltage a particular cell is experiencing. This could allow scientists to study how neurons behave, millisecond by millisecond, as the brain performs a particular function.
Source: mit.edu
Every day hundreds of Facebook engineers make thousands of code changes, each of which requires at least one, and usually many, iterations of the edit-compile-run development cycle. To speed up this process, we built and open-sourced Buck, a build tool designed from the ground up for fast iteration, allowing engineers to compile and run changes quickly.
Read More
Three thousand years ago, dense old-growth rainforests covered most of central Africa. But around 2,600 years ago, an event that ecologists call the Late Holocene Rainforest Crisis occurred, and the forests suddenly gave way to savannas dotted with islands of trees. Six hundred years later, the forests grew back almost as swiftly as they had vanished.
Read More