Lena Matzeder just finished her Bachelor thesis, entitled “Is anxiety a factor influencing photo-preference in Drosophila melanogaster?“. She administered Diazepam (valium) to flies and asked them if that changed their preference for bright or dark places. A warm welcome to Weitian Sun, a Master’s student who will be testing candidate genes for their involvement in operant self-learning.

I’ve spent all morning deleting and re-installing major portions of the system running this site. Please do keep in mind that it is important to only use safe passwords on this site!

For newcomers in the lab and mainly students who want to work on the Buridan setup I wrote a protocol that can be used for all kinds of Buridan experiments. Colorful illustrations will be helpful to easily understand the data processing program. Please, download the protocol here: A General Buridan Protocol

I have now cleaned the site from all malicious code and installed a few new plug-ins which I still need to properly adjust all settings. The site should now almost be back to normal, please resume posting your data and let me know if there is anything that still needs fixing!

I have just realized that there is no “new comment” section, so we have access only to the last 3 comments. Since there is also no way to have them as rss feeds (only public posts are feeded), it makes it possible to loose track of comments, if somebody (like I just did) look and comment the posts only once in a while.

Is there a way to manage this?

3 stocks came dead(26167 Cyk, 8641 da-Gal4, 34716 PKC53e RNAi). The other are good, although one was weak.
(7018 tubGal80ts on 3d, with cyo on 2nd
4440 201y
28997 TNT 3
27491 PKC53e RNAi
28837, and 28838 tnt2)

My camera is bigger than Julien’s :mrgreen: I realized that the camera I had been using to track the laser position in my flight simulator didn’t quite fit with the way everything is arranged now. I remembered I had seen an old camera in the basement, so I went there to check it out. It worked really well and it provides a fantastic picture of the fly. It’s just that it is now the largest piece of the equipment:

The workshop has been busy recently…

If the new plugins are working, you should only be able to see this post when you are logged in. Please go and check this and reply in the comments to this post. I have also added some other new functionality, such as a larger set for formatting your posts. Let me know if there’s still something you would like to have by commenting on this post.

Martin Fenner demonstrated how to use his three WordPress plugins: BibTex Importer, Link to Link and KCite to introduce citations to scientific articles into a blog post. I have now installed these plugins and will insert a few citations below to see how easy this is:

This is a reference for a paper on Drosophila [cite source=’doi’ rel=’cito:cites’]10.1016/j.neuroscience.2011.06.058[/cite] and this is one on Hermissenda [cite source=’doi’ rel=’cito:cites’]10.1016/j.neuroscience.2011.06.063[/cite] or one on the leech [cite source=’doi’ rel=’cito:cites’]10.1242/jeb.057224[/cite]. If this worked, there should be a reference list at the bottom of this post.

In the afternoon part of the workshop Eva Amsen showed how to link a blog post to researchblogging.org, which is what I already demoed in our journal club, so I won’t cover it here.

Now, after two weeks, my provider is fiddeling with some settings to make the citation plugins working. Looking good so far! We have citations!