It has been an exciting past few days! While we're inching forward in our imaging endeavour, I've been trying to put in one or the other visit to friends and colleagues who are working here. There are so many interesting people that do fascinating stuff here right around the UCSD campus, it is totally sick, dude! So yesterday I went to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to meet with George Sugihara, with whom we collaborate on the analysis of spontaneous behavior in Drosophila. George is a very famous guy and when I met him yesterday for the first time, I realized quickly that he's famous for a reason he confirmed a lot of the things I had only tentatively concluded and did so in a very elegant and easy to understand manner. Our work has profited tremendously from his expertise and I hope we'll be able to submit the manuscript soon. Stay tuned for more on this right here.
And the excitement continued today. This afternoon I visited Bruno van Swinderen who works at the Neuroscience Institute in the group of Ralph Greenspan. This guy amnages to record field potentials in the fly brain while the animal is flying stationarily! Incredible! I was amazed when I had a chance to take a close look at the flies in this set-up. He sticks the electrodes right through the cuticle of the fly and has a very flexible and effective way of controlling the fly's sensory environment. It's sort of like the flight simulator I use, only way more advanced. I love it! I also met Herman Dierick, who works on Drosophila aggression, which is a very cool topic
But here comes the shocker: both of them admitted that they are 2 of the 5 people who actually read the crap I'm posting here! Oops, I think that just blew their cover. I guess I'll have to buy them a few beers for outing them here so publicly
Both also mentioned that they thought some of my posts poking some fun at creationists actually were a little funny. That means I have to find some time to blog about the recent report that early humans may have interbred with chimpanzees for extended periods of time, before actually splitting away from that branch. So not only are creationists also descendants of apes, their ancestors had it going with them, too! I can only imagine the horrors such a scenario must inflict on creationists