Wired to be Weird

Ian McLaughlin | @_Anthropoid

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Me & My Work

Walking back from the lab, I stopped in at a local used book store. Stumbled on a handbook of pharmacy from 1917 used by a student in 1924 here in Philly. Not that I'll need it for reference, but my inner nerd couldn't be restrained and I had to sna
Decided to take a selfie after an experiment I’d been trying to get to work for like 2.5 years finally went my way, figured I might as well include it here. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t happen all the time, so it felt worth a
Here's an image from an experiment that FINALLY worked. After over 2.5 years. I can't post the most important parts of the image because academic journals will refuse to publish them if they already live online, but this is just a small part of the l
This is one of the first images I took after spending a full weekend basically becoming one with my microscope. Learning how to get the best possible pictures with what’s otherwise a fairly simple device, and it couldn’t have been with a
It’s almost become a cliché at this point, but the mimicry visible at very disparate domains of nature is quite fascinating and alluring. On the top is the cosmic web, a map of all known matter in the universe. While it doesn’t inc
Here’s a super weird image I took of some neurons in a petri dish that were infected with a virus that seemed to turn them into…balloon animal versions of neurons. This wasn’t quite what we were going for (neurons don’t look
Which neurons become more active when people do cocaine? This virus helps us to see them. At baseline, and without any cocaine, the virus causes neurons to churn out green fluorescent protein – turning them green. However, once cocaine is admin
Spring in #Philly makes a helluvan entrance . . . . #spring #naturephotography #nature #natureart #bloom #flower #trees #Philadelphia
Another beautiful collection of hippocampal neurons infected with an engineered virus that causes neurons to turn fluorescent red, and then green once they fire impulses. We can use a tool like this to identify which neurons are involved in things li

Images from my labwork

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