Business implications of the falling cost of electricity

Sharp declines in cost per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated by wind turbines and solar panels have opened up major shifts in cost and supply of electricity. Using elasticity of price and income to analyze scenarios of much cheaper electricity reveals economic impacts well outside the range that has dominated the debate until now. The methods and computations give a wide span of impacts, and those methods led to unexpected and provocative implication

The effect of N-methyl-formimino-methylester on the neural olfactory threshold in albino mice

The effects of N-methyl-formimino-methylester were studied in albino mice. Very short exposure (0.5 and 1 s) to the concentrated vapour led to an increase of the neural olfactory threshold to geraniol . There was a slow recovery of the olfactory sensitivity and after about 40 days the threshold values returned to normal

brainlife.io: A decentralized and open source cloud platform to support neuroscience research

Neuroscience research has expanded dramatically over the past 30 years by advancing standardization and tool development to support rigor and transparency. Consequently, the complexity of the data pipeline has also increased, hindering access to FAIR data analysis to portions of the worldwide research community. brainlife.io was developed to reduce these burdens and democratize modern neuroscience research across institutions and career levels. Using community software and hardware infrastructure, the platform provides open-source data standardization, management, visualization, and processing and simplifies the data pipeline. brainlife.io automatically tracks the provenance history of thousands of data objects, supporting simplicity, efficiency, and transparency in neuroscience research. Here brainlife.io's technology and data services are described and evaluated for validity, reliability, reproducibility, replicability, and scientific utility. Using data from 4 modalities and 3,200 participants, we demonstrate that brainlife.io's services produce outputs that adhere to best practices in modern neuroscience research

Light microscopical investigations (Chemical blockade of olfactory perception by N-methylformimino-methylester in albino mice ; 2)

Evidence is given that N-methyl-formimino-methylester (MFM), a highly volatile substance, causes olfactory receptor cell degeneration in mice. The time course of this degeneration and morphological changes in the compartment of receptor cell progenitor cells are described. Due to the morphological appearance of the progenitor cells and their dynamic transformation after exposure to MFM, two different types of progenitor cells can be distinguished: (a) light-staining globose basal or blastema cells, which are thought to be real progenitor cells and to remain in the mitotic cycle for generating new sensory cells; and (b) dark-staining basal cells with condensed chromatin, which are quiescent. The results agree with electrophysiological data indicating temporary inhibition of olfactory perception after MFM

Multiple objects evoke fluctuating responses in several regions of the visual pathway

How neural representations preserve information about multiple stimuli is mysterious. Because tuning of individual neurons is coarse (e.g., visual receptive field diameters can exceed perceptual resolution), the populations of neurons potentially responsive to each individual stimulus can overlap, raising the question of how information about each item might be segregated and preserved in the population. We recently reported evidence for a potential solution to this problem: when two stimuli were present, some neurons in the macaque visual cortical areas V1 and V4 exhibited fluctuating firing patterns, as if they responded to only one individual stimulus at a time (Jun et al., 2022). However, whether such an information encoding strategy is ubiquitous in the visual pathway and thus could constitute a general phenomenon remains unknown. Here, we provide new evidence that such fluctuating activity is also evoked by multiple stimuli in visual areas responsible for processing visual motion (middle temporal visual area, MT), and faces (middle fundus and anterolateral face patches in inferotemporal cortex – areas MF and AL), thus extending the scope of circumstances in which fluctuating activity is observed. Furthermore, consistent with our previous results in the early visual area V1, MT exhibits fluctuations between the representations of two stimuli when these form distinguishable objects but not when they fuse into one perceived object, suggesting that fluctuating activity patterns may underlie visual object formation. Taken together, these findings point toward an updated model of how the brain preserves sensory information about multiple stimuli for subsequent processing and behavioral action

Multiple objects evoke fluctuating responses in several regions of the visual pathway

How neural representations preserve information about multiple stimuli is mysterious. Because tuning of individual neurons is coarse (e.g., visual receptive field diameters can exceed perceptual resolution), the populations of neurons potentially responsive to each individual stimulus can overlap, raising the question of how information about each item might be segregated and preserved in the population. We recently reported evidence for a potential solution to this problem: when two stimuli were present, some neurons in the macaque visual cortical areas V1 and V4 exhibited fluctuating firing patterns, as if they responded to only one individual stimulus at a time (Jun et al., 2022). However, whether such an information encoding strategy is ubiquitous in the visual pathway and thus could constitute a general phenomenon remains unknown. Here, we provide new evidence that such fluctuating activity is also evoked by multiple stimuli in visual areas responsible for processing visual motion (middle temporal visual area, MT), and faces (middle fundus and anterolateral face patches in inferotemporal cortex – areas MF and AL), thus extending the scope of circumstances in which fluctuating activity is observed. Furthermore, consistent with our previous results in the early visual area V1, MT exhibits fluctuations between the representations of two stimuli when these form distinguishable objects but not when they fuse into one perceived object, suggesting that fluctuating activity patterns may underlie visual object formation. Taken together, these findings point toward an updated model of how the brain preserves sensory information about multiple stimuli for subsequent processing and behavioral action