Bringing Neuroscience to the Garage - The Interview

When I can spare the time, my favorite hobby is to go into the garage, put some music on, and work on my cars. I enjoy it so much, sometimes it has bothered me. If you should do what you love, and given a choice I would rather spend my time in the garage, why am I a neuroscientist? Shouldn't I be a mechanical engineer?

Upon reflection, I realized I do love neuroscience, but it is simply impossible to do bench level neuroscience at home. All of my previous homemade neuroscience has consisted of satirical or theoretical writing that did not require any equipment besides a brain and a labtop. So...for this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting, my close friend and colleague Greg Gage and I decided to attempt to do some amateur neuroscience on the cheap, within the budget of a middle class high school student.

If you have a labtop, an insect, and $100, can you record an action potential using components solely obtained from RadioShack and Ace Hardware? We tried to answer this. Greg spent his spare time the last two months working on the electronics, and I worked on the micromanipulator. We presented our work in progress at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington, D.C. last week, and the response was overwhelming. DrugMonkey, a blog journalist writer for ScienceBlogs, covered the event rather nicely for us. Educators heavily encouraged us to complete the project and begin delivering it to students. Wow!

I also contacted Kerri Smith, the podcast editor for Nature Magazine, who was attending the conference, and she interviewed us for the Nature Neuroscience Podcast. You can listen to the ~1 hour podcast highlighting research from the whole conference here, or if you just want to listen to our bit, that clip is here (also embedded above). Thanks Kerri!

Stayed tuned y'all; I am already working on prototype V. We are close to fully operational spike.

Organism of choice, but I am beginning to look into crayfish as well.

Prototype IV of the MicroManipulator: 3 degrees of freedom, but still contains a little wobble that new prototypes should fix.

Greg's two pole bandpass filter pass plus amplifier on a breadboard. He is looking into alternative low noise op amps that cost 1 -2 cents more, still within our budget.

Finishing our presentation the night before at the hotel bar. Our first reviewers were the barflies, and they gave us great advice on the presentation format. That's Greg on the left, me on the right.

Greg delivering our message of neuroscience liberation to our colleagues and converts.

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Finally, if you came to my blog in search of satirical neuroscience, here are the links to pdf's of our group's (Greg, Hirak, and me) previous work.

SfN 2005 Stock Market Behavior Predicted by Rat Neurons
(satirical poke at overuse of correlation)

SfN 2006 How Many Neurons Must One Man Have, Before You Call Him a Man?

(educational/semi-serious thought experiment on long-term memory...the paper finally just came out; all figures hand drawn!)

SfN 2007 Cingular Theory of Unification: The Cingulate Cortex Does Everything
(satirical poke at overinterpretation of fMRI mapping data)
The work will appear in a German book, translated in German, in early 2009.
Gage G. Marzullo T. Parikh H. "Die Cinguläre Theorie der Vereinigung: Der Gyrus Cinguli ist Für Alle Geistigen Leistungen Zuständig." in the book "Braintertainment 2.0"
An abridged version also appeared in a recent issue of the Annals of Improbable Research, and you can watch a youtube version of the work.

Enjoy! We encourage any readers out there to tackle issues in their own science field through satire. Sometimes scientists take themselves too seriously in the importance of their results (I sometimes do this as well), and a good-humored joke can spark more serious discussion of the limitations of our tools and methods.

Rolling Your Own Gaskets

Yes. I am still working on Bopper trying to bring it back to life. The cylinder head is back on, and now I am trying to reassemble all the pieces to get her back on the road again.

A couple months ago, during disassembly, when I removed the carburetor from the intake manifold, I noticed the cork gaskets from the rubber bottom of the carburetor were horribly rotted and needed to be replaced. Now that I am back to putting it all back together, when I went to Murray's  to get the gaskets, but they didn't have any for this specific Toyota 3AC engine. However.... they had rolls of gasket material, so I thought, "hey what the hell, I'll just cut my own; that's what most gearhead folks do anywhere on odd cars when you can't really find readily available replacement gaskets from the store."

Note; To non-gearheads out there, a gasket is a piece of rubber, cardboard, or cork that goes between two metal parts to complete a seal. Getting two parts of metal to seat perfectly against each other is very difficult, and every modern car engine uses gasket material between two metal parts to fill in any irregularities, so that a fluid-tight and gas-tight seal can be formed.

But how do I make my own gasket? I recalled the woodblock techniques from my high school art class. Cover the metal part with paint, and stamp the pattern on a piece of paper.

Then tape the painted gasket picture on a piece of gasket material, and use a fine #11 edge blade (re: scalpel) to cut out the gasket pattern.

Below you can see the cut out paper pattern on top, the homemade gasket in the middle, and, below that, the piece of rubber the gasket will attach to.

You can see the new gasket placed on the intake manifold of the car.
And coated with a high temperature resistant silicone sealant.
The thick rubber block between the carburetor and intake is installed...
Another handmade gasket is put on top of that, with more high temp sealant...
and viola! 
The carburetor is installed! Now to hook up that mess of vacuum and fuel lines...

From Genes to Social Behavior - A Meme Gone Out of Control

Those close to me know about the recent fiasco regarding the neuroscience program forcing my colleagues and I to retract an abstract we sent to the Society for Neuroscience meeting this year.

The abstract, entitled,"From cell fate to human fate decisions: the role of notch signaling in global conflicts," was a satirical poke at contemporary neuroscience by claiming that all human wars are the result of one gene, Notch, which is required for nervous system development. 

The point of the abstract was to point out how easy it is to exaggerate the importance of single proteins and genes in the function of the human mind. True, Notch definitely is responsible for human wars (because we wouldn't have functional brains without it), but a lot of other genes and factors, to understate it, are required as well.

And, true to form, look what appeared in the November 7th issue of Science Magazine in a article entitled "Genes and Social Behavior." The figure that explains it all. We should all stop working; it's all figured out.

Head Gasket Finally Replaced

With a screw driver I was able to scrape off the carbon deposits on the valves in question (see previous post). Then, with a combination of steel brushes, more screwdrivers, rags, and engine cleaners, I tried my best to remove the gasket material from the bottom of the cylinder head. I couldn't make it completely clean, but I made it as smooth as I could, and with a straight edge the bottom of the head did not seem warped.

So, Bopper, what failed on you almost five months ago in Southern Ohio, with me since averaging probably 3-6 hours a week working on you in any time since I could spare, is finally being replaced. It's time for your new head gasket!

As you can see in the picture and video below, I had previously exposed and cleaned the engine block and cylinder heads. I was worried that maybe a piston component had failed, but it appears not so.

And the culprit! Compare the old gasket to the new one, and notice the rip in the gasket between the #1 and #2 cylinder hole. I had a brief moment of minor annoyance when I saw that the gaskets were not exactly the same, but the two coolant pathways on the front of the old gasket don't lead to anything, as there no passage way for those holes on the head! See picture at top of post. 

I bought some special gasket sealant spray from the auto parts store that contains bits of copper to improve heat transfer, which made the gasket a very pretty burnt orange look (Hook 'em Horns!). The gasket slipped right on the top of the engine block. Like a glove.

I took one last look at the cylinder and piston heads, said "It was good knowing you, but hopefully we don't have to meet again for a very long time." I put the cylinder head on carefully (it's a bit heavy!), put the 10 bolts in the slots, and tightened each one down in the correct order, carefully eventually torquing them up to 50 lbs in 10 lb steps.

Now I only have to install the carburetor, distributer, timing belts, water pump..... Twill still be a while before she's fired up again.