Eyewire.org expert review

It is not so often that some piece of software comes out that gets me as excited as what the folks at eyewire.org are doing. What they are attempting to do is to take one of the most difficult aspects of generating synapse-level “Connectomes” and speed it up by crowd sourcing the labor. By breaking the task into pieces that can be completed in short periods of time and adding some game-like elements, they hope they can dramatically speed up their reconstructions of the human retina connectome. But how useful is it really?

Gilberto Bento in town

Gilberto Bento, former Sommer Lab member best know for his 2010 Nature paper on the Pristionchus pacificus mouth form polyphenism, managed to make a return visit to Tübingen this weekend. A few of us went out for dinner and beers during his all-to-brief stay. In the photo, left-right, is Gilberto, Akira Ogawa (our esteemed Japanese postdoc who is soon leaving the lab) and Matthias Herrmann, our resident beetle taxonomist. Bento can now be found working on the genetics of Daphnia magna in the lab of Dieter Ebert in Basel, Switzerland.