Integrated Calendar

Touch is vital for many human and animal behaviors, but our understanding of it lags other senses. We have deployed a suite of techniques to dissect mechanisms of touch perception in the mouse, from the biophysics of whisker bending to optogenetic manipulation of specific cortical circuits. I will present our recent work exploring how circuits of primary somatosensory cortex process sensory and motor signals to create a neural representation of tactile features during whisker-based object exploration.

Radio photons are the least energetic ones used by astronomers. Yet, their origin is often associated with highly energetic processes, coming frequently from areas of extreme conditions involving high energies, high gravitational or magnetic fields. As a result, this window of the electromagnetic spectrum is a doorway to an effective laboratory for fundamental physics. This talk will concentrate on experiments that are possible using pulsars and neutron stars, but will also cover ongoing experiments which aim to study the properties of black holes, or touch on results where LIGO and pulsar results provide beautiful complementary information.