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Picture Caption: A picture from Cornell's Cascadilla Gorge Trail. Contributed by: Mark V. Albert

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The pressures of evolution have maximized the brain's processing speed and metabolic efficiency. Therefore, to understand why neurons in early visual cortex respond to specific visual patterns, you simply have to learn an appropriate efficient code. Here, we used independent components analysis (ICA) on a series of whitened image patches taken from pictures of natural scenes - rocks, trees, fields... For each filter, the "neuron" will fire if the image is bright on the bright spots and dark on the dark spots (more precisely, it's a linear filter). Some of these resemble simple cells in early visual cortex, as they have a characteristic oriented bright/dark pattern (like 2-D gabor functions, to be more precise). The idea is that the more filters derived from an efficient coding of natural scenes resemble those of neurons in early visual cortex, the better we understand how the brain processes visual input. For a more thorough understanding please visit http://emva.net/educational/introduction.html Contributed by: Mark V. Albert

Expression of CCAP RNA (right) in CCAP immunoreactive neurons (left) in the Drosophila CNS. Work on the moth, Manduca sexta, strongly suggests that the peptide Crustacean Cardioactive Peptide (CCAP) is central to the control of ecdysis. We have initiated the genetic analysis of CCAP function in Drosophila by examining the behavior of transgenic flies bearing targeted ablations of CCAP neurons (Park et al., 2002). Arrows and arrowheads point to neurons expressing CCAP. Br: brain; vns: ventral nervous system. Contributed by: John Ewer

This shows a 3rd instar larvae that has been dissected to show the musculature and the nervous system. The two white circles are the brain lobes, and the oval below it is the ganglion, where all the axons reach out to innervate muscles.

During the spring and summer, midshipman fish (Porichthys notatus) migrate from deep waters offshore to spawn in nests in the intertidal zone along the Pacific coast of North America. Females use the male advertisement call (ÏhumÓ) to find a maleÌs nest in the rocky intertidal zone. Shown here are newly hatched midshipman embryos (about 10 Ò14 days old, about 0.8-1.0 cm length), each attached to the surface of a small rock by an adhesive disk on the bottom surface of their yolk sac Contributed by: Andrew H. Bass

A convict cichlid male (left) and female (right) pair providing care for their offspring. These monogamous fish have a specific parental division of labor with males defending territories and protecting offspring from intruders while females provide direct offspring care. These fish will combine their efforts to raise their offspring to independence. We test the neural phenotype with regards to neuropeptides of single and paired individuals, as well as these neuropeptides effects on their parental care ability.

Please report corrections, questions, comments, and problems to: Lori Miller (lmm8 AT cornell.edu)