I’ve got to get back to my meeting, but Cosma just had to distract me with these classic video clips on dissecting the squid giant axon, including movies of one of my personal heroes, JZ Young (pronounced, as everyone knows, as jay-zed), in action. It’s beautiful stuff.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Fascinating! Those really are great video clips.
I just looked up JZ Young and found this interesting description,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Zachary_Young .
I don’t think I’ll be watching the rest of those, but that first video is certainly interesting… giant axons, not exactly what I thought I’d be learning about today!
I certainly didn’t think I’d be learning about giant axons today either.
I thought it was interesting to learn that experiments by Hodgkin and Huxley in England on the squid giant axon in the 1940s “unraveled the mechanism of the action potential”.
Well I learned about squid giant axons in physiology lectures back in ’85. It is also in all the physiology textbooks I have.
That was really interesting. I watched it over lunch. :)