A new poll conducted by Arizona Public Opinion Pulse has found that if Kyrsten Sinema chooses to seek re-election in 2024, well put simply, she's screwed. Arizona voters were asked who they'd support in three different hypothetical matchups and as you can see, Kyrsten Sinema loses in a landslide in all three head-to-heads. This is amazingly satisfying to look at. So in a matchup between her and Ruben Gallego, he beats her by 23 points in a matchup between her and Kathy Hoffman. She loses by 20 points in a matchup with Greg Stanton. Sinema loses by 22 points. Now this is interesting to me because as someone who's covered Democratic Party primaries for years on this program, one thing that is consistently true is that the incumbent always has a plethora of advantages. They usually have an advantage when it comes to name recognition, an advantage when it comes to fundraising, and an advantage is just because they're the incumbent and voters oftentimes are risk averse and they view the person who's currently there as the safest bet more often than not. So to see her have this big of a disadvantage is pretty interesting.  But there's two really important caveats that I want to point out. First of all, this is a really early poll. She's not up for re-election until 2024, so by then a lot can change in 2022. The Democrats can lose control of the House and the Senate and by then most Arizonans who are dissatisfied with her now may forget how terrible she was this year in 2021. So that's one thing. Another thing, even if everything holds and she's still disliked in 2024, well if there is too many competitors going up against her and they don't consolidate before voters make their choice, she could win by a plurality. So for example, we have three people who in a head-to-head matchup, they all individually defeat her. But if each of these people remain in the race and there's let's say like 10 other people running, well if they split the vote, Kyrsten Sinema, if she hangs on to that 24-25% of Arizonans, she wins that primary. And if she wins that primary, she could be re-elected again. I mean, it's kind of a purple state. I think maybe shifting blue, that's arguable though. But it's not a foregone conclusion. And again, it's early, so I don't usually like to dwell on polls this soon. But still, I have to admit, seeing these numbers did put a smile on my face. And when we are living in a late-stage capitalist hellscape, anything that brings even a little bit of joy to my life, I want to celebrate that and I want to share it. Now there's some other portions of the poll that I do want to highlight. So overall, she's underwater with 45% of Arizonans viewing her as somewhat or very favorable and 42% viewing her as somewhat or very favorable. Now moving on to the third graphic, among all registered voters, only 26% say they prefer cinema as a senator. And here's what's interesting. Among Republicans, 75% still prefer a Republican over Kyrsten Sinema. So her being Republican light and obstructing her own party's agenda isn't leading to GOP voters seeing her as one of their own. They still don't like her. This is a message for corporate Democrats everywhere. Among independents, they're pretty evenly split, but the majority do not prefer cinema overall. And look at this. Among Democratic voters, 72% prefer a Democrat that is not cinema. Now one thing that I absolutely loathe about the Democratic Party's base is that usually they are very loyal. Even if they agree with the policies of politicians who they view as outsiders, like Bernie Sanders, for example, they're very loyal and that Democratic Party label, it unfortunately holds a lot of weight in modern American politics. And perhaps that's the result of the GOP just being insane. But in this instance, they are not loyal and they don't view Kyrsten Sinema as a Democrat that they approve of. So that's interesting. Now the best part about this poll and this story overall is that Kyrsten Sinema knows he's in trouble. She knows she's aware and her response, not necessarily directly to this poll, but the response to backlash overall leads me to believe that she actually does want to run for reelection. That was skeptical for a moment, just given her actions. But I mean, she's responding now and we saw a puff piece interview by Politico. There's local news affiliates in Arizona who are doing softball interviews with her. So there's very obviously a deliberate attempt for her to rehabilitate her image. And that tells me she's scared. So I mean, in the end, this is super early. So I want to stress that, right? So don't just assume that she's going to lose. But if the election were held today, would she lose? Yes, by a landslide. And she knows that. She knows that she needs to turn things around. The only problem is that she has a lot of time to turn things around. And this is American politics. So things change drastically from year to year. So by 2024, Arizonans may not even care.  And thankfully, Arizona voters acknowledge that not all Democrats are good Democrats. You actually have to deliver the policies that you fight for or don't fight for. More specifically, that matters. And that's encouraging for what it's worth.


DEET has been considered the most effective mosquito repellent. Unquestionably, read this editorial in the Journal of Family Practice, it should be the only mosquito repellent recommended by physicians with no other repellent coming close. Given the dramatic efficacy, it's hard to concede that any other repellent would ever beat it. However, there are some rare reports of severe reactions to DEET, not to mention the fact that it can melt plastics like eyeglass frames and cell phone components, and many consumers find the odor and sensation on the skin unpleasant. Enter picaridin. Overall, studies have shown little difference between DEET and picaridin applied at the same dosage, with some evidence pointing to a superior persistence for picaridin, all without the iridistancy, odor, and melted glasses. No wonder it got consumer reports pick for the best overall insect repellent. Note that concentration matters—their 20% picaridin product top the list, but at 5% it was one of the worst-performing products. Any toxicity? Adverse effects, when occurring, primarily manifested as eye irritation, redness, vomiting, and oral irritation. But of course you're not supposed to eat it or spray it in your eyes, but even unintentional ingestion was associated only with relatively minor toxicity. What about the electronic mosquito repellent gizmos? Ten studies done in all ten found that there was no difference in the number of mosquitoes landing on people with or without the gizmos, and experiments out in the field confirm no effect on preventing mosquito bites. Picaridin was roughly based on a black pepper compound, but like DEET is a synthetic chemical. Are there any natural repellents? Of course, just because something is natural doesn't mean it's necessarily safe. Strict 9 is a natural product of the Strict 9 tree, and ricin from caster beans is 10,000 times deadlier still. In fact, the top 10 most toxic poisons are all natural. But let's look at the mosquito repellent effects of about 20 essential oils compared to a placebo control group and to DEET. The asterisks point to the significant result, so here's a cleaner peek. As you can see, only five had any lasting effect at all. Peppermint and lemongrass oil were effective for 30 minutes. Spearmint and garlic oil started working, but didn't even last that long. Cinnamon oil, though, reduced mosquito attraction for one and a half hours. The remaining essential oils had no significant effect on mosquito attraction at any time point, and this includes citronella. Citronella was the most widely used repellent before DEET was invented, and it's still used today in many formulations despite inferior efficacy. At lower concentrations, it may only last a few minutes, and at higher concentrations, citronella can cause skin irritation. Compared to a complete protection time of six hours for DEET, citronella may only last 10 and a half minutes. Therefore, citronella may be acceptable for brief exposure to nuisance mosquitoes, but it is not advised for protection if you really can't afford to get bit. Essential oils, read this, family medicine journal editorial, have no effectiveness and are not recommended. But that was before we learned about lemon eucalyptus, the only plant-based repellent recommended by the CDC, though should not be used by pregnant women or children younger than three years of age. Consumer Reports listed it as one of their top three picks warding off mosquitoes and ticks for at least seven hours. All the other botanical products they tested failed, but 40% lemon eucalyptus was shown to prevent bites for 47 hours after application for aggressive species of mosquitoes and for greater than 12 hours for less aggressive mosquitoes. A period of prevention greater than at least a 10% DEET repellent.


Hello, my name is Eric Lopez. I'm a solution architect for VMware. And my co-presenter is Justin Beditz. He was a developer on the open V-Switch team that's with VMware. The person who is supposed to be doing this talk, SOMIC, he's not here today. So I'll be taking over doing this presentation. 40 minutes. 40 minutes? OK. We thought this was going to be a very quick session. So what we're going to do is do a deep dive in terms of OpenStack and VMware NSX architecture and actually how we provide network virtualization for OpenStack and why it is actually better using VMware NSX in your OpenStack environment. So we have five key points that we want to talk about. Talk about OpenStack and VMware. Then we'll do an introduction to OpenStack Neutron. Hopefully some of you are familiar with that. We'll talk about some of the use cases on that. Then we'll go into a deeper dive in terms of OpenStack Neutron and how NSX plays with that. And that will give you an idea of actually why NSX is very important for enterprise type applications. And then we'll do what's next. And that's what we'll cue into what Justin's going to be talking about in terms of Hyper-V and Docker containers and things like that. What is the next generation? What's going on with NSX? And then we'll do a slight demo showing you how Hyper-V is interacting with NSX at this point as well. If we do have some time, I actually can do a live demo part and show you actually a full integration of multi-hypervisors, ESX, Docker containers, Hyper-V, KVM. We can actually do XANA as well, but I don't have that in that particular demo. And if you were ever at the VM world, we actually did that whole exact demo during that presentation in San Francisco as well. So the key thing about OpenSec and VMware SDDC, so the Software Divine Data Center, so it's for us to provide a framework to assemble sort of an AWS type infrastructure for you to provide your infrastructure to the service to your clients or your tenants. So this is for developers. And you have all the essential component variations that are available. So Horizon, all the CLI tools for all the different projects, Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Glance, but the underlying infrastructure can be whatever is that you're doing. So typical, it's KVM, Linux Bridge architecture, NSF, we're doing the providing the Glance as well as the Cinder part. With NSX, we actually take over the Linux Bridge and we actually do provide all the plumbing for the network environment. And then using NSX as a hypervisor, we provide sort of the ESX hypervisor as well as the vCenter for the scalability issue. And then you actually use any type of the vCenter type of storage. This can be a third party that plugs into the data storage environment, or it could be the vSAN product as well. So you can do your application provisioning management, developer tools, service API. So any type of, in terms of your application developers, your DevOps teams, or whatever that are providing, they have all the open APIs that are currently available for that. So what we call this infrastructure is currently in beta. It's called the VMware Integrated OpenSax, or the VIO. If you want to get information about that, talk to our product managers, go to our booth and talk to them about how to be part of the VIO beta. So that's sort of what is OpenSax, how we integrate with it. Now we're going to talk about a quick overview of OpenStack Neutron. So if you're looking at terms of large scale environments, so hundreds, thousands of tenants, thousands of networking switches, and things like that, there's a scalability issue with sort of the Nova networking. So in terms of that, Neutron improves on this type of environment. So large number of tenants, you want to do L3 type routers, security, so you want to do security groups, things like that. Load Balance is a service, VPN is a service. Neutron provides that basic functionality and that plumbing for you. So you can actually have multiple tenants using multiple logical routers, have multiple logical switches as well. Load Balance or VPN services and things. We support overlay. So in terms of instead of doing VLAN type isolation, now you have the ability to do L2 over L3 type network. So these overlight networks. So you can use GRE, VXLAN, and then the other tunneling protocols that are possible. So it removes one of the major limitations of using VLANs, which is the 10, 4,096-type number of address spaces that you can do or the virtual LANs that you can use. And now you have IP connectivity over this overlay network easily in that type of environment. So from one hypervisor to another, it uses this overlay network to communicate to another VM on a different hypervisor. And it looks like it's L2 adjacent on that system. And then you can have any type of open solution. So this could be R, VMware NSX plug-in, could be the Linux Bridge plug-in, OVS plug-in, as well as Cisco UCS plug-in, the NEC ROO plug-in, or any of the third party providers that are providing the underlining tunnel network. So that's the use case in terms of using Neutron. This allows you to get the scalability that you want and improves on the current limitations on Nova network. So and now using OpenStack Neutron with NSX, we can actually take a look of actually what the type of environment that this does as well as break some of the limitations that currently the OpenStack Neutron has with using the base reference platform of OVS. So in terms of our application, NSX is actually a highly distributed application. We have this control cluster that controls all the flows in that environment. It actually learns about the different points and how those systems are supposed to communicate and programs the edge devices, which are your hypervisors, to actually know how to switch the packets around in that environment. So this high availability cluster is designed to scale. It's fully active active. So you just add more nodes to actually, as your workload increases, you can add increased control clusters in that environment. We actually have also a management console. This is a different management console. It's mostly used for troubleshooting and actually operational aspects of that environment. It's still used as all the leverage of the APIs that are from OpenStack. Can communicate directly with the controllers. We have our own API that the controllers provide to provide any type of API call. So it's very easy to integrate into any of your own home grown dev platforms or dashboard platform that you have. So if you have typical workflows, you can use our APIs to call that. You don't have to use our manager or you don't have to use the OpenStack APIs. That gives you that flexibility. The second thing is smart tunnels. So we actually have the ability to do some additional encapsulation method. One is STT to actually increase the performance between the hypervisor to get near wire speed performance between two of the hypervisors, as well as any other encapsulation technology that's going to occur, so VXLAN, as well as the next generation encapsulation technology. And then we actually have the ability to do some of the issues with the VXLAN was we have for broadcast multicast type traffic. We have a service node that allows us to replicate that packet in the environment. So each of the hypervisor nodes are not dealing with specific broadcast multicast traffic. Those get offloaded to another node to actually do that replication and does it smartly. It's a fully resource scalable solution as well as that environment.  So these services are active-active. So if you lose one of the edge gateways, all the information gets synced between the systems. And a new system will take over for that particular process. So you actually have this highly scalable infrastructure to provide the logical network for your environment. So some of the improvements that we do in this environment, so scale, so we actually have a very high scale limit. In each of our NSX domains, so those are the control clusters that are controlling this, 15,000 logical routers. So that's a lot of logical networks that you can provide. And then you're going to have 60,000 logical ports or VMs that can attach into those 15,000 networks. This is all fully active-active. The other thing is high throughput. So you can actually bond together two 10 gig nicks and you can get near wire speed. So essentially, 20 gigabits between those two 10 gigabits that are bonded. So if you need that wire speed communication for data transfer in the tenant network, we can actually provide that type of scale. The third thing is now we actually have optimized traffic for doing the L3 and security. So based upon implementing the security policies, those are done at those edge points in terms of where this packet is being processed. So if a packet comes in, you have the security policy for any address or egress, they'll be done either at the source hypervisor or at the destination hypervisor, as well as distributed logical routing. So instead of going through a node that's doing your L3 type networking, it does not get tromboned in that environment, but now actually you can have the hypervisors transmit that packet directly to each other. So we actually have full distributed logical routing in our environment. So we optimize the traffic for both security policy as well as routing between the hypervisors. So a lot of the east-west traffic that is served by that. So as VMs communicate to each other, if they're on the same hypervisor or if they're on the different hypervisors, we optimize the traffic pattern for that. So and lastly, management. So the ability to actually manage a lot of the system, when you start looking at the scale, how do you actually troubleshoot operate this type of environment? We have our own management layer that actually allows us. This is what the NSX manager does in terms of that aspect. So as we offload specific data path information, we're actually able to learn information about the environment. So our whole design is for management and high availability for those type of enterprise applications that you're looking at. So management monitoring tools. So there's specific monitoring tools, like I mentioned before. Stats, you can get stats on the logical port. Port connections, now you can actually do logical port connections and port connection tools to actually see in the underlay actually how they're communicated and actually how the environments are actually communicating to each other. We can actually inject packets into the environment. You actually do a trace flow to see where the packet gets propagated in your environment. And you actually can do different types of packet signatures on that as well from the different NICs. Packet size, packet length, so it gives you that troubleshooting and operational aspect. And then we actually have the ability to mirror logical ports as well, to be actually the mirror logical traffic to different points in the environment so you can use your existing application tools for monitoring to notice that particular data patterns or whatever that you do in your typical environment. So security policies for compliance monitoring, things like that. IDS, IPS, you actually offload into your current working environment from the logical space. And then we actually have the ability to upgrade our NSX components. Since we are a very highly distributed application, we have what we do, an update the process of upgrading to the next version of the software. So we'll upgrade the different components in our environment in a timely manner for you guys and actually help operate that aspect. And then we also integrate with other different bare metal tools. So in terms of networking services, L3 with static routing, L2 logical networks, we actually have hardware VTEP devices that we can actually plug into as well. And then if you have any type of ACLs, QoS, we actually able to provide those additional services as well in terms of bandwidth rolling on a particular VM process, as well as doing some of the DHCP process. So if you have differentiated service protocol that you're using, you can say from the particular VM environment, you can actually re-replicate that packet data onto the underlying infrastructure. So the underlying understands what type of packet is being propagated in that environment. So we have the DHCP markings that are occurring at that. So next part. So as Eric mentioned, my name is Justin Pettit. I'm one of the core OVS developers. And the key part of how to get NSX to work on multiple hypervisors is through OVS. And so I'm going to talk about today is some of those efforts that we've been putting into getting OVS to run on more platforms. So we've been focused lately on support for DPDK, Hyper-V, and Docker. And so today I'll talk about the last two of those. So with OpenV, Switch, and Docker, we've begun working on integrating OVS and Docker already. So a few months ago, Aaron Rosen, one of the core neutron developers, added support to OpenStack for OVS and Docker. So in this case, it pretty much just looks as far as OVS and NSX is concerned that it's just a standard VM that's connected with vets instead of being vifs that are usually used in VMs. To the OVS repo, we've added documentation and integration scripts to work with Docker and OVS. And we've begun working with the Docker community to see about adding OVS as one of the supported back ends for Docker. So the way that we view Docker is that it's good for instantiation, for well-known configurations. But the security can be a little bit more difficult, because you have to protect against the full Linux API. So the way that we've been viewing things is that if you have your security domains, you want to have those. The containers can be adjacent to each other. But if, for example, you were running, if you were a service provider and you had different tenants, you may not want to run those adjacent to each other and instead run those in different VMs or on different bare metal hosts. And I'll talk about those configurations in just a second. So the first one is the model that I mentioned, where we're running on bare metal. And so these, this laser's not working. Anyway, these different Docker instances are connected to Vs into that OVS. That's the green circle there. And as I mentioned, to OVS, this just looks like if it could be a VIF or it could be Vs or it doesn't really matter. They're just interfaces. And then we associate information from the cloud management system that identifies what the other end of those Vs are attached to, to OVS, that then sends that information to NSX so that you can implement your policies. And so this is supported already. But depending on how concerned you are about these things, we'd recommend that these different Docker instances are in the same security domain. Just because if one of them breaks out, then it could affect the traffic for the others in that green switch. Another model that we're looking at supporting is if you want to run multiple Docker containers, but this time in a VM. And in this case, if any of these Docker instances breaks out, if all of the policy was implemented in that red OVS, then it could modify the traffic and modify the connectivity between things so you could break down the isolation that you're looking to provide through something like NSX or any of the logical networking services that you may want to run. So what we are proposing is that in these environments, what you would do is use the red OVS to tag the information to identify which of the Docker instances they are. And then that information would then be relayed down to that green OVS that then actually enforces the policy and then connects the tunnels. So this requires more work with OVS and the upstream Docker community, but we are beginning to work on that. So then I wanted to talk about our port of OpenV switch to Hyper-V. So this is a collaboration between VMware and CloudBase. And I mentioned that this is the largest external contribution that we've had. And the reason it's really external from both of these is that the core OVS developers are really more Linux people than Windows. So the group that actually implemented in VMware, the support for OVS, was a different group from the core OVS developers. And so VMware and CloudBase had each developed their own port to Hyper-V. And so what we decided to do was merge the efforts together. And so both of these teams proposed changes. And then the core OVS developers sort of went through and made suggestions and then have pulled code in based on requirements or based on the feedback that we've given. So it's the newest supported platform. It uses the same user space. So OVS vSwitch D, which is actually where most of the code for OVS resides for switching, is exactly the same on the platforms, except now it's a Windows binary. And all of the utilities, if you're familiar with them, are the same. So OVS OF Kettle, DP Kettle, and VS Kettle, they're all identical, except now they're Windows binaries. The data path is implemented as an internal forwarding extension to Hyper-V's native switch. So the performance should match that of a native switch on Hyper-V. So all the code is upstream in the master branch. We're going to include it in OVS 2.4. But the initial release, it's not feature complete yet. And I'd only recommend using it for testing purposes. But we're moving quickly towards we want to get feature parity and have it work just as well as any of the other platforms. And then finally, all the code for making it work with OpenStack is been done. But it hasn't been sent for review. So hopefully that will happen soon. So I should have a demo of using NSX and Hyper-V together. So in this, in the demo that you'll see, there's two different hypervisors. And these are Hyper-V hypervisors in blue here on the bottom left. And so there's Hyper-V R3 and Hyper-V R4. You can see these have 10 dot addresses. And they're connected together with a VX LAN tunnel. And there's three VMs that are one on R3 and two on R4. And then those ones have addresses in the 172 address space. So this is the physical layout. But then logically in NSX, we configured them these VMs to be on the same logical switch. So when we run the demo, you'll get to see how that's done. So here we are on the Hypervisor R3. And you can see that VS Kettle is run here. And down here, there's the OBS R3 port 1 in VS Kettle. And this is the database that shows the configuration. And here with the OBS DP Kettle command, which communicates directly with the kernel module, you can see that the port is created as well. So now we're going to go to R4. And we'll go back to the Hypervisor in a second. But these are the two VMs that are running on R4. So the first one has the address <IP_ADDRESS>. And the other one has the address <IP_ADDRESS>. So remember, there are two VMs here on this R4 host. So now we'll go to the Hypervisor window PowerShell. And you can see that there are two interfaces shown in VS Kettle. There's the OBS R4 port 2 and OBS R4 port 1. Both these exist. And then if you run the DP Kettle show command, you'll see that they both exist in the kernel module as well. So now what we'll do is we're going to go to the NSX screen. And so first we'll look at R3's configuration. And so there's a little bit of delay here from the VNC session. But you can see that this is Hyper-V R3 in the NSX console. And there was one VM on R3. And you can see that. And it's a little hard to read here, but it's down here. It's specified as OBS R3 port 1. And then here this is for R4. And here are the two ports from the two VMs that we're seeing. And then this is the logical switch we created that is VXLAN based, called demo VXLAN Hyper-V. And now we'll see that those three ports that were on those two different hypervisors are listed down here. And so all the connectivity looks good on them. And you can see that they're for the R4 and R3. And so now what we'll do is we'll go into R3, which had the one VM, and we'll ping in the logical space one of the VMs on R4. So we have the address <IP_ADDRESS>. And we'll ping <IP_ADDRESS>. And all of that traffic will go out, go over the tunnel. And you'll see that as far as those VMs, even though on their different hypervisors, they think that as far as they're concerned, they have local L2 adjacency. So this demo just is showing running two Hyper-V hosts. But it would work as well if we had ESX and KVM and Docker. We have all of those working. And you can connect any of those together. And they would all appear on the same logical L2 adjacent, if that's how you configured it. So that's what we're working on for multi-hypervisor support to show what's coming. If you wanted to go into your demo slides. OK, I think that was all I had. So in our environment, we actually can do multiple type of hypervisors. And that's kind of the key thing. With this NSX product, you can actually plug in any type of hypervisors you want. We do work with a lot of different companies as well, providing the different type of OS support in that environment. So thank you for your time. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Any questions? Thank you.


Alright, so typically I will go through and do a stock photography revenue report every month on my stock photography sales from that past month. But I've missed it for a couple months, so in this video I'm going to go through all my sales for 2020. So that's both January and February. Alright, let's get into it. So the top four sites for 2020 so far have been my largest growing sites from 2019. And I think these four sites are probably going to be my top sites probably for most of the year, although I expect the order to change month to month. Now the top two Shutterstock and Adobe have been at my top three lists for a long time. But Pexels and Deposit Photos, they've really been moving up more recently and I really see them growing much faster than the other two. But Adobe and Shutterstock had quite a head start because I've been getting good revenue from them for a number of years. Now one thing to note is that I don't have the same number of photos uploaded to each site. So I've attempted to upload the same photos to Shutterstock and Adobe stock, but Adobe has rejected more than Shutterstock, that's why those numbers are different. But take a look at Pexels. I've only uploaded a small portion of my photos to Pexels. I did this last year because I wanted to try it out. I wanted to see if it was worthwhile. And I've done that with a number of different sites and they've stayed around the $10 a month range, whereas Pexels has slowly been climbing over time. So I'm considering uploading a lot more of my photos to Pexels. I've got about another 400 photos that I could upload to Pexels. And I'm wondering if that could push it into the top spot. Now the thing with Pexels is it's still pretty random. Now I've been getting some good donations recently, but it is possible for me to get like a $40 donation one month and the next month gets $0. So it's pretty random. Whereas if you compare that to the Microsoft site, it's like Shutterstock or Adobe stock, they're never going to go down to zero in one month. They're always going to be within a range over a month, although it goes kind of up and down every single month. So I'd love to hear what you think in the comments is whether I should go ahead and upload more photos to Pexels, whether you think it'll push up the numbers or whether uploading more photos won't make much of a dent. I'm just wondering whether people are seeing and what you think. Let me know. It's also interesting to see deposit photos as the number four site. I've really seen deposit photos going up recently. And it never was a really big site for me. So I haven't uploaded any photos to deposit photos since 2014. So that's six years without an upload, which means that the only reason they would be going up is maybe they're getting more customers on there or maybe they changed the search algorithms so they're showing my photos more. But either way, I've created a lot of photos since 2014. So I'm thinking about going ahead and uploading all those photos to deposit photos to see if that will increase my sales because it just seems like that site is doing better recently. All right, and here's the rest of my sales for January and February. Nothing out of the ordinary here. You know, sites that I've tried out that never really worked out for me. So I haven't gone ahead and uploaded any photos to them recently. So anyways, pretty short revenue report this time for 2020 because there hasn't really been anything outstanding, no big sales to talk about and no news or big changes that I have to talk about in this video. But if you're new to the channel, I go through and do a revenue report every month to talk about my sales on the different stock sites. And I talk about new stock sites and different ways to make money with your photos online. So if that interests you, make sure you go ahead, subscribe to the channel. If you found this useful at all, give it a like and best of luck selling your photos online.


I have to be really freely moving here. Thanks, Sean. Thanks to the organizer. It's a great pleasure to be here. I want to talk today about cellular determinants of spatial representation in the cortical hippocampal system. And there'll be three parts to this lecture. In the first part, I will talk sort of about structure function relationships in the medial and torino cortex. And this is work primarily pushed by Andrea Bogalossi, a postdoc in the lab. I will then in the second and third part, which are pre-for switch to the hippocampus, where I talk about hippocampal activity, in particular, play cells, activity and silent cell activity, and how it is affected by experience. And finally, discuss the possibility that there might be an internal trigger for global remapping. And these parts were done by Albert Lea and Schaubabstein, and they were still in the lab. And this is currently work underway done by Moitz von Heimdall, a postdoc who is also a poster here and who you should talk to for more detail. So the study of the cellular activity in the cortical hippocampal system, I think this has been one of the most fascinating stories in neuroscience in the last decades. It somehow didn't end up in the Nobel Prize yet. But who cares? What was so stunning about the work in cellular neuroscience of the hippocampal system is a series of discovery. And the first discovery was the discovery of play cells by O'Keeffe and Rostovsky, then head erection cells by Tobi and Muller, and finally the discovery of crit cell activity by the Morses and their colleagues. So why were these discoveries so important, and why is it such a success story? The reason is that the activity in the hippocampal system, the cellular activity, it was just unexpectedly abstract and explicit, sort of this idea of a cell firing in a certain spot and another cell firing in another spot. It really made it possible to think at a neurophysiological level about the idea that the animal was using a map. And before that, there was sort of behavioral evidence to suggest that rats, rodents, can do map-like navigation. Then when people discovered these head erection cells, Tobi and Muller, it sort of became actually difficult to think that the animal is not using a map. So the first there was this correlate, the play cells, but then when you find things that look like a compass and that's what these cells do, it would actually kind of be surprising if the animal would not be using map-like navigation. Then again, grid cells, I think they did another job, at least for me. And there was a debate started off by the discovery of O'Keeffe. He suggested that play cells are part of an internal construct, an internal spatial representation system that the animal applies to the world to sort of break it down and make explicit representations. And he had a lot of emphasis on the idea that this is something that is inside the animal. Now, people didn't want to believe that. In particular, psychologists, they have a very hard time with the idea that an animal is not empty. They think it learns everything and stuff. And I think that's sort of where grid cells came along and eliminated another large class of theories. Obviously, an animal has never seen a grid. These firing patterns, these hexagonal firing patterns sort of iterated through space, this is something a rat has never seen. So it's not a goddamn memory. It's not something the animal acquired. It's an internal system much like predicted by O'Keeffe. So OK, the cell activity in the cortical hippocampal system, it's fascinating, it's rich, it's explicit. Turns out it's very inspiring. A huge amount of work was done to sort of understand how the system works. Here, I have an atomy diagram. You don't need to understand that in detail. Blue structures are structures where people found head-direction cells. Here, yellow, blade cells, grid cells here in pink were found in enterinocortics. But it turns out that they're also in the post-subiculum and the parasybiculum, which is not depicted here. So there was a lot of anatomical work triggered, even more so. And many of you will know that or may have contributed. There was a huge set of models triggered to explain how the animal makes blade cells and how the animal makes these spatial representations. So we have literally hundreds of models for how these cells come about. Now, being an experimentalist, what I see as a challenge then is to eliminate these models, to reduce them ideally to one. This is not where we're at. We still have hundreds of models. A lot of models are compatible with the data. And this is something not so easy to understand. When you think about the fact that we have studied these cells like hell, there are thousands and thousands of studies. Why do we have so many models? Why do we have so many alternative explanations? I think a major reason is that we typically know relatively little about the individual cell under study. And this is both true for the synaptic events that contribute to blade cell, grid cell, head erection, cell activity, and for the microcircuits. And that's where our work is focused on. And today, I want to talk about hippocampus and enterinocortex. Enterinocortex is an interesting place. Head erection information, which is very heavily linked to the vestibular system, which scans from here, is integrated. And we see here in the enterinocortex for the first time allocentric coding, sort of spatial responses that are not egocentric, like the ones that we would find in the sensory courtesies. And then I will also talk about the hippocampus, which has this special ability to form memories very fast, sort of in single trial learning. OK, why is it so difficult to, why do we know so little about the individual cells we study? I think the reason is that most of our techniques use deliver only very limited information about the single cell. So we can extercellory court from awake behaving animals for decades, but we typically could not identify these cells and could not identify the microcircuits. And that's something that Andrea Bogalossi addressed. So he used a special micro drive that was friction based that we would implant on the animal because there's a lot of friction between the pipet holder and the pipet guide. The thing is very stable in place. He would approach a cell. He would stain it and then cement everything in place and let the animal run around. And this cementing in place strategy is also something that we use. It gives a lot of additional stability. And it's also a strategy that we use for the patching that I will talk about in about 15 minutes. Now, the way we do the experiments as yet and all the data I will talk about today come from formats where we anesthetize an animal, we then stain a neuron or we patch a neuron. We give the animal an antidote against anesthesia and we have it run around and then look at spatial correlates of firing. Now, this format has its problems because the animal first gets the anesthesia, then it gets the antidote. So when it's waking up, it's full of drugs. The behavior is quite variable. The reason why we do it is because it's easy. Before Andrea sort of started to do this, there were maybe in the whole history of neuroscience, I tried to count it. There was something then less than 50 cells identified in freely moving animals. And Andrea has now identified about 100 cells already and actually more people in particular, the Klausberg group is now also coming up with identified cells from freely moving animals. So we think this is something where we'll have a lot of movement. At the same time, we're trying to improve these experiments. We try to, in this format, we just get a single cell per animal or actually to be honest, it's more like half a cell per animal because not every experiment works out. We're trying now to improve this, to get several cells per animal, to do it in fully awake animals and to have animals that are trained to run around because this leads to better spatial discharge properties. This underway, it's promising. The cost is that it makes the experiments even slower. Good, so now we're gonna use this technique and ask how do microcircuits of cells in the entorhinal cortex look in particular? We are interested in head direction information and crit cell information. The idea was that these cells are mixed in entorhinal cortex and we're gonna evaluate this idea on the basis of our evidence. Before I really get into it, I wanna give you some background on the anatomy of these structures. So in particular in the human, here you look at the temporal lobe of the human, here would be the occipital lobe, here would be the frontal lobe. So this is the entorhinal cortex of the human. This brain structure is incredibly patchy. Sort of there are islands, half a millimeter islands or so, that contain about 3000 cells. In each hemisphere we find one to 300 of these little islands. In between there are basically zero cells. So as far as I know, this is the patchiest cortical structure that has ever been described. Now because it's so stunning in humans and monkeys, it was first actually in the original publication I was saying that there are no patches in red entorhinal cortex. Turns out when you look closely at it, you find that it's also patchy and what is very interesting, so you see certain spots of cytochrome oxidase activity in layer two. This would be a section through entorhinal cortex, dorsal being here, ventral being here. This is layer two, the dark region. This is a major output layer of the entorhinal cortex. In this area the outputs come from the superficial layers. And it projects to the layer two cells, in particular project to the dentate. So what was particularly interesting here is that we found differences in the patches when we went from dorsal where the patches are often very small to ventral where the patches are large. And that was interesting to us because there was evidence from multiple sources, first anatomical evidence from Menovitus Group and later physiological evidence from the Moser Group that there are functional differences here, namely the ventral entorhinal cortex being sort of concerned with large spatial frequencies, having big distances, several meter distances between firing spots of grid cells and the dorsal parts being concerned with sort of smaller spatial distances having sort of firing fields that are sort of 10 to 30 centimeters apart. Now what we also found is that there is not just one type of patch but that there are sort of multiple types of patches, small ones and larger ones, these larger ones we later understood are related to the parasybiculum and I talk about these in a bit more detail. So these patches were very intriguing to me because I worked with patchy structures before in like red barrel cortex. I have to say that we still don't understand the functional significance of these patches all that well. The reason is, as far as I'm concerned that we have too few techniques that allow us to relate sort of cellular activity to individual patches. So we made progress on describing these patches in the red. We found that actually multiple different stains reveal sort of this is a stain for cells, an islet stain. This is a chat stain for acetylcholine S-transferase, a sort of cholinergic enzyme that is involved in cholinergic action there and cholinergic action we know it's very closely tied to thetherism or cytochrome oxidase stain. So if you look at these different stains, they all reveal the same kind of patterns. So for example, these three patches we see in cell density, metabolic activity, cholinergic activity. So we have now a better take on what these patches are and from doing these multiple stains our estimate of how many patches they are came down. We first started with several hundreds. Now we think sort of in the upper third of the MEcBF maybe 30 of these patches, we think there's about 200 cells per patch. Yeah, it's a reasonably small number and quite different number from the 3000 cells per patch that we would find in the humans. What is also intriguing to us that we find patches not only in the interrhinal cortex but also in the structures that project to them like the post-subiculum and there are a lot of structural similarities. The patches much like in the interrhinal cortex are also restricted to the superficial layers. They also have size gradients indoors or ventral and we think this is something that iterates in cortex and is a feature that is very typical for cortical processing. As far as I know we don't have any evidence of patchy structure in hippocampal system or very strong patches. Good, now what's happening in these patches? What do we see when we identify cells there? So here is a recording from a layer two cell that we identified. We have the animal runner around in an omaze and what we find, we find sort of multiple firing spots where the cell is particularly active in the corners here, the cell actually fires basically no spikes at all the five turns that the animal made and at these spots we have then other spots where the animal fires and most of the runs. Okay, this is similar to a grid cell in a linear environment. We haven't studied these cells in an open field where you see the grid pattern better and the reason is that we typically do not get good enough spatial coverage with our animals who just woke up from anesthesia. They run for 10 minutes or 15 minutes but for a grid cell, for sort of robustly seeing this grid pattern, you really need the animals to have run like hell and we don't have that. So we restricted ourselves to these linear masses where we can assess the spatial modulation better. A very typical thing is that these, their two cells show very little head direction modulation. Yeah, they are sort of not directionish and they're very strongly cedar modulated. Okay, now how do other cells look like? I think I'm actually running late on time. We skip this sort of the, layer three cells look similar to the layer two cells. In the deep layers, we often find silent cells, yeah. Or we were very puzzled by the large fraction of silent cells, about half of the cells are silent in our experimental conditions and we initially thought that it's related to experience. We see in some cells an experience effect so that when the animal knows the place better, they fire more, but it's not as robust as we initially thought. Actually many cells also would fire more in a unknown environment, so we're not totally clear about that. What is striking is the architecture is very different from the layer two cells. The layer two cells actually made only very moderate local connections, yeah. And quite restricted connectivity in the superficial layers, in the deep layers which actually receive the hippocampal feedback, there is very rich local connectivity. So we think that the microcircuits of these deep layers that get hippocampal feedback and the superficial layers are very different. Another thing that is very interesting is that these cells, basically the layer five cells, we never saw them connect to these big patches here. Now what's happening in these big patches, in these big patches we found a lot of head direction cells, yeah. And these cells are strange cells, often very small cells. They very much respect the borders of these big patches. So we think these big patches, the parasympicular big patches, they have very, very sharp borders. So the cells never cross, that's why it's basically never crossed these border and we think it's one of the hardest borders in the red cortex. Now these cells have a very interesting axonal architecture. First of all, they make a single axon that goes, sort of, we find these cells at the border. This is, let me start here again. This is the side view. This would be dorsal. This would be ventral. These are the different layers of the entorhinal cortex and at the dorsal end of the entorhinal cortex we find these bigger patches and they send an axon to layer two and actually it turns out that they often send select with their axon a single or two in this case of these smaller patches. Now this is one of the few things that we know that might help define these patches. So they get very private directional input. So what that made me think originally is that maybe these patches can sort of, as an ensemble, they get specific direction information and we think that the direction information, the head direction information is involved in updating the map so that when I turn my head, yeah, not everything jumps but it stays in place. So we think that the head direction information might help rotate these patches and we wondered if individual patches might rotate. Now from talking to Edward Moser, my friend Moser and people who record from ensembles of great cells, I'm not sure this is a viable hypothesis because they would typically say that sort of all the typically most of the grid cells would rotate together. It would not be, they'd have seen little evidence for restricted rotations. I went to first here, I didn't go through the spike plots so this is a spatial modulation of the cell. It fires everywhere but it's strongly modulated as a function of where the animal looks so when the animal looks south, it fires and that makes it a head direction cell. Okay, these cells, they do not just have this one exon that goes to the layer two but they also have a very long exon that we call circumcurrent exon because it runs around the entorhinal cortex. So it would connect actually many of these big patches together and another feature of these cells is that when we rotate the animal in forced rotation we see strong responses very much suggesting that these cells see a lot of vestibular input. So a few concluding words on sort of the micro circuits of these head direction cells. So what we wonder if these circumcurrent exons are involved in a global computation of head direction. So when we go back here, they have this exon that connects many, many of these big patches and we wonder if this circumcurrent exon is involved in aligning all the head direction vectors, right? A key thing about the compass is that the needle shows in one direction. So we think that this might be something that enforces sort of a common head direction vector across the system.  So there is very strong global connectivity. When you do the same experiment here, you find there's a bit of local connectivity, but it's never that the entire entirinal cortex lights up. So there seems to be a big micro circuit difference in sort of the exons that these head direction cells form compared to the more crit-like cells that we discovered in other layers. Another feature of these cells is that we really have seen no deep layers associated with these parasybicular patches. So when you go back here, these cells, these patches are fat. They actually almost touch the surface. There's very little layer one above and they get very thin and basically we see very little layer five connected to it and layer five is what gets a hippocampal feedback. The deep layers in particular feedback from CA1, these cells do not seem to get. So what we wonder is given the lack of feedback, maybe the animal doesn't memorize this. Maybe the animal doesn't consolidate this. A key idea sort of in hippocampal research is that the hippocampal feedback allows the cortex to sort of consolidate memories about what the animal did. Now what we wonder is if there is no hippocampal feedback or at least no CA1 feedback, maybe the animal doesn't memorize where it looked. It just memorizes its path. Actually, this is a very good spatial, a very reduced spatial representation but when we draw maps of where we were, we don't specify where we looked. We just specify where we have to go. So this is an idea and it's maybe compatible with some other evidence that actually also shows a lack of replay in head erection cells, et cetera. Good. I spent quite some time now with structural function stuff in entorhinal cortex. I also wanna talk a little bit about hippocampal circuits. So I'm gonna shift gears a little bit and this is work done by Albert Lee and show him Epstein and sort of a key thing about hippocampal representations is when you have the animal run around, you would have a group of cells set fire in certain places, so-called place cells, certain place cells and other cells that are silent. So now we investigated these cells with patch recordings and I show you a movie of such a recording. In this case, a place cell recording. What you're gonna see right-hand side is the animal running around and left-hand side, the membrane potential. So we start with the animal sitting in the place field and in black, you're gonna see quite a bit of spiking. The animal sits here in the place field. There's a lot of very massive activity. The animal runs out of the place field which is here and actually the cell shuts down. This is the zero line, this is the membrane potential. Now it comes back into the place field and you're gonna see substantial activity. Yeah, the cell firing quite a bit. Now we're gonna show a run where the animal runs, enters the place field from the other side and you're gonna see some mighty spiking events, complex spikes, we think, that is a gigantic depolarization of the cell. Very, very impressive events and I show you this now in a more formal format. This is the cell that I just showed you, the firing map of the cell. So the animal runs around here. The cell would fire only in this corner and here we have the animal covering some space. This is when it's in the gray area in the place field and you see this massive depolarization. In particular, we see these gigantic huge bursts that look like they have a big calcium contribution. They can be so strong that it actually brings the cell into the depolarization block. So we do not see any sodium spikes anymore and then actually it relaxes again as the animal moves out of the place field. These big events, these big depolarization events, they were a surprise for me. I had recorded for years in freely moving and also in head fixed cortical cells in these gigantic events that occur when there are such that the depolarization is such that the cell goes in depolarization block. I never saw this and I actually, I only saw that in vitro protocols when people did certain plasticity paradigms and I always made fun of it because I thought these people have no clue but I changed my mind. So in hippocampus, you really often see these gigantic events and we wonder if this is a difference of cortex in hippocampus. In particular, might be cellular mechanisms, these very massive depolarizations might be a mechanism for instantaneous plasticity. Sort of the single trial learning that hippocampus is good at and that you don't see like this in cortex. Good, so this is a one class of cell that we see, the other class of cell that we see are silent cells. So if the animal runs around and there are very few spikes fired and the membrane potential is just rock steady. So we recorded these first cells in Holland and they still remind me of it. The membrane potential is just flat, just flat. And this was kind of surprising for us. Most of all, we have very few cells, I should say, because these experiments, in particular the patching and the freely moving animals is exceedingly difficult but it looked very much like they come in two flavors, the cells, sort of the flat ones, the silent ones and the ones with the peak. And this is a finding that intrigued us a lot and that we worked on quite a bit and what was actually quite special about this difference between place cells and silent cells is that we then also discovered intrinsic differences between these cells. Namely, what we found is when we fire the cell and actually we would fire the cell when the animal is still anesthetized. It hasn't, it has never been in the maze that it's gonna explore in 10 minutes when we wake it up here. So we would patch a cell, we would inject current and what we would find is that some cells give regular spiking patterns and other cells burst when we inject current. And once more, the animal has never been in the place. What we then found is that the cells that would burst would come out as place cells and the regular spiking cells would come out as silent cells. Sort of suggesting that there were intrinsic differences. To me it was a big surprise, for years I suggested not to analyze this data because it's anyway from the goddamn anesthetized animal we're doing here the awake stuff, so why bother? But then in the end we did it and we found this difference and very surprising to us. Another thing that was also very stunning and was you could anticipate this finding from extracellular data but I think it's more clear in our data is that the cells very much come as they are. Sort of here we show the first time the animal runs and we show the data from the entire session and we show the membrane potential traces and the spiking and what you see here, this is sort of and we average across all runs. This is the first run. Clearly this here is a place cell, yeah. It has a firing peak. So clearly this peak is already there, the first go, another even more dramatic case. The first time the animal runs through it, the entire session, they're just the same. So this made us conclude that the place cells, they come as they are, yeah. So probably this whole place field formation and it's not a learning business, yeah, as we would have or as at least some theories might have liked to think and this is in line with what people had concluded from extracellular recordings earlier. Good, Albert and Jerome, they then analyzed more properties of the cells, more intrinsic properties and found quite a bit of further evidence for intrinsic differences between silent cells and place cells and these were entirely unexpected as I already said. Even better, what Albert recently did and what was just published in Science is he fired cells at a certain spot and could show that he could switch on such a peak, that he sort of, by just a manipulation, intrinsic manipulation of the excitability of the cell, he can get place cells and I think this will tell us much about how these firing fields come about, yeah. These are un-predicted findings and we think that people need to pay more attention to cell intrinsic factors in place field formation and memory formation and I wanna leave it here with this. The last thing I will talk about is very preliminary. I sort of talk about it because I was asked for an abstract and I somehow put it in and I didn't wanna leave it out these early days and it are findings on hippocampal remapping, yeah. And what is global hippocampal remapping? This is something that was realized early on but then became more clear in the 80s and it's simply the fact that when you have an animal in an environment A, you have a certain set of place fields one in the corner here, one in one here in the middle, one in the other corner. When you put it then, the animal in another environment, you get a totally different set of firing properties. Some cells would totally lose place fields. Some cells would sort of have the place field in a very different sort of global location. Some cells would move the place field from the border to the middle. Now, when you then put it back into the old environment, you see the exact same place fields as before, showing you this is not just random. And now this ability to totally rearrange, totally rearrange place fields from one environment to the next, we think that this is part of the hippocampus ability to form highly context specific memories, yeah. It's just the way the cells fire and actually as a spatial relationship of the cells is very different, is very much context dependent. Now, this is very different from cortex. At least so far, what people would say, what the Moses would say about enterinocortex, they would say, you put the animal into do different environments, sort of the crits as a first order approximation, they transfer the spatial relationship of cells as they say. And so this is a unique hippocampal property. I also say here, it's very magic. What I mean by that is that it's deeply non-understandable. So basically in cortex what we are used to, the way we try to understand cortical circuits in a microcircuit fashion is that we make little wiring diagrams for, say, receptive fields. They're like thousands of models for how you wire up a V1 complex cell or a V1 simple cell or, say, direction selectivity. And this is what we typically do in sensory physiology. We make little wiring diagrams for how response field response property comes about. Obviously in hippocampus you don't need to draw little wiring diagrams for these things because they just do what they wanna do. So this is a very magic, very dark ability of the hippocampus. Initially when I understood this, I decided never to work on hippocampus, but I changed my mind. Okay, so we looked into this a little bit and what we did is we, let me give you a bit more of background. What we obviously were interested in is how were these novel maps generated and sort of one classic idea is that there might be a pattern separation involved. Yeah, a pattern separation operation involved in the Lloyd gaps and Moses have, and also other peoples have very nice evidence for that in cortex when you put the animal into similar but distinct environments you get in the entorhinal cortex, you get quite similar receptive fields. When you then in the hippocampus in CA1, you get very different representations just like I showed you. And the idea is that maybe a pattern separation operation in the dentate contributes to that. Now, we followed another idea. We followed the idea that maybe internal factors could induce remapping. We already saw that our place fields, there seems to be quite some stuff in the cell. It's excitability seems to be a major determinant if it will form a place field or not. So what we thought is, hey, let's not look for this environmental stuff, but let's look for factors inside the animal. And what we looked at first was dopamine, which is thought to be a novelty in teaching signal. And more interestingly, manipulations with the dopaminergic system are greatly disruptive to map-like learning. So interestingly, a task that doesn't really require a map like a teammates go left, right, the animals can still learn when you put them full with dopaminergic agonists or antagonists, they still can learn these tasks. But when they need to use a map like a Morse-Watermase task, they get very bad under interference with the dopaminergic system. So what we did is we used what now turns out to be a very good or a very bad decision. We used a very dirty agonist, apomorphin. It acts strongly on the dopaminergic system, but it actually also acts on other systems. And maybe I come to talk about this and looked how this would affect the hippocampal representations. And what do we see here? Sort of we would do the following experiment. We have an animal run around. We record from multiple cells in the hippocampus and we see here place fields in this case. Then we would inject a little bit of saline. And what we would typically find is that sort of the place fields are kind of similar.  They're not exactly identical because the runs of the animal are also not exactly identical and because these cells are quite variable in their discharge. Here again, another field that kind of stays relatively similar. You still have this firing spot in the corner. You still have this firing spot. This firing spot was not there, but there is a lot of similarity when we do this. When we then inject apomorphin at a high concentration, sort of one place field would be totally lost. Another one would remap, yeah? And it turns out that this is very prominent. If you look at the population statistics, so when we do saline injections, basically three quarters of the cell either fully stay or look sort of like they stay. And I actually think if we would push our behavior, give two more runs, assesses more carefully, I still think this is an underestimate of the stability, but 75 to actually more cells would do the same and very few place fields sort of would appear or would sort of remap to other locations, et cetera. Now, when we inject apomorphin, whole health breaks lose, yeah? Very few place fields stays the same, yeah? About 20%, many remap, many appear, many assert or so, 25% are lost. So this is very striking. Now, as I said, these were very preliminary findings and there is much about this that we still don't understand. We are still not really clear what dopamine receptor subtypes are involved, actually, when we give more specific drugs than apomorphin, we typically get less good effects. So this is very unclear to us. When we give antagonists to antagonize the dopamine allergic system, we also get quite variable effects. So this is stuff that is underway. What I think it tells you, however, what is interesting here is that you don't necessarily need two environments to make two maps. I think this is clear from our data. So we have here, this is presumably not a pattern separation operation because the animal is just running in the same environment and we get two maps. Let me summarize here. I talked in the first part about structural function relationships in the medial enterinocortex. We find different microcircuits for head direction cells versus cells that look more like grid cells. This is encouraging, I think, also our methods to sort of derive structure function relationships and freely moving animals, they are improving. It's still that we, from this, we do not understand, obviously, how it works or even the most obvious questions, what is happening in a certain grid patch, in one grid patch as opposed to the other, we still can't answer. I told you about the idea that hippocampal blade cells and silent cells, that these cells are, to some extent, internally preset, that they arise in just in no time. As soon as we measure, we see them. And I told you about the idea that maybe there is an internal trigger for remapping, or at least our data suggests this possibility as opposed to getting remapping exclusively from different environments. Thank you very much for your attention. We have time for a few questions. Yes, there's one here, and then Crystal. Do you think that every silent cell has a chance to become a place cell, or is there something like, is naturally different between place cells and silent cells? Okay, this is a very interesting question, and I oscillate on the answer. So from the X-cellar, obviously, there are tons of remapping experiments done in the X-cellar literature. And from these, you very much have the feeling it's random. So it looks, you put the animal in another place, and then either it loses or it gets, so you get this feeling that it's random. Now, clearly, in our hands, it was very non-random, so there were cell internal factors. So what I think is that maybe, this is part of why we started to do these dopaminergic experiments. Maybe there are switches that allow the cell to change its internal properties.  So that makes me think that these cell intrinsic factors must be very important. Yeah, we don't know if some cells are sort of forever silent. It makes no sense to me, but yeah, who cares? Are there key morphological differences between the classes, or are they all the same, like a cellotype? Yeah, we don't know, we don't know. So we should do this sort of the place cell, silent cell data that I showed. These came from patching experiments in the awake animal. It's exceedingly few cells. It's sort of 14, 15 cells or so, and only about half or so that we recovered, so there's no point making statements about that. As I told you, we are now quite a bit more efficient in recovering cells, this is Chuck's cell approaches, where we just stain the cell, and there we have high recovery rates, so it's clearly traceable with these techniques, and one should be able to find that. Other questions? Christoph? No, no, no, no, no. They occur very much preferentially in the place field. Can you use the microphone please? Yeah, I repeat the question. The question was if the complex spike or these gigantic events are direction selective, if they would come as in the movie, only when the animal enters in one direction, the place field or not, this is not the case. So they occur more in the place field, the tuning. We have too few cells to really strictly compare the tuning, it seemed to me tighter, but I'm not sure. So we think that actually these are very common events. I think that if I understand the extracellular folks correctly, this is really what is a complex spike. That the spike amplitude dives down so much, we think that the spikes in the classically described complex spikes which are the feature of the hippocampal pyramidal cell, extracellularly is really these big events. So we think that they are very common. But if you look at the extracellular literature, they actually have also done a very poor job. They should be able to pull this out where the complex spikes are, where the spike dives down most and it's not been done very well. Okay, one last question, Neno? Michael, thank you very much for a very nice talk in which you summarize some of the major debates in the field. It's also obvious from your talk that the reason for you to leave Rotterdam because things were too flat, too boring, which is still a pity I think, but because it's a nice country. But I had a question about your grid cells and the relationship with the head erection cells. So you initially started to say head erection cells are typically related to the post-subiculum and then you discovered this very intrinsic, intriguing wiring of the parasybiculum. It seems to have these global effects that the directional system might be tuned into one direction. So do you know what the relationship is between the parasybicum and the presybicum? Have you seen any specifics about that? Or are they too independent? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we looked at this a lot. So I dance around a bit about the question how head erection cells and grid cells are related because we are not really in a full position to compare our data to the ones that you and Edward published. From our reading of the papers from your labs, it seemed like a mixture. We think that there are more head erection cells in the parasybiculum. We, what is not so clear to us, what is clear to us is in layer two of entorhinal cortex there are very few head erection tuned cells and I think this is in line with the findings. What is less clear to us is how many of the really in the entorhinal cortex head erection cells we have. We also seen these, but few, yeah. Now the interaction between the parasybiculum and the entorhinal cortex. So this circumcurrent axon, we think makes a global connection across the parasybiculum. The interaction we say entorhinal cortex is not global. It's a specific stripe. So we think that the, let me go back to maybe I have one here. Just a second, it refuses to work. So we think that there are these circumcurrent axons. This being the parasybiculum there, we find a lot of head erection cells. This top few of the entorhinal cortex, yeah. And we think that they make very specific connections to one stripe of the entorhinal cortex. And we think this is probably where one sort of spatial frequency is represented. Sort of the spatial frequency as you demonstrated changes from ventral to dorsal, yeah. So we think that they make global interactions along here and they make rather specific interactions with layer two along here. What we also saw is that we get some feedback from, that seems to return this, in particular from layer three cells. What we don't quite understand is basically when we stain, when we do sort of large scale stains here, we get exactly this connectivity. The whole parasybiculum will fail when we do a small injection here. Also when we, also we would get from a specific site cells back labeled here. What we don't see so very much, what we don't understand is this back projection from layer three. We don't see these so very much. But we thought it were specific cells on both sides. And layer three probably projecting back and parasybiculum very specifically, one piece of, one slice of entorhinal cortex. Probably one spatial frequency. All right, so now we have time for a coffee break. And the parallel sessions will start again at 10.20. And let's thank again our keynote speaker. Thank you.


You are tuned into the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm Audemars Abbey-Reno and today is Tuesday, June 16th. We're sharing local news and resources focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. The show airs live Tuesdays at noon and repeats at 5 p.m. and also on Sundays and you can listen online anytime at kdrt.org. My guests today are Dr. Mary Ann Limbos with Yolo County Public Health and Dr. Andy Jones of UC Davis and KTVS and PubQuiz fame. And we'll get to our first interview in just a few minutes. We'll be speaking with Dr. Limbos about what reopening looks like here in Yolo County and what risks it brings. And folks, just because something is permissible doesn't necessarily mean it's advisable. Business Insider recently published a list of the relative risk of different activities that are now opening up or available. The article was based on conversations with Dr. Susan Hassig, who is an epidemiologist at Tulane University. Things considered high risk, gathering of family and friends, bars, in-person religious services and movie theaters. These activities mix people from different paths and places, thus upping the risk of transmission, especially where people are not compliant with mask wearing and social distancing measures. So if you're trying to stay safe, these are really not recommended. On the medium to high risk list, gyms. Mask wearing and thorough cleaning of all equipment is necessary but must be constant and consistent. Medium risk, indoor seatings at restaurants, visiting hair and nail salons, one-to-one dates with people outside your daily circle. Low to medium risk, beaches and other outdoor pursuits and outdoor dining so long again as mask wearing and distancing is in effect. And on the low risk, shopping and touching mail or groceries, and Dr. Hassig said she does not wipe down her groceries or let her mail sit for days. She doesn't feel it's necessary. In local news, Courtyard Healthcare Center on East 8th Street in Davis has reported its first case of COVID-19. The Davis Enterprise reported yesterday that Courtyard, which provides skilled nursing and rehabilitation services, said this is the only confirmed case at the center since the beginning of the pandemic. It is one of five long-term senior care facilities in the county to have a resident or staff member test positive for COVID-19, though only the Stollwood convalescent hospital in Woodland experienced an outbreak, and that was one that ultimately took 17 lives. So all skilled nursing facilities in Yolo County are now required to implement and submit to health officials a mitigation plan that includes baseline testing of all staff and residents by June 30th, thereafter followed by monthly testing of all residents and staff. Let me just give a shout out to the Enterprise and especially reporters Ann Turnes, Bellamy and Caleb Hampton for their continued excellent reporting on the local impacts of COVID-19. All right, the fine folks who bring us free yoga in the park are offering free online yoga classes during this time of COVID, including yoga and espanol, yin yoga, myofascial release, and vinyasa flow. Times and offerings vary throughout the week, but the classes are free because the instructors and coordinators are volunteering their time. So if you need to take care of your body and your mind, you can learn more at yogamovesus.org. And finally, the Davis Downtown Business Association is sponsoring the Davis Downtown Communal Art Project, which calls for artists of all ages to participate in a community-wide art project focused on how we've all been coping with shelter in place and social distancing. The DDBA says that as we begin to emerge from this unparalleled time, our community's art will serve as a way to understand and memorialize our experience, and collectively this will be a testament to our resilience. And personally, as chair of the Arts Alliance Davis, I approve that message. Artists of all levels and ages are invited to participate, and the deadline for submissions has been extended to this Friday, June 19th. You can find all the details and guidelines at davisdowntown.com slash cap, C-A-P. We will take a moment for music and be back with our first interview shortly. All right. She is the deputy public health officer for Yolo County Health and Human Services, and she'll step into the role of interim public health officer at the end of this month. She's also been on staff as a pediatrician at Communicare Health Centers. My first guest today is Dr. Mary Ann Limbos. Dr. Limbos, thank you so much for joining us. I first really need to acknowledge something. Cal Matters published an article today about the unprecedented pushback county health officers are experiencing during this crisis. Everything from harassment and threats to essentially blaming you good folks for everything that displeases them. So I just want to say on behalf of everyone here, thank you for your service and really for stepping up and managing this transition at a time of crisis. Yeah, actually, I appreciate your words and support. So you and I spoke back in March, and I think we've all lived a couple of lifetimes since then. But I really wanted to bring you back today to talk about reopening and its attendant risks. Frankly, I'm really concerned about not only what I'm seeing behaviors I'm seeing around town here in Davis, but also about the numbers of new infections and hospitalization spiraling upwards in all the counties surrounding Yolo. Yesterday the state reported nearly 150,000 confirmed confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 5,000 deaths. Did you envision a time when we'd see those kind of numbers? We're closely following those numbers in our region and in our own county to make sure that we are proceeding at an appropriate pace, that we don't have to re-institute some of the restrictions that we've had, and that our hospitals can manage the new cases that we're seeing. Let's clarify where we are in terms of Yolo's public health order, because as you know better than anyone at this point, it's been just a moving target constantly changing. So what is now permissible? I guess the question is where are we in the stages in the road map to recovery? But what's permissible and what is not at this point in time? Exactly, with the state. We are one of what are known as the variance counties, meaning that we have attested to the fact that our cases are stable or decreasing and that our hospitals are well-equipped to manage any potential surge, and because of this the state has allowed these variance counties to proceed a little bit more quickly than the other counties in the state that don't have the variances. So the most recent, the activities and business sectors that we opened on last Friday the 12th, and there's really a whole host of them, to name a few, the family entertainment centers, gyms, bars and wineries, hotels for tourism, music, TV and music production, which isn't big in our county, public swimming pools, professional sports without audiences, so really the best way to keep up to date with all these new activities and businesses that are opening up is to keep checking our website, because our order has been amended so that every time the state is allowing a business or activity to be opened, we will let our county know when it's opened locally by posting the guidance on our website. Yeah, yeah, and that's yolocounty.org, just for everyone who could possibly not know that at this point in time, and right on the front page you'll see the links for all the COVID-19 related information, including the roadmap to recovery, the public health orders and everything. And, you know, Dr. Limbos, you just mentioned a lot of things reopening and I guess that's the crux of my concern, because just weeks after parts of the U.S. began reopening, we're seeing infections on the rise in several states, including, let's see, Arizona, Utah, Texas and Florida, and I know in Fort Lauderdale, one week after reopening bars and restaurants, they shut them down again. So are we, do you think we're at the start of a second wave, or is this still first wave of COVID infection? Still probably our first wave. Every state is different, and frankly every county is different. And we've been keeping a close watch on our cases, because we did see an increase in our cases last, toward the end of last week, those of you who follow our dashboard, we update the number of cases every day. And we saw, usually in, you know, we've had days when we've had zero to one cases. Usually we've been seeing about two to four. And at the end of last week, we saw about 20, 21 new cases over the span of a couple of days. So, in our investigation of who these cases are, and could they be perhaps linked to the reopening of the new businesses a couple of weeks prior, what we've seen is that the majority of those new cases were linked to gatherings. I mean, multi-generational family gatherings, and then gatherings from different households and even from different communities.  So, those were the majority of the new cases that we were seeing. And so, we continue to remind our residents that, you know, when multiple households gather, when people from different communities gather, that really increases the risk of transmission. Yeah, yeah. What kind, well, first question is, we also had Memorial Day when we know that everyone just seemed to think that was licensed to throw caution to the wind and gather in public places. And we also have the impact of people who are gathering for protests and marches. I will say I went to Sunday's protest and march in Davis here. And I would put the rate of mask wearers at about 95%. It was really good. And people were doing their best to observe distancing. But I can go into a store or walk downtown, and that's clearly not the case. And I'm really seeing it's clearly not the case among young people, college-age students in particular. Pretty good about following the masking order, or I should say the face covering orders and the social distancing. And I really have to hand it to our businesses and our community. Our businesses are really trying to enforce that. And I think we as a community have to be prepared to do the face coverings. If we do want to be able to have more of our businesses and these activities open. Yeah. So you talked a few minutes ago about the kinds of metrics that the county has to keep a close eye on. Numbers of new cases, numbers of hospitalizations. What would be the tipping point for having to close back down again as we're seeing in Florida, for example? Activity. Meaning we look at the number of positives divided by the total number of cases. Sorry, trust. That we've, that have been done in the county. And, you know, despite the fact that we do have a grade, that we have that spike of cases last week, we are also being able to test more. And I think what has been reassuring for us is the fact that despite all these new cases, our case positivity rate has been just a little bit over 3%. And in comparison to the state, the state is running at about 4% or 5%. And the, you know, for that particular metric, the tipping point is over 8%. Okay. We're well beyond, we're well below that. And in terms of our hospitalizations, you know, for weeks, we have seen the number of cases hospitalized in Yolo County at about one to two. So that is all very reassuring to us. That's good news. And I want to confirm, the county still has a testing site in West Sacramento. I think that ends on June 27th, is that correct? That's correct to reach our communities that have decreased access to testing, particularly our rural communities. So we also want to make sure that anybody in Yolo County who wants a test can get a test. So, you know, we are continuing to work on partnerships that will help us replace the OptumServe site. Perhaps a mobile option, which will, you know, give us a lot of flexibility in reaching different communities. Okay. We're almost out of time. I want to thank you. I know how incredibly busy you are right now. So thank you for making time to come and share your perspective with us. If you could share just one message or directive with the residents of Yolo County right now, what would that be? I would love to do that. And then a lot of our local businesses and activities, because we have been very good as a community about social distancing and using face coverings. And I really want to urge our communities not to undo the hard work and sacrifice that our residents have done so far and to be complacent. So please, please, please continue to stay home as much as possible. And when you do go out to support our local businesses to wear a face covering and to practice physical distancing to the greatest extent possible. You know, we've come this far together as a community. Let's continue to move forward. Great. Okay. Thank you again for your time and for calling in today. Thank you, Adam. All right. Take care. That was the Dr. Marianne Limbos of Yolo County Health. Very quickly, before we get our next call, I really need to say that KDRT and Davis Media Access are doing our spring fundraising right now. And folks, local media is in local voices and what you just heard from Dr. Limbos, for example. It's really important that we have access to that info, and yet we are not getting the level of community support we usually do. It's frustrating times, it's hard times, but you can go to kdrt.org and donate because we still need your help to be on the air. And we're going to take our next call. Okay, my next guest is Dr. Andy Jones, who has taught writing classes at UC Davis since 1990 and committed to outreach and encouraging cross-disciplinary thinking. Andy has hosted Dr. Andy's Poetry and Technology Hour on Campus Radio Station, KDVS, since 2000. He's also the past chair of the Cultural Arts and Entertainment Committee of the City of Davis and the poet laureate Emeritus of Davis. And prior to COVID-19, he also hosted the perennially popular pub quiz, say that three times fast, at DeVears in downtown Davis. Welcome, Dr. Andy. Thank you, Autumn. Thank you for having me on the radio show. You bet. It's nice to hear your voice back on the air. So you've been incredibly active in the cultural life of our community and many of the things you're active in just ground to a halt. So talk to us a bit about what you've been up to during these past couple of months. That's true. You mentioned the pub quiz. Yeah. And I think that the pub quiz, if it were happening today, it would be a super spreader of COVID-19 because it involves a bunch of people packed in close to one another in an indoor restaurant. And with me, I'm shouting trivia questions at them. So it's probably best that we're not gathering in that way. Another event that I've run for about 15 years now, and the last dozen or so at the John and Zulus Gallery, is the Poetry Night Reading Series. And this has been, when I was poet laureate, an important part of my outreach to the community. But it's also something that I did before and after. We're very lucky that John and Zulus has such a commitment to the arts that he's opened up and staffed his big gallery at the corner of First and East Street for us twice a month on First and Third Thursdays of the month. And that would be another place where anywhere from 25 or 30, all the way up to 100 or 150 if we have Gary Snyder visiting, of people who would get together to enjoy poems read by featured poets and then also by people participating in an open mic. And so to answer your question, we've pivoted over to Zoom Poetry Reading. Nice. And as people can find out if they wanted to visit poetryanddavis.com, we're still holding them on First and Third Thursdays. But we get to involve poets from a great number of communities, including outside of the Sacramento Valley. So this Thursday, for instance, we have a poet who will be visiting us from Massachusetts. And we'll have another poet coming up from New York. And so we get to reach out to different poetry communities outside of the area. So that's been a lot of fun, even if we do miss hugging and high-fiving each other and also the in-person after-party. But we try to approximate some of these cultural events the best that we can. Yeah, there are a few silver linings to the virtual life, so to speak. And you just mentioned one of them being able to involve a wider circle of poets. I want to talk about KDVS for just a moment. It was, you know, we were kind of shocked and saddened to learn that KDVS had at least temporarily gone off the air in March. And it was a factor of not having automation and the students not being able to access KDVS. But as such a long-running college station, and my goodness, your show has run for the last 20 years on KDVS. What's the status these days? I hear some evergreen programming when I tune in, but I'm not sure what the status moving forward is. That's right. They have a skeleton crew working sometimes in the station but often remotely to present best of programming, evergreen programming, including my radio show on Wednesdays at five. We have an archive that continually records whatever we broadcast at KDVS. And that lasts for the 12 months preceding any particular date. And as a result, there's lots of content that our programming staff has been able to grab to keep those people who are fans of KDVS with plenty to listen to. But it is a different experience when you don't have the regular stream of DJs and public affairs hosts and news broadcasters heading down there, a real mix of community and students to head into Studio B and to broadcast regularly, as I've been doing for a couple of decades. That's very relatable here for us too. We have just a few minutes left, so I'm hoping you brought a poem for us today. I sure did. One thing that I've discovered in this last week and a half is genealogy of all topics. We choose all sorts of ways to procrastinate when we are stuck at home perpetually. And I've been in conversations with my mom and cousins and others about people from previous generations of the family. So I thought I would share just a quick poem that touches on that. It's called Shalely. One can almost call it munificence, the great grandmother's abundant propitiousness. Stories remain of the oversized hands fingers on a shoulder or taking a pulse or mixing merengue. She was a force. Nothing and no one were ever stolen from her household. The mutilations were only mental the many children thought to themselves as they grew older, daring not to escape. No one else in the village had had so many children. Two generations later, the grandchildren had trouble not falling in love with one another. All of them with plump fingers, powerful hands that gripped and struck with the weight of a thousand pies, a thousand shalely. Nice, thank you. And you got to love a poet who rhymes munificence with propitiousness. That's not one that comes up every day. Alright, thank you so much for making a few minutes to call in. We are out of time. Thank you, Dr. Andy Jones. Absolutely, it's my pleasure. Best to you and your family. Thank you, bye-bye. From one doctor to another and a lot of terrain in between. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you, I had to cut my message a little short earlier, but thank you if you can for stepping up to support this community station during this time. Again, you can donate at KDRT.org. This has been the COVID-19 community report.


Zanfarah State Governor Bello Metawali has again secured the release of another Zanfarah indigene without paying ransom. The kidnappers had earlier demanded a ransom of 10 million Naira, but the governor said the release was facilitated through a peace and reconciliation process. The victim is a 70-year-old man, Ballah Afuro, who was abducted over a month ago. He was released on Saturday evening. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.