Vision Science faculty member John Flannery, professor at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, was presented with the Foundation Fighting Blindness Board of Directors Award.
How does San Francisco Giants slugger Pablo Sandoval swat a 95 mph fastball, or tennis icon Venus Williams see the oncoming ball, let alone return her sister Serena’s 120 mph serves? For the first time, vision scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have pinpointed how the brain tracks fast-moving objects.
Scientists pinpoint how the brain tracks a fast-moving object. The discovery advances our understanding of how humans predict the trajectory of moving objects when it can take one-tenth of a second for the brain to process what the eye sees…
A contact lens on the bathroom floor, an escaped hamster in the backyard, a car key in a bed of gravel: How are we able to focus so sharply to find that proverbial needle in a haystack? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered that when we embark on a targeted search, various visual and non-visual regions of the brain mobilize to track down a person, animal or thing.
In 2001 when Fernando Pérez was still a graduate student in particle physics, he kept bumping into walls with a popular programming language he was using called Python, as he tried to analyze an elusive theoretical phenomenon known as the quantum vacuum.
He didn’t know it then, but the intellectual chafing he was experiencing was about to launch him on a decade of tweaking, innovating, experimenting, integrating, testing and updating of a new computing tool – the very tool he needed to propel his research forward.
He started the IPython project “on the side”, as he describes it, by making small tweaks to his Python setup. This “afternoon hack” is now an interactive computing environment that allows a programmer or researcher to run experiments and get results in real-time, and to display data in a dizzying range of ways.