NEURON

As of January 29, 2012, we know of 1176 publications that report work that used NEURON--see http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/static/bib/usednrn.html . This is an increase of 169 from the total of 1007 on September 3, 2010, the last time we updated this page.

It may seem a surprise that many of these newly discovered papers were actually published several years ago: 4 in 2007, 7 in 2008, 10 in 2009, and 46 in 2010. We have noted this "delayed discovery" phenomenon every year since we started keeping track of NEURON publications.

This is a year for milestones. For the first time ever, there will be a NEURON Summer Course on two continents: one at University of California, San Diego, from June 23-27 (see http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/static/courses/nscsd2012/nscsd2012.html), and another at Institute of Science and Technology in Klosterneuburg, Austria, from August 20-24 (see http://www.ist.ac.at/NeuronCourse2012/).

This is also the first NEURON course in Europe. Many thanks to Peter Jonas, Jose Guzman, and our other colleagues at IST Austria for inviting us and organizing this event!

On November 11, 2011, we will hold a one-day course on NEURON as a satellite session of the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC. In this course we will present practical tips to help beginners get started, an executive-level summary to help PIs understand how NEURON might be helpful in their research, and review some of the latest advances to help bring established NEURON users up to date. For more information and an on-line registration form, click on "Courses" in the menu at the top of this page.

At long last the NEURON 2011 Summer Course is open for registration. This 5-day intensive hands on course covers a wide range of topics and saves users many weeks, if not months, of time with their projects. For a link to detailed information about this course and an on-line registration form, click on "Courses" in the menu at the top of this page.

We've been trying to build a list of presentations at this year's SFN meeting that report work done with NEURON, and so far we have found 42 talks and poster sessions--see http://www.neuron.yale.edu/ftp/ted/neuron/neuron_at_sfn2010.html.

On Saturday morning, Nov. 13, 2010--just before the Society for Neuroscience meeting--there will be a four hour course on NEURON + Python. Continental breakfast will be provided. Registration is free, but space is limited, so if you are interested you should sign up quickly. For further information see the full announcement on The NEURON Forum
https://www.neuron.yale.edu/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1993
or contact thomas_dot_mctavish_at_yale_dot_edu

The NEURON 2010 Summer Course is now open for registration. This intensive hands-on course will be held June 19-23 at the Institute for Neural Computation on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. Registration is limited, and the application deadline is Tuesday, June 1, 2010. For more information and the on-line registration form, see http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/static/courses/nscsd2010/nscsd2010.html

We're announcing two events for late March 2010 -- "The 2010 NEURON Simulator Meeting" and "Course on Parallelizing Network Models with NEURON". These will be held at the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ, during the week of March 22, 2010. Registration is limited (30 for the Meeting, 10 for the Course), and the registration deadline for both events is Friday, Feb. 26, 2010. For more information and an on-line registration form, see http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/static/meetings/nsm2010.html

The new standard distribution of NEURON is version 7.1, which is available from the download page http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/download. A few new features have been added, such as

• A Python Section can be given a name and/or and owner when it is constructed. For example, in a Cell class the constructor can make sections as in
  soma = h.Section(self, name = 'soma')

The algorithms used in the IntFire4 artificial spiking neuron have been revised to be more biologically plausible, in light of findings described in a paper by Ronald van Elburg and Arjen van Ooyen which appeared in a recent issue of Neural Computation (see REFERENCE below). We would like to take this occasion to describe their results and thank them for making this valued contribution to the community of NEURON users.

IntFire4 is a "current-based" integrate and fire mechanism which has an "excitatory current" that decays with time constant taue, and a biphasic "inhibitory