Projections and the Potential Societal Impact of the Future of Neurotechnologies.

Traditionally, recording from and stimulating the brain with high spatial and temporal resolution required invasive means. However, recently, the technical capabilities of less invasive and non-invasive neuro-interfacing technology have been dramatically improving, and laboratories and funders aim to further improve these capabilities. These technologies can facilitate functions such as multi-person communication, mood regulation and memory recall.

The lone inventor: low success rates and common errors associated with pro-se patent applications.

A pro-se patent applicant is an inventor who chooses to represent himself while pursuing ("prosecuting") a patent application. To the author's knowledge, this paper is the first empirical study addressing how applications filed by pro-se inventors fare compared to applications in which inventors were represented by patent attorneys or agents. The prosecution history of 500 patent applications filed at the United States Patent and Trademark Office were analyzed: inventors were represented by a patent professional for 250 of the applications ("represented applications") but not in the other 250 ("pro-se applications").

Uncharted territories of the patent-restoration due-diligence challenge.

The innovation and development incentives offered by the patent system are mitigated if a substantial portion of the patent term is lost while obtaining product approval through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Drug Price Competition and Patent Restoration Act was enacted to return some of the lost patent term to the patentee. However, any person can petition the FDA, contending that the patentee did not act with due diligence in seeking FDA approval of the product during the regulatory review period.

Exclusivity strategies and opportunities in view of the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act.

Government-provided exclusivity periods provide pharmaceutical companies with incentives to invest in new drugs. Meanwhile, encouraging competition serves another worthy goal of improving the affordability of medications. Decades ago, the Hatch-Waxman Act set forth provisions attempting to balance these objectives in the context of small-molecule drugs.

Information measure for analyzing specific spiking patterns and applications to LGN bursts.

Neural spiking responses can include a variety of spiking patterns. However, neither the mere presence of the patterns nor the pattern's frequency indicates that the pattern conveys distinct stimulus information. Here, we present an in-depth analysis of a Pattern Information measure, which quantifies how informative it is to distinguish a particular pattern of spikes from either a single spike or an another pattern.

Contrast adaptation in a nonadapting LGN model.

Sensory neurons appear to adapt their gain to match the variance of signals along the dimension they encode, a property we shall call "contrast normalization." Contrast normalization has been the subject of extensive physiological and theoretical study. We previously found that neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) exhibit contrast normalization in their responses to full-field flickering white-noise stimuli, and that neurons with the strongest contrast normalization best preserved information transmission across a range of contrasts.