Neuronal calcium spikes enable vector inversion in the brain.

A typical neuron signals to downstream cells when it is depolarized and firing sodium spikes. Some neurons, however, also fire calcium spikes when hyperpolarized. The function of such bidirectional signaling remains unclear in most circuits.

Muscles that move the retina augment compound eye vision in Drosophila.

Most animals have compound eyes, with tens to thousands of lenses attached rigidly to the exoskeleton. A natural assumption is that all of these species must resort to moving either their head or their body to actively change their visual input. However, classic anatomy has revealed that flies have muscles poised to move their retinas under the stable lenses of each compound eye.

Neural-inspired sensors enable sparse, efficient classification of spatiotemporal data.

Sparse sensor placement is a central challenge in the efficient characterization of complex systems when the cost of acquiring and processing data is high. Leading sparse sensing methods typically exploit either spatial or temporal correlations, but rarely both. This work introduces a sparse sensor optimization that is designed to leverage the rich spatiotemporal coherence exhibited by many systems.