Volume 4 Issue 5, May 2001

Early visual cortical areas are organized in retinotopic coordinates. Levy and colleagues now report that category-selective regions show a similar organization, with face-selective areas responding more to central stimuli and place-selective areas responding to peripheral stimuli.

TREK1 was known as a voltage-independent 'background' potassium channel, but a new study suggests that protein kinase A can reversibly convert it to a voltage-dependent state.

An ATP-sensitive K⁺ channel in glucose-responsive neurons is shown to be required for the emergency response to severe glucose deprivation, but not necessarily for normal feeding.

Speed preferences in MT neurons are found to be unaffected by changes in stimulus pattern, supporting the hypothesis that these neurons represent retinal image velocities.