An fascinating set of articles appeared in Nature showing that some brain tumor cells appear to make synaptic connections with neurons in the brain. Here is a link to a summary article about this research.

September 6, 2019

The Center for Teaching and Learning suggested Canvas Discussions as an alternative to Piazza, which I have used as a discussion board for the past several years. To this end, I have created several discussion boards on Canvas, that can be found by selecting Discussions in the left column of Canvas browser page.

The purpose of the Discussion boards in this class is to provide a forum for students to ask questions about concepts from the lectures, notes, or readings. These questions can be answered by me, the Teaching Fellows, or another student.

I have set up these boards as threaded discussions. To make an original post, please reply to my parent or top-level post that describes the discussion board. To answer another’s question, or to request clarification of a response, reply to the post that contains the question. In this way, your post becomes part of that question’s thread. I realize this isn’t as intuitive as it could be, but we will see if we can make it work.

Please note, when a qSet is active, I will temporarily close for comments the discussion board pertinent to that qSet. Please do not ask or answer questions related to a particular qSet once that qSet is published. I will reenable the discussion board after the due date for that qSet.

The TFs and I will be monitoring the discussion boards to answer questions. I hope this works out well. If it proves unwieldy, then we can switch back to Piazza.