#JobPosting for a full-time OPS Laboratory Technician. This position will mainly support two projects, both of which evaluate the effect of non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation on speech in noise perception. Please share!
For more details, please see bit.ly/4jdiEjs
Image credit Frontiers in Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2025.1602996
Their system is a great example of how you can add your own custom modules to OmniTrak and save yourself having to build an entire cage+controller+dispensers setup. We happily share specifications, software, and CAD files to help you build your own modules to fit OmniTrak standardized ports.
There's a great new article out today from the Pancrazio Lab at UT-Dallas looking at techniques for a somatosensory brain-machine interface! They've got a really cool behavioral paradigm based around a Vulintus OmniTrak system that they added their own customizations to.
But maybe you have ideas (hobbies, even!) outside the lab, and there’s something wild you’ve been wanting to build, but don’t know quite how to get started. Send us a note at @protonaut.design (or at Vulintus, too), and maybe we can help build it as good as it looks in your imagination!
And don’t worry! Vulintus will still be making all the #MotoTrak, #OmniTrak, #SensiTrak, and #HabiTrak systems that your lab might want, and we’re stilling developing many new ideas to accelerate your biomedical research!
@protonaut.design offers all the same design services and custom fabrication that Vulintus does, only with less of a focus strictly on biomedical research.
During the current, let’s say, slowdown of biomedical research, Vulintus’ engineers and technicians have found themselves without nearly as many research systems to build. To keep our skills and tools sharp, we’re launching a new off-shoot small-scale manufacturing service called Protonaut Design!
So if red work lights disturb our animals’ internal clocks, how can we work with them during their dark phase? Vulintus is prototyping goggles for working under infrared lights (which the Spencer Lab showed the rats and mice couldn’t detect). Not so stylish yet, but we're working on it!
This was a super fun collaboration! To test whether their rats could consciously detect red lights in the far red band, the Spencer Lab asked us to help them create a Go/NoGo nosepoke task in which rats would be rewarded for reacting to a quick flash of...lasers! Diffused, scattered lasers, that is.
There's a great new article out this week from Bob Spencer’s Lab at the University of Colorado, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, and Vulintus got to help with it! Long story short: laboratory rats and mice can see and are sensitive to all of the red light that humans can see.
Don't think we've forgotten about you, too, Bug Nerds! We've had a lot of you asking for much smaller spherical treadmills, and we're going to have something to show you very soon!
Just wrapped up new updates for our spherical treadmill-walking recording software including real-time displays of the 3D ball rotation and the animal's recent path and orientation. Think your mouse might be doing the Electric Slide while you're not looking?
#SphericalTreadmill #Ambulation
Like most of our products, we built this Social Choice Module because a lab asked if we could build them a system similar to one they'd seen in an article they were inspired by! In this case the article was this excellent study from Isaac et al, 2024:
Our first new product for 2025: the OmniTrak Social Choice Module! This module can be combined with any of our other OmniTrak system components to create behavioral tasks measuring social behaviors. Whatever you're thinking of, we can help you build it!
#SocialChoice #SocialBehavior
What we're working on this week:
Vulintus pellet dispensers have been reliably whirring away in labs worldwide, unchanged for 10+ years, and it’s time for an upgrade. New features on our redesign for 2025: an OLED display to show feeding counts, quieter motor movements, USB connectivity, and more!
A snip of my profile. Banner image incldes Arendt, Durkheim, Fanon and others drawn rouglys on eggs in Black and White. Profile picture is me in front of some autumn leaves. Key descriptive text identifies me as a criminologist working on atrocity crime. At the bottom, highlighted by a big red arrow is my ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7463-1302
A snip from my ORCID profile page - at the left is a list of institutional and other links to social media, including one to Bluesky, highlighted by a big red arrow.
Academics wanting to 'verify' their Bluesky profile as genuine might give an ORCID identifier in their profile and link back to their Bluesky profile from ORCID.
#AcademicSky
Come see us at SfN 2024 exhibitor booth 118 today and pick up one of our new not-boring business cards! Let's talk about all the animal behavior testing that's taking up too much of your time! #sfn2024
Come visit us at exhibitor booth 118 tomorrow!
#sfn2024
New year, new social media platform to try out! If you don't already know us, Vulintus creates innovative tools to reduce the cost of preclinical behavior research for biomedical investigators working toward the public good.
