All the labs I know in my field (neuroscience) do most of the data analysis and simulations with MATLAB. It is also used to control hardware for data acquisition.

The reason why this is allowed while it is not allowed with, say, a rat or a cat, is because insects do not have a peripheral nervous system and thus do not feel pain like we do.

And who are you to blame them?

This is the same type of arrogance that has led engineers and physicists who have entered neuroscience to contribute almost nothing of significance to the field. They might think otherwise because they live in a bubble, but people in wet labs usually don't care or just ignore them. I recommend that you read a book about your average cell's intracellular machinery before making this kind of statements. The roadblock is complexity. First, we still don't understand how a single cell works as a whole. Second, we have no theories to deal with that level of complexity. I agree with the Human Brain Project's leaders that we have to start somewhere, but knowing that we know essentially nothing about most of the cells in the brain, I think that this is a project for next century. It is the opinion of most people in the field that this is just going to be an immense waste of money. This is not physics in the early 20th century, your model is only as good as your experimental data and it cannot be compared to the Human Genome Project or to the CERN where people essentially scaled up techniques that had been around for years or decades.

I mean that because neuroscience has extensively focused on neurons, we know very little about glial cells experimentally. So indeed we cannot really study them in simulations because we have no experimental data to base these simulations on. I caricature a bit but that is the idea.

Only 20% of the cells in the cortex are neurons. We have very little idea what the other cells are doing.

It is and the project gets 1 billion euros, not 10. Actually I believe that it gets about 500 M€ in matching funds.

As a London resident, I wish foreign companies had more of a say in the development and maintenance of UK infrastructures. Maybe then the transformer in the street below my apartment would not have spontaneously combusted and exploded some days ago. Anyway they had apparently already abandoned the control of their nuclear plants to the French. How much worse can it possibly get?

Gibraltar would almost for sure not be referred to as "in the Middle East".

Sadly, half of them are also probably wrong (yes, I work in the life sciences).

Because it costs a lot of money, your taxpayer's money. Because it costs a lot of time and ruins the career of young scientists who will waste their time trying to replicate bogus results. Because it should not be acceptable in the first place. What about these reasons?

Sadly it shows that no one really bothered reading the manuscript thoroughly before publication, neither the authors, nor the reviewers.

I know but that was 25 years ago (finished in 1988).

Or maybe that's because India is the largest democracy in the world and has been mostly at peace since its independence in 1947 (minus border conflicts with China and Pakistan and some peacekeeping operations abroad). It's last conflict was in 1999 against Pakistan and the total death toll after 3 months of operations was less than 5000 victims. It's not a bad track record for such a large and populated country given the size of the societal issues it's dealing with.

The iranian democracy on the other side is today nothing more than an empty shell and while its population is highly educated, young and probably wouldn't mind a change in government, its government and associates have proven time and time again since the 70s to have a rather proactive agressive stance.

Can anyone recommend a replacement? Maybe a lightweight app?