• Howarth (1975) - Heat Production in Non-Myelinated Nerves. A short review with comments.
• Gallup and Eldakar (2013) - The thermoregulatory theory of yawning- what we know from over 5 years of research. We yawn to cool our brain!
• Cohen et al (1970) - Changes in axon birefringence during the action potential. Suggestive of structural changes in the axon during the spike.

• Koser et al (2016) - Mechanosensing is critical for axon growth in the developing brain. It's not all chemical gradients! See also this cool review by Tomba and Villard (2015).
• Ingber et al (2014) - Tensegrity, cellular biophysics, and the mechanics of living systems. Physics of cell shape and mechanics.
• Armstrong and Cota (1991) - Calcium ion as a cofactor in Na channel gating. The effect of extracellular Ca2+ on Nav channels.
• Hille (1977) - Ionic basis of resting and action potentials. A nice review on the ionic theory of APs.

• Albrecht et al (2016) - Nanoscopic compartmentalization of membrane protein motion at the axon initial segment. On the AIS diffusion barrier.
• Pollack (2001) - Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life. This is a fascinating book I'm reading. Certainly wrong on many aspects, but still inspiring. The author's thesis is that cell water is structured by the charges on proteins (because water molecules are dipoles), and that provides alternative explanations for a number of phenomena, for example ion partioning (exclusion of Na+ from the cell).
• Kolata (1976) - Water Structure and Ion Binding- A Role in Cell Physiology? I stumbled on this very readable piece while reading Pollack's book.

• Catterall (2010) - Signaling Complexes of Voltage-gated Sodium and Calcium Channels. Very useful information for anyone interested in plasticity of excitability.
• Leterrier et al (2016) - Ankyrin G membrane partners drive the establishment and maintenance of the axon initial segment. Did I read plasticity of AIS diameter?
• Kratochvil et al (2016) - Instantaneous ion configurations in the K+ ion channel selectivity filter revealed by 2D IR spectroscopy. Showing how the K+ channel works (evidence for the “knock-on” model).

Back from holiday! Here are a few papers I noticed:

• Sigworth (1980) - The variance of sodium current fluctuations at the node of Ranvier. Estimating number of channels from noise statistics.
• Hu et al (2016) - DVS Benchmark Datasets for Object Tracking, Action Recognition, and Object Recognition. Vision benchmarks for spike-based computation.
• Marin et al (2016) - Reassembly of Excitable Domains after CNS Axon Regeneration. Medically interesting but also addresses an interesting fundamental question: how a neuron builds a functional organization of the initial segment.
• Howarth et al (1968) - The origin of the initial heat associated with a single impulse in mammalian non-myelinated nerve fibres. What produces heat during spike generation?
• Saal et al (2016) - Importance of spike timing in touch- an analogy with hearing.
• Koyama et al (2016) - A circuit motif in the zebrafish hindbrain for a two alternative behavioral choice to turn left or right. Includes a model of the escape reflex in fish (Mauthner cells).

• Hodgkin and Huxley (1953) - Movement of radioactive potassium and membrane current in a giant axon. Direct test of the ionic hypothesis: voltage-clamp current times F equals K+ flux.
• Dener et al (2016) - Pea Plants Show Risk Sensitivity. Brains are overrated.
• Hoyt (1970) - Sodium Inactivation in Nerve Fibers. Different models of Na inactivation, with a second-order equation instead of two coupled equations.

• Morris (2011) - Predicting what extra-terrestrials will be like- and preparing for the worst. How much of evolution is accidental?
• Heimburg and Jackson (2005) - On soliton propagation in biomembranes and nerves. A radical alternative theory of action potentials, which are presented as essentially sound waves along the axon lipidic membrane, with proteins playing no role. Read my post on why this is highly implausible.
• Heimburg (2010) - The Physics of Nerves. A less technical presentation of the idea.
• Kim et al (2007) - A mechanical spike accompanies the action potential in Mammalian nerve terminals. Mechanical change attributed to osmosis (intake of water with ions); i.e., not to a propagating sound wave.
• Bergstrom (1968) - Induced avoidance behaviour in the Protozoa Tetrahymena. Conditioned learning in a ciliate.

• Shinar et al (2007) – Input-output robustness in simple bacterial signaling systems. Some good systems biology; certainly relevant to neuroscience too.
• Agrawal et al (2016) - Learning to Poke by Poking. Somehow related to subjective physics.
• Jaffe (2003) - The propagation speeds of calcium action potentials are remarkably invariant. I don't quite understand why! The author suggests AP speed is limited by calcium toxicity (ie buffering/extrusion speed).
• Burr and Seifriz (1955) - Response of the Slime Mold to Electric Stimulus. Yes, slime molds spike! Really cool; is there spike propagation across the thing? (Remember slime molds are intelligent!)
• Moreton-Amos-1979 - Electrical Recording from the Contractile Ciliate Zoothamnium Geniculatum Ayrton. Another spiking protozoan.
• Bingley-1966 - Further investigations into membrane potentials in amoebae. Amoebae too??
• Wood-1970 - Electrophysiological studies of the protozoan, Stentor coeruleus. Pretty cool one with a contractile stalk.
• Adolph and Berger (2006) - Motor development. Think about it: when we talk about “unsupervised learning” and about learning to walk or any other kind of human learning, are we actually talking about the same concept of learning?
• Conti and Palmieri (1968) - Nerve Fiber Behaviour in Heavy Water under Voltage-Clamp. Changing the solvent to manipulate electrical properties.
• Halter and Clark (1991) - A distributed-parameter model of the myelinated nerve fiber. Pretty good model with detailed geometrical aspects (periaxonal space, para/juxtanodal regions).

• Rano (2012) - A Model and Formal Analysis of Braitenberg Vehicles 2 and 3. Dynamical systems analysis of Braitenberg vehicles.
• Lamb and Calabrese (2012) - Small is beautiful: models of small neuronal networks. A review on modeling small invertebrate networks.
• Kane et al (2013) - Sensorimotor structure of Drosophila larva phototaxis.
• Kidd and Castano (2013) - Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind. Why you should read literature.

• Viswanathan et al (2008) - Lévy flights and superdiffusion in the context of biological encounters and random searches. Theory of the optimal distribution of straight run lengths in organisms that move by runs and tumbles and look for food (e.g. Paramecium or E. Coli).
• Bartumeus et al (2003) - Helical Lévy walks- Adjusting searching statistics to resource availability in microzooplankton. Evidence of adaptive change in trajectory statistics in a microorganism.
• Benichou et al (2011) - Intermittent search strategies. A similar problem but when the organism can only look when it stops; applies to molecular transport too.
• Huang et al (2016) - Adaptive Spike Threshold Enables Robust and Temporally Precise Neuronal Encoding. Some information-theoretic analysis of our adaptive threshold model (Platkiewicz and Brette (2010, 2011) and Fontaine et al. (2014)).
• Clay et al (2008) - A simple modification of the Hodgkin and Huxley equations explains type 3 excitability in squid giant axons. A revision of the HH model with K+ current following GHK.
• Armstrong (2007) - Life among the axons. Pretty cool paper on the history of electrophysiological theory.
• Hille et al (1999) - Ion channels- from idea to reality. The same on channels.