The 1.4 release of Brian is out! The major change in this version is the addition of a new Synapses class, which allows modeling everything synaptic: gap junctions, probabilistic synapses, nonlinear synapses, plasticity, etc. There are also a number of other new features, bug fixes and improvements (see below). Brian is being developed by Romain Brette and Dan Goodman. This version also includes contributions by Bertrand Fontaine, Cyrille Rossant, Victor Benichoux, Marcel Stimberg and Jonathan Laudanski. We take advantage of this announcement to inform Brian users that we are currently discussing the development of Brian 2.0, a rewriting of Brian, intended to be simpler, faster, and to be able to run on external devices (e.g. GPU). We will make an announcement on our mailing list soon, where we will ask for user opinions. New features since 1.3.1 Major features:

New Synapses class (plasticity, gap junctions, nonlinear synapses, etc)

Minor features:

New AERSpikeMonitor class
Several updates to library.electrophysiology

Improvements:

Units should work better with static code analysers now
Added Network.remove
SpikeMonitor has a new .it attribute (returns pair i, t of arrays of spike times)
Many new examples

Bug fixes:

Assigning to a static variable (equation) now raise an error
Fixed issues for TimedArrays with explicitly set times (fixes ticket #81)
Fixed bug, repr and str didn’t work for Sound
Fixed bug where tone(array_of_frequencies, …)
Fixed SparseConnectionMatrix bug suggested by Owen Mackwood
Fixed bug in Parameters reported by Jimmy Bonaiuto
Fixed bug with contained_objects reported by Oleg Sinyavskiy
Units __repr__ and __str__ fixes
Sound.spectrum, Sound.pinknoise, brownnoise
t wasn’t available in StringReset and PythonThreshold

Deprecated or removed features:

MultipleSpikeGeneratorGroup
experimental.coincidence_detection

Experimental features:

Generating model documentation automatically (experimental.model_documentation)