[NEST Users] NEST 2.18.0 released

Dear NEST Users! It is a great pleasure to announce the release of NEST 2.18.0, which provides a number of new neuron and plasticity models and additional functionality. It improves memory allocation and performance during network construction. It includes a number of bug fixes and is the first release that can be installed via aptitude and in a Conda environment directly from conda-forge. For details, please see the change log at https://github.com/nest/nest-simulator/releases. NEST 2.18.0 is the result of 116 pull-requests (1128 commits) by 31 developers since NEST 2.16.0 which was released on 2018-08-21. Enjoy! Hans Ekkehard Plesser President, The NEST Initiative -- Prof. Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser Head, Data Science Section Faculty of Science and Technology Norwegian University of Life Sciences PO Box 5003, 1432 Aas, Norway Phone +47 6723 1560 Email hans.ekkehard.plesser(a)nmbu.no Home http://arken.nmbu.no/~plesser