My department, Neurobiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington (nbio.uw.edu), is hiring a new tenure-track Assistant Professor, application deadline 09/30/26. It's a broad search — molecular to organismal, all of neuroscience/physiology/biophysics welcome. apply.interfolio.com/187735

Natural history on canvas: Brueghel knew about bird-eating noctule bats Just published in @pnas.org, OA for all eyes Led by the one-and-only @romero-vidal.bsky.social, with the amazing @elena-tena.bsky.social and Sonia Sánchez-Navarro @ebdonana.bsky.social LINK: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to share this preprint from @ianoldenburg.bsky.social . To evoke movement with holo stim, you need the right pattern at the right time! Interestingly, the preparatory state before spont motion is not the same as the state permissive for evoked motion. Dig in! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Better late than never... an update on the recent work from the lab. First of all, the Foundation: @astridd93.bsky.social phenomenal paper on the evolution of layering in the cerebral cortex 🧵1/7 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

An obituary looks back on the life of Avis H. Cohen, who bridged the disciplines of neuroscience, math and engineering to decode lamprey locomotion. By @sarahthau.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/locomotion/r...

Very excited to share our discovery of an engineering masterpiece from the Australian rainforest! In our latest paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social we report a hunting strategy in a spider, whose web outperforms every known biological catapult system.

1/ Complex behavior demands the sequential coordination of hundreds of muscle groups. The body is mapped topographically in the brain, but does neural activity actually propagate across these maps to organize sequential action? Our new paper in Science: doi.org/10.1126/scie... 🧵

Neural activity in mouse cortex forms rotating spiral waves. The architecture of individual axons matches the wave geometry, centered on somatosensory cortex. Beautiful new pape from our colleagues in the @steinmetzneuro.bsky.social lab. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I am a neurodivergent neuroscientist. My bipolar brain brings struggle but it also helps me think off-the-map ideas. To help others who are similarly different, I co-founded the Neurodiversity Innovation Center for Excellence in Neuroscience (niceinneuro.org) with Leah Blankenship and Lila Kaye.

The Battle over the Constitution Has Spread to American Science. I'm out in the @theatlantic.com today about the new OMB proposed rule. It's just the longtime agenda of the the Supreme Court. US science and cancer cures now all depend on us picking up a fight with the Roberts Court.

@thetransmitter.bsky.social asked what scientific paper has impacted me most. Hal Weintraub's discovery that MyoD alone can convert naive cells into muscle cells seemed like magic. I've been chasing that kind of magic ever since: www.thetransmitter.org/this-paper-c...

Now a reviewed preprint in @elife.bsky.social elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

A glowing profile of my post-doc advisor. As @yvetteefisher.bsky.social says in the piece, Rachel is truly "...one of these generational scientists who thinks extremely incisively about both the details and the big-picture frameworks." magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/stu...

A great privilege of science is working with remarkable people. A nice piece highlighting @mindyisminsu.bsky.social. Her grit, esp through the pandemic, was foundational to the #BANC project. hms.harvard.edu/news/making-...

Meet Eyewire II: a new connectomic resource for the mouse retina. ~1 mm² of retina at nanometer resolution, with synapses and circuits of ca. 100,000 neurons, plus visual responses from the ~400 neurons shown in the video! Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202... Data: eyewire.ai 🧠📈 🧠💻🧪 #VisionScience

Agentic coding is genuinely useful now, and there are some impressive reports of AI agents doing science. But how well and how reliably can they handle tasks scientists actually want to hand off, ones that bottleneck progress? How do we even measure that?? New paper🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2606.07718 1/10

Now published - the #BANC! A full central nervous system (CNS) connectome of a limbed animal at single-synapse resolution, enabling us to follow sensory-motor arcs and understand how the CNS controls the body. rdcu.be/fncjS. #neuroscience. Video by @quorumetrix.bsky.social 1/18

Congrats to all! And a special welcome to @ellenlesser.bsky.social!

It's Leading Edge Fellow day!!! This day fills me with joy and inspiration. This cohort holds a special place in my heart because it is named for Zara Weinberg, a beloved Leading Edge Fellow who was a visionary scientist and fierce advocate for building a better scientific ecosystem

Congrats to the recipients of the 2026 McKnight Scholar Awards! www.mcknight.org/news-ideas/2...

Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees. Amazing work by the bees who were put in these puzzling situations by @akshayebhambore.bsky.social in the lab of @olliloukola.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

very helpful, just submitted mine

A fossil nervous system meets modern neurobiology. We found that a living comb jelly preserves neural architecture remarkably similar to those inferred from Cambrian fossils over 500 million years old 🤩. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I was asked to list any international people I would collaborate with in the next two years. I don’t even know where our science will go next month. Do these people have any fucking clue about how science works??!!

Trump's budget calls for billions in cuts to lifesaving research, but a $1.5 trillion war budget. I asked Trump's NIH Director how he could justify a budget that puts defense contractors ahead of cancer research. He couldn't. I’m throwing Trump’s budget in the trash.

Story time friends... Ring attractor networks rely on fine-tuned symmetric connectivity. The fly head direction network has ring attractor dynamics but heterogeneous connectivity. How is this possible? 1/🧵 Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our paper is out! Work by Christopher Black in collaboration with Liam Browne, Rob Brownstone, and Marco Beato. Here, we describe the unique kinematic signatures of multi-limb coordination in freely climbing mice and show how these flexibly adapt to changing environments. tinyurl.com/4bnw88wk

new (but very old) paper! someone recently wrote to ask how they could cite my first research project, which was on exploding fungi. i did this work in rachel merz' biomechanics seminar at swarthmore in 2005. glad that someone is finally following up! zenodo.org/records/2021...

"The smallest organisms may hold the biggest answers." Here, two new studies on the fruit fly connectome led by Tuthill, Brunton, and Bidaye address the mechanisms underlying walking. It's well summarized by a piece in the Transmitter: www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

Our recent work covered in this cool piece by @natmesanash.bsky.social @thetransmitter.bsky.social . Thanks for using our videos!

Researchers have long searched for the neural circuit underlying locomotion. Now they’ve found it in flies. By @natmesanash.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

One of my favorite scenes from the series. LIFE UNEARTHED with Ariel Waldman now streaming on PBS, Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video. www.pbs.org/show/life-un... 🧪🦠 #scicomm

Heartbreaking to hear Sean Eddy (@cryptogenomicon.bsky.social) talk about how arbitrary cuts to his lab's NIH funding have decimated his lab Sean's lab has built computational tools that enable so much important biology research also quotes by @jeremymberg.bsky.social www.npr.org/2026/05/11/n...

The insane world we’re living in: speak up in support of immigrants, the government closes your research lab and the university immediately complies

Run, don’t walk, to your closest local preprint server to see our latest 3D tracking results! I’m still tickled that our results show flies don’t exactly walk, they “ground run” everywhere. I bet they also talk fast and suffer no fools.

Salaries for workers across universities in Argentina have dropped 30 to 40 percent since Javier Milei took office, creating a scientific crisis that has driven researchers to the streets. #neuroskyence By @natmesanash.bsky.social, @claudia-lopez.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/funding/fund...

Happy 100th birthday Sir Attenborough!

Here’s our latest preprint on uncovering neural control of a coordinated walking pattern! doi.org/10.64898/202... (author-list jumbled, see pdf for corrected). Video shows the central paradigm in this study, we optogenetically induce walking in headless flies and sequentially reduce proprioception.

New preprint: Whole-body 3D kinematics of freely behaving 𝐷𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑎 New tech from @blobology.bsky.social & others at @hhmijanelia.bsky.social, which @ispizua.bsky.social and @elliottabe.bsky.social used to gain insight into 3D structure of locomotion & courtship www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We received the sad news that my emeritus colleague Peter Detwiler passed away at his home in Prague last week. nbio.uw.edu/people/entry... Peter was an amazing scientist, builder, and artist, who was always very modest about his accomplishments. And he was very kind. A quick example...

🎨KEEPING ARTISTS IN SOMERVILLE: we just made history. In honor of Open Studios, here’s the incredible story of Central Street Studios. Watch til the end! #openstudios #somerville #somervillema #mapoli

Revision of @sarahpugly.bsky.social's 🪰 walking CPG preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Major updates: → motor rhythms replicate across 4 connectomes (incl. 2 new full-CNS datasets) → robust across all 6 legs → new analyses of the CPG motif show it's an outlier in the VNC → improved code docs

Neuromatch has been denied our Office of Foreign Assets Control "Iran license" renewal. We had renewed successfully before, but now our request is “inconsistent with current U.S. foreign policy.” I am absolutely gutted by this denial.

Bioluminescent mushrooms (Omphalotus nidiformis) from Conjola National Park, Australia. Glowing could be to attract spore-dispersing insects, but this paper suggests that it's an "incidental by-product of metabolism". link.springer.com/article/10.5... pics from my mother in law

Sharing this screen grab from a friend at NIH (with permission). This is a checklist program officers have to complete before a grant can be awarded. The first question: "Is this grant All Clean/Clear in the NIH Text analysis Tool?" 🧵1/3

🧵 1/6 Our new paper is out in Journal of Experimental Biology! We've been studying the curious dancing flight of male mayflies and why they do it. Spoiler: it's not just to impress females. 🪲⬇️ journals.biologists.com/jeb/article-...

I got to nerd out with @seanmcarroll.bsky.social last week 😎

My story on the NSB terminations:

told a group of four year olds at the playground today the news that there was humongous octopus that ate dinosaurs and they absolutely lost their minds www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A cautionary note on biological inference from connectome-constrained networks trained in supervised settings: model selection based on task performance alone does not reliably recover the true biological circuits or underlying mechanisms Led by @ckaraneen biorxiv.org/content/10.6...