No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

“The human body is an obstacle to efficiency — the limited head, the distracted heart, the tired limbs. Taking things inside saps energy and time, retaining them takes up space; and all for occasional use, if at all.”

The only surprise is they admit it

hahahaha what

Save the date for the annual "Neural Circuits and Behaviour" satellite conference at the Canadian Association for Neuroscience annual meeting, cohosted by @franklandlab.bsky.social and myself on May 18, 2026. We have a great speaker lineup and will be selecting 4 trainees talks from our registrants!

Defending PhD student, looking over their thesis: “If I knew then what I know now, I could’ve done all of this in like 9 months.” A thread about my favorite pioneering cave explorers and why I don’t think AI will ever “solve” biology.

How does the brain control locomotion? In our new preprint, we uncover a brain circuit in Drosophila that controls forward walking independently of turning. This dedicated locomotor circuit enables flexible motor control and might reflect a shared principle across species. doi.org/10.64898/202...

What in the Gestapo is going on in Grand Rapids? Watch this activist get arrested *mid-interview* for speaking out against U.S. action in Venezuela.

Carolin Warnecke together with Hanna, Dennis, Bene & Kerstin from my lab show that re-exposure to reward diminishes multiple associated olfactory memories. We’re hiring 2 postdocs—DM/email me for details. #Postdoc #Hiring www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

📢 Please help spread the word: We’re hiring a Head of Student & Postdoc Affairs to coordinate our international PhD program, provide guidance & career counseling, lead training programs, collaborate on EDI initiatives, and manage alumni relations. Apply at www.fmi.ch/education-ca...

1/n: A new collaborative preprint from the lab to start the year: "A multi-ring shifter network computes head direction in zebrafish" together with Siyuan Mei, Martin Stemmler and Andreas Herz from the LMU, Munich.

That’s quite the pivot from LeCun who disagreed vigorously (let us say) with @garymarcus.bsky.social on this issue for quite some time…

"40 percent of MRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity"; "Since tens of thousands of fMRI studies worldwide are based on this assumption, our results could lead to opposite interpretations in many of them.” www.tum.de/en/news-and-...

If the Romans had simply deported woke baby Jesus to South Sudan, a lot of trouble could have been avoided

This is exactly why people claiming "it came up with a new set of experiments/ideas/concepts" are carrying water for the weasels trying to put genAI on everything. This is how we get science defunded. This is how your colleagues lose their jobs 🧪

I wouldn't describe Jay as "man in the middle" unless I were making sort of human centipede analogy.

How do animals channel sensory information into motor pathways to generate flexible behavioral output? Excited to share a new preprint addressing this question by leveraging the new #maleCNS connectome, behavioral experiments, and in-vivo recordings: doi.org/10.64898/202.... A long🧵...

Very proud to see our paper selected as one of Nature’s 2025 highlights! @johanneskappel.bsky.social @jlarsch.bsky.social @mpiforbi.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Adam Kampff’s passion for understanding and explaining the world was unmatched. Living by example and not ever compromising on his dreams, Adam was uncanny in making people realize they can learn and understand anything and everything. Keep his dream alive! In his own words: tinyurl.com/ye29csw3

Best Christmas Card of 2025 award goes out to the @biozentrum.unibas.ch for this incredible building-themed-advent-calendar! Opening a window each day has been fantastic! ❄️☃️😁

I'm no purist when it comes to participating in things we all know are bad. I try to reduce my harm but I'm an honest hypocrite. I won't judge you for still using Spotify, just try this rad alternative. I'm listening to music from Dar es Salaam. Where will you listen to? radio.garden/listen/furah...

Last night Adam Kampff, the glue, the light, the catalyst, the builder, the smile, left us. He and his work transformed the lives of many labs, scientists, students. He inspired and was generous to his last transformation, working tirelessly to set up a foundation to continue the work.Thank you!

"Spiking Networks Hate It! Find Out the One Plasticity Trick They Don’t Want You to Know! Never stabilise models by hand again." - I woke up thinking we missed an opportunity with the title of this one. :/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Also: It snowed in Vienna, 10cm white fluffies! Happy Sunday!

NEW: Elon Musk's Grok chatbot will, with minimal prompting, provide residential addresses of everyday Americans. Prompts as simple as "[name] address" immediately returned accurate home addresses of private citizens — alongside other personal info we didn't ask for. futurism.com/future-socie...

Finally got the job ad—looking for 2 PhD students to start spring next year: www.gao-unit.com/join-us/ If comp neuro, ML, and AI4Neuro is your thing, or you just nerd out over brain recordings, apply! I'm at neurips. DM me here / on the conference app or email if you want to meet 🏖️🌮

One of the most promising approaches to making headway in understanding the cortical algorithm that I have seen in a long time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Come on Konrad, why do you cave so easily? Here, let me try it for you: 1. Spikes are (to good approximation) the only events that matter. 2. Extracellular fields are one way by which spikes interact with each other. 1/2

"[...], in principle, the humans on our team could have come up with it unaided. Nevertheless, we only found it after constructing the AI system."

Capitalism certainly does not fund science to speak truth to power. But precisely because science cannot make due without a concept of truth, it sometimes cannot help but speak truth to power anyways. An obvious case is climate change, where scientific truth conflicts clearly with the profit motive.

In applying AI to material science, biology, etc, capitalism is trying to shed science. The point is to substitute the engineering of a machine that can generate what science has hitherto done, but without having people know things. Knowledge ultimately residing in private property is the dream.

It is actually an incredibly frustrating time to be a theoretical neuroscientist right now imo, for this reason

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

To me, this is one of the key aspects of generative AI's broader environmental, social and climate harm: it cannot exist in an efficient, lean and narrowly applied way. It only ever looks like it "works" when it's brute-forced: just like Bitcoin. The harm is baked into its characteristics.

What if we did a single run and declared victory

MIT rejects "compact" proposed by the Trump administration. MIT prez wrote: it "would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution" and "is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone." orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

I've been waiting some years to make this joke and now it’s real: I conned somebody into giving me a faculty job! I’m starting as a W1 Tenure-Track Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in a week (lol), in the Faculty of CS and Math and I'm recruiting PhD students 🤗

You asked for it! We delivered Quack-O-Grams to our members of Congress urging them to #ImpeachRFK, and get that Quack out of office! There's still time for you to get in on this fluffy, feathery action: Send your own duck at zurl.co/W1ZnB#ImpeachRFKand keep the momentum going! 🦆

Only single cell sequencing of the all these post docs will reveal why

Preprint - Excited to present WHOLISTIC, which extends the concept of whole-brain functional imaging to the entire body. Pioneering work by incredibly talented Virginia Ruetten @vmsruetten.bsky.social, this platform reveals whole-organism cellular dynamics in vivo. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

‪@benhayden.bsky.social‬ @tyrellturing.bsky.social‬ @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social‬ @pessoabrain.bsky.social I see a lot of talk on here about how we should avoid "x does y" talk because the brain is "a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system". But this does not follow. A thread...

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I hope that when RFK Jr dies someday, someone has been hired and trained to capture whatever crawls out of the body, so that it doesn't find a new host

I wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it! Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Your job is not to turn in completed assignments; it's to learn how to think." cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

Total disaster for the #drosophila community if flybase disappears

Never ask postdocs what they'll be doing next year, that's considered terribly offensive in their culture.

📰 I really enjoyed writing this article with @thetransmitter.bsky.social! In it, I summarize parts of our recent perspective article on neural manifolds (www.nature.com/articles/s41...), with a focus on highlighting just a few cool insights into the brain we've already seen at the population level.

Go for it. I don't even care any more.

Great resource, out today in @natneuro.nature.com: An integrated single-nucleus and spatial transcriptomics atlas reveals the molecular landscape of the human hippocampus @stephaniehicks.bsky.social @martinowk.bsky.social & colleagues 🧪🧠🧬 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Joint statement on Gaza from AFP, AP, BBC News and Reuters