Johannes Kappel
@johanneskappel.bsky.social
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📥 658
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Neuroscientist, working on connectomics & cognition. EMBO Postdoctoral Fellow @ FMI Basel 🇨🇭
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Johannes Kappel
jennifer uncoolidge
4 days ago
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...
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Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology
She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00254-z
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“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.”
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4 days ago
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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ
6 days ago
The only surprise is they admit it
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Christian Cazares, Ph.D.
10 days ago
hahahaha what
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mark cembrowski
15 days ago
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!
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Joel Boerckel
30 days ago
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.
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Chris J Dallmann
about 1 month ago
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...
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Brandon Friedman
about 1 month ago
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.
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Johannes Felsenberg
about 2 months ago
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...
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Re-exposure to reward re-evaluates related memories
To adapt behavior in changing environments, animals must continuously re-evaluate previously learned associations. This flexibility of memory systems …
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982225015969
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FMI science
2 months ago
📢 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...
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Portugues Lab
about 1 month ago
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.
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Matthew Cobb
about 1 month ago
That’s quite the pivot from LeCun who disagreed vigorously (let us say) with
@garymarcus.bsky.social
on this issue for quite some time…
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Magnus Johansson
about 1 month ago
"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-...
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40 percent of MRI signals misinterpreted
Interpretation of numerous MRI data may be incorrect: blood flow is not a reliable indicator of brain activity.
https://www.tum.de/en/news-and-events/all-news/press-releases/details/40-percent-of-mri-signals-do-not-correspond-to-actual-brain-activity
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NY Times Pitchbot
about 2 months ago
If the Romans had simply deported woke baby Jesus to South Sudan, a lot of trouble could have been avoided
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MadScientist
about 2 months ago
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 🧪
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Carl T. Bergstrom
about 2 months ago
I wouldn't describe Jay as "man in the middle" unless I were making sort of human centipede analogy.
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Jan M. Ache
about 2 months ago
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🧵...
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Inbal Shainer
about 2 months ago
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...
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Asteroids, antibiotics and ants: a year of remarkable science
Highlights from News & Views published in 2025.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03807-w
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Dinu F Albeanu
about 2 months ago
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
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Dr Emma Hodcroft
2 months ago
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! ❄️☃️😁
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Andrew Middleton
2 months ago
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...
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Explore live radio by rotating the globe
Explore live radio by rotating the globe.
https://radio.garden
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Rui Costa
2 months ago
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!
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Tim Vogels
3 months ago
"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!
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Inhibitory Plasticity Balances Excitation and Inhibition in Sensory Pathways and Memory Networks
Plasticity at inhibitory synapses maintains balanced excitatory and inhibitory synaptic inputs at cortical neurons.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1211095
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Maggie Harrison Dupré
2 months ago
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...
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Richard Gao
2 months ago
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 🏖️🌮
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Georg Keller
3 months ago
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...
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Understanding cortical computation through the lens of joint-embedding predictive architectures
Tracking prey or recognizing a lurking predator is as crucial for survival as anticipating their actions. To guide behavior, the brain must extract information about object identities and their dynami...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.25.690220v1
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Markus Meister
3 months ago
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
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"[...], in principle, the humans on our team could have come up with it unaided. Nevertheless, we only found it after constructing the AI system."
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3 months ago
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Hagen Blix
3 months ago
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.
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Hagen Blix
3 months ago
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.
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Jeff Bezos Creates A.I. Start-Up Where He Will Be Co-Chief Executive
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/technology/bezos-project-prometheus.html
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Grace Lindsay
3 months ago
It is actually an incredibly frustrating time to be a theoretical neuroscientist right now imo, for this reason
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Paolo Crosetto
3 months ago
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
👇
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Ketan Joshi
3 months ago
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.
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Artificial Intelligence Wants to Sell You Stuff While the World Burns
Meta is betting on generative AI for a new generation of aggressive advertising. It requires immense energy, much of which will likely come from fossil fuels.
https://newrepublic.com/article/202864/meta-generative-ai-ads-emissions
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒
4 months ago
What if we did a single run and declared victory
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Josh Moody
4 months ago
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...
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Regarding the Compact | MIT Organization Chart
https://orgchart.mit.edu/letters/regarding-compact
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Richard Gao
5 months ago
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 🤗
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Stand Up for Science!
5 months ago
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
#ImpeachRFK
and keep the momentum going! 🦆
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Oded Rechavi
5 months ago
Only single cell sequencing of the all these post docs will reveal why
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Misha Ahrens
5 months ago
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...
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Nancy Kanwisher
5 months ago
@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...
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Ben Hayden
5 months ago
Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature
The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09235-0
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Memento (new) Morty 🌙
5 months ago
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
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Ann Kennedy
6 months ago
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...
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Theoretical neuroscience has room to grow
Nature Reviews Neuroscience - The goal of theoretical neuroscience is to uncover principles of neural computation through careful design and interpretation of mathematical models. Here, I examine...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-025-00965-8.epdf?sharing_token=Vv_dTCdqVQid092mEumTqtRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0OYxbleeyUaomEFNMTDzwXyIgMDT-OpOB8cASARvDUrJBBwSctjElnMOMY9l6yVUtZDt8tnWw7JP0q1rN1gq19Kc0_TfjMbZblsugJ3JwEv-xyed4XsTP7EyDwaWvBzqW4%3D
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Iris van Rooij 💭
6 months ago
"Your job is not to turn in completed assignments; it's to learn how to think."
cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...
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The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art: Q&A with Ted Chiang
The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art: Q&A with Ted Chiang
https://cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08/12/ted-chiang/
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flymuscles
6 months ago
Total disaster for the
#drosophila
community if flybase disappears
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Johannes Kappel
6 months ago
Never ask postdocs what they'll be doing next year, that's considered terribly offensive in their culture.
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Matt Perich
6 months ago
📰 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.
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Woodrow Peel 🆗🆒
6 months ago
Go for it. I don't even care any more.
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Cedric Boeckx
6 months ago
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...
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An integrated single-nucleus and spatial transcriptomics atlas reveals the molecular landscape of the human hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience
The topographical organization of cells in the hippocampus reflects its ability to regulate mood and cognition. Here the authors generate a spatially resolved gene expression map in the human hippocam...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02022-0
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AFP News Agency
7 months ago
Joint statement on Gaza from AFP, AP, BBC News and Reuters
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