good news: 3 papers (2 lead author) accepted in the last 30 days bad news: none of these made the 30-day deadline to update my SRO for my K99 that is about to be reviewed 🥲

Physicists coming into neuroscience: I would simply control all the variables

New in Nature Neuroscience: We developed a flexible model that reveals how animals learn tasks—uncovering stages, sudden insights, and gradual improvements unique to each animal. Learning isn't monotonic, and our model captures that complexity 🐭📊 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ze Frank is the best, and "the Goffin's cockatoos make the New Caledonian crows look like Old Caledonian crows" (this it's an actual comment on YouTube!) Don't miss this video about our work at the Goffin Lab (and the Tanimbar Lab!) "I've seen a cockatoo. I've seen a cockatoo 🤘"

spent a lot of time scrambling around here as a kid

Can also recommend, and there was a nice chapter-by-chapter reading club of it with Georg and lots of other great speakers - videos still up here: sites.google.com/view/bbtread...

It won't actually exist for another month or so, but because it now 'exists' on amazon, I'll humbly observe that, after working through this book, your student/trainee would be able to read and understand all but two or three papers in this week's J. Neurosci. Check it out:

Shirley Rim can't be serious

Submit to our collection :) This is a fantastic opportunity to publish your work on cortico-subcortical loops

Teaching probability is like sex ed: it’s nobody’s idea of a good time, but it keeps the kids from learning about it on the streets.

Big News! I am beyond honored to have received the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology in animal learning and behavior! I am so grateful to my lab, mentors, colleagues, and institutions for all the support over the years!

I continue to be impressed with Scholar Inbox! - Personal recommendations the day after the papers land on arXiv (significantly faster than Google Scholar?? 😱) - Very good recommendations - Email notifications for digests - Super slick UI, both on mobile and desktop... check this out! 👇

Convoy in San Diego 👀

My department, Duke Neurobiology, is searching for a new chair. Ad below. Come work with me, @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social @ennatsew.bsky.social @jorggrandl.bsky.social @jnklab.bsky.social @sbilbo.bsky.social @neurocircuits.bsky.social and many other amazing folks! @dukemedschool.bsky.social

Congrats @danielavallentin.bsky.social happy to see this out in @currentbiology.bsky.social

Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KckG... www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...

Welcome to Super Seabird Sunday where we ask you to share photos, videos & artwork of seabirds to brighten timelines (it’s needed!). Here is my contribution; a crèche of Eider ducks marching to the sea #SuperSeabirdSunday

Avo-gadro hand it to you,

In general, I think Peter Jackson made very good choices when deciding how to adapt LORD OF THE RINGS, but I will never entirely forgive him for cutting out the scene where a Nazgûl shouts "Open in the name of Mordor!" and kicks down a door.

Honored to be appointed Chief Scientific Officer @lieberinstitute.bsky.social. LIBD is a uniquely collaborative place with extraordinary biological resources and a commitment to translation 🧠🔬🧪. Grateful to my colleagues and excited to help guide our next chapter! www.libd.org/keri-martino...

A new study from the Yovel lab @elife.bsky.social reveals that acoustic signals emitted by plants affect the moths oviposition decision. An effect gone in deafened moths. "We reveal evidence for a first acoustic interaction between moths and plants, [...]". elifesciences.org/articles/104...

you guys, i was just invited to actually write this. what is happening???

We are excited to announce the 2026 GRC Neurobiology of Cognition (7/19-24) in beautiful Waterville Valley, NH! Registration/abstract submission open. Wonderful speakers/program covering cognition across scales & species, incl. AI & neuromodulation! @desrocherslab.bsky.social @erinlrich.bsky.social

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

New preprint. We show that in addition to reward prediction errors (RPEs), dorsal striatal dopamine signals encode sensory prediction errors (SPEs), the difference between sensory prior & observed stimulus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This was thought provoking 🧠 Doesn't invalidate computational approaches but a clear-eyed view of the limits/assumptions, and an eloquent description of why neurobiology is endlessly fascinating

Squirrel's point of view #birds:

Happy new year! I wanted to share my new Python package called chatter that streamlines the process of applying AI/ML models to animal communication 🦜🦇🐋🐵👨‍🌾 masonyoungblood.github.io/chatter/

Throwback to this Reddit post I saw in 2024 and that I still think about sometimes

Happy new year, no ragrets

I definitely didn’t just scrape the web to get the h-index and total citation count as of 12/30/2025 for 319 living and dead nonhuman primate researchers to get a sense of publication metrics by rank on tenure-track.

A quote said by one of my academic "grandfathers" to one of my mentors: "Well, I'm a tenured professor with an endowed chair at (big deal institution). You're a graduate student. What have we got to lose?"

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...

For every trainee who succeeds at getting some super difficult experiment to yield interesting results, there are another dozen who fruitlessly spun their wheels for years. My advice: explore many technically feasible experiments and follow up on interesting leads

Excited to share latest study from the lab by an amazing RA, Dylan Flink. We solved a small (important) puzzle while in the trenches of a larger (wavy 🌊) puzzle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵...

merry Christmas x2 (go Nuggets)!

Merry Christmas!

made a trip to Cerebral Brewing which has perhaps the best named beer for a neuroscientist #neuroskyence

Do you love quantifying animal behavior as much as we do? We have just the tool for you! Presenting #OCTRON - a pipeline that helps you create rich annotation data and enables training of custom segmentation models. Have a look, particularly if you work with non-model / invertebrate organisms!

iGluSnFR4 is now available @natmethods.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... Glutamate indicators with increased sensitivity and tailored deactivation rates 🧪

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A

Look who's finally on Bluesky! Welcome Hendrikje (and lab). @nienborglab.bsky.social Let's get her follower count up. 🙂

Yes, having lots of work is stressful, but have you tried finishing all that work and then being nagged by the vague suspicion you've forgotten something?

sunsets out west hit different

Well it’s been quite a year 🫠 but I’m happy and tremendously grateful to close it out on a personal science high-note - Ill be going to my first ever Cosyne, and I officially received the NOA for my K99/R00 from NIDCD 🙏 thank you Santa ie hardworking NIH staff for the best possible holiday gift 🥹

Our python package for real-time targeting of birdsong syllables "Moove" is finally out! Thanks to my co-authors Nils Riekers, @goebl.bsky.social and Lena Veit. Our pre-print is online on biorxiv and our code is available on GitHub. Check it out! doi.org/10.64898/202... github.com/veitlab/moove