Following up: factoring noise out can also blind you to disease effects Alcohol-exposed mice looked normal by coarse measures. The deficit, an inability to use experience, only showed up after modeling Alcohol deficit tracked M2→DMS hyperactivity; dialing it down rescued behavior👇 #neuroskyence

Excited to share our first red ACh sensor! 🔴 We developed GRAB_rACh1h, the first genetically encoded red fluorescent sensor for recording acetylcholine dynamics in vivo. (1/3)

Teach a man FISH and he'll spend a lifetime on the confocal microscope

New from the lab: Fred Stoll & Neelima Valluru looked at how neural activity in frontal ctx tracks deliberative decision making. In a trial they found that activity flips between the options. When this flip happens it reshapes the neural geometry of option attributes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Want to follow your favorite small animal around? Maybe you'd like to also see it's environment at the same time? Or you'd want to see muscle activity but your commercial microscope doesn't have a large enough field-of-view? Meet Glowtracker! scholz-lab.github.io/GlowTracker/ Paper: rdcu.be/foISQ

Following up: factoring noise out can also blind you to disease effects Alcohol-exposed mice looked normal by coarse measures. The deficit, an inability to use experience, only showed up after modeling Alcohol deficit tracked M2→DMS hyperactivity; dialing it down rescued behavior👇 #neuroskyence

Come work with us! We're looking for a new lab manager to help us develop new motion capture methods, new biosensors, and to hopefully learn something cool about the brain. Bonus: you get to do all this in the ATL and, in my humble opinion, we're nice people to work with! markolab.org/careers/

novel signaling pathcake

A lightweight head-mounted multiplane microscope allows simultaneous imaging of 1800 neurons in freely moving mice, sampled over weeks. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/ We work hard to factor "noise" out of behavior. But the brain doesn't. Strip away noise and you may miss what the brain evolved to do I wanted to share this pre-Bluesky paper where we found premotor (M2) corticostriatal circuits encode a broad history of behavior, beyond just action + reward 👇

Question for in-vivo physiologists: which is worse for neural circuit function - random loss of a few spikes or random gain of a few spikes? Intuitions as well as hard data/facts welcome!

Out now in Current Biology: "Striatal visual responses increase prior to visuomotor learning" With Andrada Marica and @petergorman.bsky.social cell.com/current-biol...

Why does dopamine ramp up during approach to predictable rewards? In this preprint with Luke Priestley, we explore the idea that dopamine ramps occur when reward predictions inferred using a world-model are used to train striatal cached values.

watching wemby with another uncalled flagrant foul #nbasky

Decent EPSC, but they really need to fix their amplifier gain.

Article Paywall Association

This was always a provocative idea, but recent data suggest: 1. Heat calls are extremely quiet, likely undetectable even by adult birds (post link) 2. Chicks cant hear until ~5 days post hatch, and sound vibrations are not detectable by vibrotactile senses in ovo www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Unbeelievable

what an incredible achievement and resource for retina researchers. We use it, we love it — it is a game changer for all of us who love retinal circuits. Kudos.

Me moving to North Carolina after spending my life in Colorado and southern California: "So glad I don't have to worry about droughts now that I'm in the famously wet southeast" Durham:

Email from NINDS announced ending F32 but they are now encouraging K32 submissions. files.simpler.grants.gov/opportunitie...

Early expiration of the NINDS F32 NOFO. Receipt dates after June 9th, 2026 are canceled. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

🎉 Really happy to share that I, together with Carlos, PhD student at @danielavallentin.bsky.social group, have been elected as Chairs for the next Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) on Neural Mechanisms of Acoustic Communication! Stay tuned — more updates to come as we put the program together.

iconic

Alternatively:

In this world, nothing is certain except: Death, taxes, @sfn.org abstract deadline extension

1/ We work hard to factor "noise" out of behavior. But the brain doesn't. Strip away noise and you may miss what the brain evolved to do I wanted to share this pre-Bluesky paper where we found premotor (M2) corticostriatal circuits encode a broad history of behavior, beyond just action + reward 👇

love a green lynx spider

So delighted to welcome the new Zara Weinberg cohort of Leading Edge fellows!!!

there are so many sleazy prediction markets, one of them has to offer a bet on SfN extending the abstract deadline, right?

Made a starter pack for attendees of the Neural Mechanisms of Acoustic Communication Gordon Conference. I'm sure I've missed people so let me know! go.bsky.app/57Ln8Bk

Made a starter pack for attendees of the Neural Mechanisms of Acoustic Communication Gordon Conference. I'm sure I've missed people so let me know! go.bsky.app/57Ln8Bk

Flowers of Gordon Neural Mechanisms of Acoustic Communication. #nmac2026 Left: Lady's Slipper Orchid Right: Painted Trillium

If you have not left a public comment on the draconian OMB-2026-0034, here's a quick thread to make it easy. #standupforscience #neuroskyence Click here: www.regulations.gov/document/OMB...

Starting off strong with Chad Firefinch at #100 birdhistory.substack.com/p/the-100-gr...

Lovely to be in Maine for Gordon Neural Mechanisms of Acoustic Communication! @nmac2026.bsky.social #nmac2026 And the bus ride to the conference venue was a huge nostalgia trip for my Appalachian Trail thru hike. Drove right through some of the coolest sections in the White mtns

Do you want to know if birds can use hair-like feathers as high-frequency sound receptors during echolocation? Join our team as PhD student or postdoc and find out! ⬇️ www.bi.mpg.de/2809383/job_...

thanks to the Kavli Institue for Brain and Mind for awarding me with an Innovative Reasearch Grant! staying afloat for a while longer!

🚨 New paper in @nature.com We asked why two hippocampal areas with very different anatomy, CA3 and CA1, often seem to code space so similarly? By recording bats flying up to 200m, we found that the difference was hidden by scale! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵 1/11

Proposed structures/ mechanisms for magnetic sensing in bird (so far): 1) In the beak/ trigeminal Nerve (biogenic magnetite) 2) radical pair-Cryptochrome mediated reaction in the retina 3) The lagena 4) Vestibular canals (electromagnetic induction) 5) Supermagnetic macrophages in the liver.

🚨UPDATE: We will launch our action center on this issue tomorrow. 📣JOIN US: Emergency Science Meeting (Virtual) June 2nd at 4pm et. Details to come. Our Policy Team has read through the entire 400 page hot mess express from Russ Vought...here are the high level details. A Thread🧵 1/x

ICYMI - an interesting null result that didn't make the main thread: Despite the well-known role of sleep in learning, we found no evidence that recent song learning consolidates *overnight*. Instead, vocal changes appear to stabilize gradually via practice over development Details👇

Bat brains code space similar to how bird brains code songs, so now 🦇 == 🕊️? 😅 Cool stuff from Shir Maimon and @tamir-eliav.bsky.social

Douglas Adams said: "Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place." Maybe he didn't go far enough - evolving a nervous system is when life really started overthinking things

this book is great, highly recommend!

New article from our team! A. Araguas et al. show that social interaction shapes vocal learning in young zebra finches tutored by a robot bird 🤖 🎶🐦 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... And check out @sebrafinch.bsky.social's Cassyni presentation on this study: cassyni.com/events/9682W...

aligns with this finding that song basal ganglia does not deterministically specify movement parameters, but instead flexibly tunes along learning-relevant dimensions of behavior bsky.app/profile/schr...

1/ 🚨🚨Preprint alert! "Perfect" isn't always smart 🧠. Anyone can tell apart two stimuli (including our mice). But how do we extract rules that apply to new stimuli? 🧵 biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @marius10p.bsky.social @computingnature.bsky.social #neuroAI #neuroscience #AI