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 🤗

The Sosa Lab website is now live! www.sosaneurolab.com We will be seeking a postdoctoral researcher to join the growing team! If you are a rodent neuroscientist and interested in doing systems neuro work in the mountains 🏔️, please check out the "Join" page.

Struck by the parallels between these posts on benchmarking in machine learning from @shahabbakht.bsky.social and operational focus in neuroscience from @gershbrain.bsky.social

Nice to see this work from Julie Elie and Fred Theunissen out in Science!

A sperm whale surfacing with a giant squid in its mouth. I love seeing things like this. Reminds me of the raw and beautiful savagery of nature.

Coronal sections the new Rorschach test?

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

I'm super happy to have the lab featured on @thetransmitter.bsky.social, my favorite place for neuroscience news! #neuroskyence @uabneuro.bsky.social

And we are live! Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️ Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions! www.kaggle.com/competitions...

My group at Science has been running a big campaign to engineer new channelrhodopsins. Excited to share the first results from it today: a suite of highly sensitive new opsins. We call them "WAChRs". Everyday indoor office lighting is enough to activate them pretty strongly.

Really cool stuff! Engineered excitatory opsins responding to 15nW light

Very excited to share my second postdoc, now out in Science Advances! We used targeted snRNA-seq to profile four major subnuclei of the primate across three species (including humans). 1/13 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A spatially resolved transcriptomic atlas of the primate amygdala (human, macaque, and baboon) now out in Science Advances (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...). The amygdala contains 32 types of neurons with many neuron types specific to particular subdivisions. Lots of updates from the preprint!

Galah Galah bills y'all

Nice work from my old colleague @ebaltz.bsky.social: mediodorsal thalamus → dorsal striatum projections help track past & present actions to support flexible behavior early in learning www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

I imagine he's happy though

Check out the meeting lineup for #MCCS25! It's going to be an incredible day. Don't miss out, register now: event.fourwaves.com/MCCS25/pages

A huge shoutout to all the dedicated grants management specialists at the NIH who are working around the clock to push grants out before the Sep 30 deadline. And also to the POs responding to frantic emails. Not an easy job under the best of circumstances and right now it's the pits. Thank you!

Accepting applications for Graduate Students! PhD & MSc I am seeking highly motivated individuals to join my research team. Application details here: https://bit.ly/4mlBd6x Deadline 01 Dec 2025 Please share widely! (1/3) 1/3

Nixon Lab is hoping to recruit a postdoctoral fellow interested in alcohol-microglia and/or alcohol-neural stem cell interactions in recovery from alcohol-induced brain and behavioral damage/dysfunction. Open fellowships on our NIAAA-funded T32! Please spread the word!

(1/10) We’re excited to share our new preprint (doi.org/10.1101/2025...), which uncovers the spatiomolecular landscape of the human nucleus accumbens (NAc), by integrating snRNA-seq with Visium spatial transcriptomics across 10 control donors. 🧠 #NAcLIBD #snRNAseq #10xVisium

Okay, I have a new favorite example video for courtship behavior www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfWt...

Distributed Denial of Science attack

This is similar to the mistake that sucks in so many grad students who become overnight devotees of dynamical systems approaches to the brain. Well, of course the brain is a recurrent, nonlinear, distributed dynamical system! People aren’t ignoring that because they’re dumb.

Didn’t want to hijack someone else’s thread, but also: what’s the alternative? Sure, evolution produces sufficient not optimal solutions. Cool. How do we model that? Or if you don’t care about modeling, what predictions does that make that we can test experimentally?

Always wondered what these gorgeous ducks at Duke Gardens were. Finally figured out they are Ruddy Shelducks native to Asia - must've been brought here?

Whose got relatively large thumbs and an enlarged neocortex?

Absolute measurement of fast and slow neuronal signals with fluorescence lifetime photometry at high temporal resolution www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

New paper on precise tool use learning in carrion crows @currentbiology.bsky.social. We show that—like New Caledonian crows—expert carrion crows pay close attention to the working end of their tool, suggesting tool integration into their peripersonal space. 🧵 & vids! 👇 www.cell.com/current-biol...

very exciting to share the result of a collaborative effort to map the molecular changes in the mouse and human striatum in Parkinson’s, revealing new biological targets and vulnerability of specific cell types with disease progression

Interesting - I wonder what kind of startup I can expect from: "organic-carbon-bearing mudstones in the Bright Angel formation" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

From up the hill in Tübingen. Congrats!

I'm usually not very active here, but good news: Together with @milliejohnston.bsky.social, our paper on time estimation in #crows got published in @natcomms.nature.com today! We found crow neurons track time like a stopwatch — without a cortex! 🐦⏱️🧠 #SciComm #Science 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 Calling researchers, students, technicians in cognition 🚨 We’re running a 10-min anonymous survey on how animal cognition is defined and studied across disciplines (from ecology, ethology, psychology, neurology, etc). 🧠✨ Scan the QR code & share widely #AnimalCognition #ResearchSurvey #Science

#Cosyne2026 is now open for business! Show us what you got both for the main meeting & workshop proposals 🧠🥳🧠🥳🧠

"A previously reported bottleneck in human ancestry 900 kya is likely a statistical artifact" academic.oup.com/genetics/art...

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...

@superkash.bsky.social The KASH UNC protein? I'll be on the lookout for the SCHREINER Duke protein

What can man do against such reckless h̶a̶t̶e̶ use of LLMs?

Hi Cian, I think this is the result of systematic statistical bias in sample AC: the shape of sample AC is negatively biased as time series become shorter (the bias can be computed analytically for simple processes). We discuss this in detail here: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

anyone come across this statistical issue before? I have simulated some time series data and am computing crosscorrelograms between two variables. "one year" of smith data recovers ground truth crosscorrelogram (right) but "one month" of sim data (left) gives artifactual negative correlations 🤷‍♂️

Application is open! Come join us and our fantastic line-up of speakers next year in March in Bonn!

Duke Cell Biology is hiring in AI/ML! @scottsoderling.bsky.social, @rohitsingh8080.bsky.social, and others are building a very active community around ML for discovery science, and Duke is a great place to be. academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30509

Saturday is for box turtles

‪@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...

Journal of Comparative Neurology | Systems Neuroscience Journal | Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Honored by this opportunity and excited for all these amazing presentations!

I still can't believe that my ERC starting grant proposal, #BeeSpace got accepted by the @erc.europa.eu. For the next 5 years, we have funding to study place coding in the insect 🐝 brain. Exciting times are ahead. Without the great support of my former PIs this wouldn't have been possible.

I'm quite sympathetic to the distributed view (and certainly Ben's claim here about brain areas), but there are some caveats. E.g., Musall et al and Mohan et al imaged from genetically defined cell types (PT v IT) and identify distinct patterns of activity (1/x) www.nature.com/articles/s41...