A great privilege of science is working with remarkable people. A nice piece highlighting @mindyisminsu.bsky.social. Her grit, esp through the pandemic, was foundational to the #BANC project. hms.harvard.edu/news/making-...

Stronger punishments get better results? Not for this hawkmoth 👀🚫 Check out our new paper where we link sensory ecology to colour discrimination learning in an insect pollinator. Shout out to co-authors @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social and @jjfosterlab.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.an...

Exciting work by @pheereynolds.bsky.social and the whole team on how visual experience shapes neural structure and function is now out in Neuron! Check it out!

I am very happy to have participated in this amazing project with @maxcapelle.bsky.social and Katja Slangewal! 🥳 Through virtual reality and agent-based modeling, Max revealed the visual algorithms of the behavioral flip from light- to dark-seeking as zebrafish transition from larvae to juveniles.

What a great start to the summer with @elefp.bsky.social and @syddoingscience.bsky.social representing the lab at the Neural Basis of Natural Behaviors conference!🧠 From worms to humans, the talks reflected an exciting new direction in neuroscience toward studying the brain in natural environments.

Amazing!

New amazing work by my dear friend @gkolyfetis.bsky.social modeling polarization vision in different bee species! Check it out! 🚨

Do bright lights change how you dance? 🔆💃 Waggle-dancing honeybees interpret bright UV & green as the sun, but dim UV as a patch of sky. Thanks Keram Pfeiffer @uni-wuerzburg.de for trusting me with your data & @jgraving.bsky.social for the circular GLMM. doi.org/10.21203/rs....

Just out: VoR of our novel cost-benefit analysis of eye design. Applied to simple and compound eyes, discovers that photoreceptor costs shape design of entire eye, explains why diurnal insects have world's longest photoreceptors, and revises scaling of acuity with eye size. doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Prediction without understanding sustained astronomy through a thousand years of epicycles, writes @tonyzador.bsky.social. AI is now offering neuroscience the same deal. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/machine-lear...

In 1986, John White published "The Mind of a Worm," the first complete wiring diagram of any animal's brain. 7,000+ synapses in C. elegans, mapped by hand. This year he won the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences. And he's donating his share to OpenWorm.

Dutch film-maker Jan van IJken condensed 4 weeks of development in a salamander embryo (Mesotriton alpestris) into a 6 minute video, presented here sped up to 1 minute. You can see gastrulation at ~the 10s mark, forming the gut, then limbs & in a moment, the heart just *begins* beating.

for more about the fascinating study organism Stentor — a veritable giant of the unicellular universe — see this quick guide www.cell.com/current-biol...

New work w/ Zach Kelso and @madeleinecsnyder.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Our negative results on classical conditioning in planarian flatworms. This was surprising, given the long history of work (including sensational findings of memory transfer and retention through decapitation).

@gkolyfetis.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de presenting his work on bee navigation at the annual meeting of the Beekeepers of Baden in Radolfzell 🍯🐝. Thank you for the invitation! Great to see the public interest in science and find out what we can learn from each other. 👁️🧭

New @currentbiology.bsky.social paper from Dr. Leila Elabbady on neural circuits that transform a touch stimulus into spatially targeted grooming. Leila discovered a leg somatotopic map and used it to infer tactile receptive fields in the fly VNC connectome. authors.elsevier.com/a/1mvu83QW8S...

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Final version of record here: elifesciences.org/articles/107... Enjoy tracking

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How do development and genetics shape evidence integration? 🧠 In our new preprint, we dissect how sensory evidence accumulation over time guides decisions. Want to know more? Keep reading or or come to Roberto's poster 1-003 this Thursday at #Cosyne2026. (1/4) Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202...

Check out this amazing piece of work by my friend Dario!

Go Katja!!! 🥳

Another memorable Bahl Lab Winter Retreat made even better by having the Vogt and Bollmann labs join us for two days of sun, snow & science! 🌞❄️

Out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social! A dive into the deep history of vertebrate vision, together with @mikebok.bsky.social, @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social Photo credit : Vasilis Karkalas

Does every visual experience shape the brain in the same way, or does what we see change how visual areas are wired? 🧠 New research from Leopoldo Petreanu’s Cortical Circuits Lab at the @champalimaudf.bsky.social, first co-authors Radhika Rajan and Rodrigo Dias, shows that visual experience matters.

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks. @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social @flatironinstitute.org @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social 1/14

New paper out : "Synchronization of behavioral and cardiac dynamics in larval zebrafish" Here, we report a pretty striking relationship between behavioral state and heart rate in larval zebrafish, and then explore the mechanisms that lead to this coupling bit.ly/4ciYt3R

Have you ever wondered how the brain should represent the sensory world in order to generate behavior? Read our new preprint: work by Shuhong Huang shuhonghuang.bsky.social with our long-standing collaborator James Fitzgerald at Northwestern.

Interesting news: The Marine Biological Labs at Woods Hole (MBL) is once again becoming an independent institution. University of Chicago will remain a partner, but only one of many. MBL is an amazing place for science and science training and I hope it will thrive in this new status.

Excited to share my first PhD preprint! w/ Sören Kannegieser and @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social @insect-vision.bsky.social We investigated how hawkmoths coordinate lateralized sensory and motor control for appendage guidance, revealing similar control principles to vertebrates doi.org/10.64898/202...

The first paper from the lab is now out in Science Advances: Multimodal social context modulates larval behavior in Drosophila www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... We find that fly larvae keep their distance to conspecifics in the absence of food, enjoy reading! @cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de

The second paper from the lab is now available on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We discovered that cannibalistic behavior in fly larvae is social-context dependent. Larval groups avoid dead conspecifics; individuals show high attraction. They only do it when no one is watching 😉

New paper from the lab, led by @ronjabigge.bsky.social, in collaboration with Kentaro Arikawa. We reconcile contrast and spatial processing functions of lamina monopolar cells by integrating 3D morphology, connectivity and neurophysiology in the hummingbird hawkmoth. tinyurl.com/mvnh3325 For more 👇

Why does life explore so few of the forms it could possibly take? Using fractal descriptors, this #scienceadvances paper shows that Earth’s biosphere clusters around simple shapes, reflecting deep evolutionary constraints. @artemyte.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Fun! Link to original research: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

1/6: New publication from the lab: “Plastic landmark anchoring in zebrafish compass neurons” by Ryosuke Tanaka (@ryosuketanaka.bsky.social) and Ruben is available here: rdcu.be/eX1L4

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... We had a lot of fun working on this project (led by Itzel Ishida, not on bluesky). Some interesting highlights from the paper -

Gregor Mendel spent seven to eight years crossing and scoring tens of thousands of pea plants. In contemporary terms, this is known as “a postdoc”

Can biological tissues "learn"? Our new preprint shows that epithelial tissues exhibit emergent behaviors akin to unsupervised learning. Local tension remodeling allows cell networks to store long-range memory and program global elasticity properties. Read more here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to share our new work on visual information processing in the retinocollicular pathway. We discovered that while luminance responses can predict motion responses in retinal ganglion cells, this prediction does not hold in the superior colliculus cells. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Really excited to see this great work published! It was an honor and unforgettable experience to be part of this joint effort in @scottvedwards.bsky.social lab!

Congratulations to the lab's first PhD student @maxcapelle.bsky.social for defending his PhD last week! Max not only helped shape the lab from day one, but also made outstanding scientific achievements, which have laid the foundation for future research. Wishing him all the best 🥳

Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: Twists and turns in the story of learned avoidance Evidence that learned avoidance of a pathogenic bacterium can be transmitted to future generations in C. elegans is growing. 🔗

CeDNe: A multi-scale computational framework for modeling structure-function relationships in the C. elegans nervous system https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.03.683805v1

Excited to share our paper now published in Cell! 'Zebrafish use spectral information to suppress the visual background' Huge thanks to @neurofishh.bsky.social & @teuler.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social @cp-cell.bsky.social 👇🏻 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

sure, if you enjoy the horrifying limits of human perception

Out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social led by Kaarthik A Balakrishnan: We identify medullary circuits that represent the valence of thermal stimuli and control both long-term strategies of cold-avoidance and short term hot avoidance behaviors to enable thermoregulation. www.cell.com/current-biol...

What if you are a pixel in a higher-level consciousness navigating through extra dimensions of time? Meet the ‘Nested Observer Window Model’ of Jonathan Schooler, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences UCSB. www.essentiafoundation.org/12750-2/seei...

one of the cool things about rock climbing as a hobby is that you gradually lose the ability to be recognized by fingerprint scanners