Goooooooood morning! This is fascism! @standupforscience.net is here to fight.

Wohoo 🎉

grants.nih.gov/news-events/... Please please please fill this out and speak up for animal research, especially primate research. So many diseases of the body and brain will only be cured if we support the models that best reflect human biology.

Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Trust me--read this. You'll be glad you did. and thank you Dr. Bennet for writing it. 🧪

You may have seen Eon Systems' viral "fly brain upload": a connectome-controlled virtual fly that walks, grooms, and feeds. (if not, here is a good article about it: www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...) It seems impressive. But how do we know the behavior is coming from the fly brain?

🧵 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...

Have you ever wondered why mice do what they do when they are free to do whatever they want? Check out our latest (and this slightly delayed thread about our recent paper, led by Caleb Weinreb and friends...) www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Excited to share our new preprint about the neural signals underlying finger and wrist movements. Alexandriya Emonds did a great job, check it out! doi.org/10.64898/202... Liza Okorokova, @garyhwbl.bsky.social, @jenpitt.bsky.social, Sliman Bensmaia, @leeemiller.bsky.social, @johndowney.bsky.social

Another university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone

More new results, this time from the amazing Lily Kramer! 🎉 “Sequential experience reshapes population representations in visual cortex” doi.org/10.64898/202... Visual experience unfolds in time. We asked how temporal structure reshapes population activity in visual cortex. 🧪🧵1/

New preprint: our lab’s first Alzheimer’s paper! “Loss of neuronal population organization links pathology to behavior in a model of Alzheimer's disease” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧪🧵1/

Sometimes you just get that shot. Anna's hummingbird with a little friend, in my yard. Davis, CA. #birds #ants

Meet Sarah Heilbronner, a neuroanatomist building wiring diagrams to understand the structure of pathways in the brain. 🧠#AskaNeuroscientist @srheilbronner.bsky.social

Deadline extended to March 25th , send in your Applications 🙌🏾😁

europeans when asked to help unblock the strait of hormuz

Smart strategy!

New LayNii v2.10.0 is out! github.com/layerfMRI/LA... 🚀 LN2_FRISGO: This program mitigates the Fuzzy Ripple artifacts in dual polarity 3D-EPI fMRI data. 💾 Big data ready: Now handling >5GB NIFTIs to support the mesoscopic shift toward high-res, whole-brain images. @layerfmri.bsky.social

So what's the most interesting, or weirdest, application of hidden markov models (HMMs) that you've seen? I once built an HMM for sage grouse mating behavior, fit to data collected by a robotic grouse (pictured doi.org/10.1086/703518). Looking for other examples for a new lecture on HMMs.

okay can we all agree to never again title a paper about minding the translational gap

New paper hot off the (pre-)press! We dig into the evolutionary origins of neural computations for behavioral control across mice, monkeys, and humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... As our lab's first foray into comparative analysis of neural dynamics, I’m super excited about this work! 1/18

Join us at TENSS 2026 to open black boxes, explain how things/brains work and debate the impact (or lack or it) of various new technologies on understanding of the brain and on society. tenss.ro Apply by: March 15th!

Science's PRIMA clinical trials are expanding to Australia, and will include inherited retinal diseases, such as Stargardt disease and retinitis pigmentosa.

Can electrical microstimulation be used to steer cortical population activity on- and off-manifold? Our new preprint says yes — using data-driven control in macaque PFC. Joint work with @gbarzon.bsky.social, Anandita De, Isaac Moran, Conner Carnahan, and Luca Mazzucato.

So... A friend was supposed to give a PURELY SCIENTIFIC talk at NIH within the next couple of weeks and it was cancelled because of a "new process" where all speakers/talks have to be CLEARED BY A POLITICAL APPOINTEE.

Monitoring gene expression in the brain with a simple blood test? In collaboration with @jerzyszablowski.bsky.social & his lab we figured out how to do it nonhuman primates using noninvasive neuroengineering of synthetic serum markers. nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

Excited to share this in final form @sfnjournals.bsky.social: An Open-Source Restraint System for Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Rats www.eneuro.org/content/13/2... if anyone wants to try doing it, give us a call! Happy to help you get going!

This, of course, is not surprising. What is surprising is lack of mention of his other Columbia colleagues who accompanied him to Epstein initiated events AND how factions at Columbia neuroscience continued to woo Epstein (eg ⬇️) long AFTER his first conviction of procuring a child for prostitution

As promised at the #GRC Basal Ganglia, here is our recent review on striatal cholinergic heterogeneity. I hope people find it useful and inspiring. www.frontiersin.org/journals/cel...

What are we even doing ? How is any of this ok? Wake up

The KM Lab is hiring! We're looking for both a new technician (makes a great post-bac like experience) and a post-doc. Come do fun science. Come join an amazing community. Learn more: sites.google.com/site/krookma...

New preprint out 🎉 What happens to the hippocampal “place code” when an animal is actively engaged in a task? The answer surprised us (and might surprise you too!). Let's dive in ⬇️ Link: "Hippocampal trace coding dominates and disrupts place coding" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Frame: the left is hurting itself by not engaging with the god machines Negation: but this technology doesn't do the things you claim kirby: the people writing these stories get funding to support narratives of power and inevitability, and that's what we should be scrutinizing

I also found this such a strange take on semiotics: "This idea, that large-language models merely produce statistically plausible word sequences based on training data, without having any idea about what the words refer to, has become the baseline across much of the left-intellectual landscape."

This should anger EVERYONE. Think of every important thing we've not done. This is how fast they could have found the funds to it, if that actually gave a shit about you.

If there is anything you take from me, let it be that actually, we CAN dream of AND create a better future. It’s hard work! It takes a lot of gumption to fight against the inertia of the status quo. But it’s possible and it’s way easier when we do it together.

If my followers have been inspired by the fierce resistance the Twin Cities has put up to ICE, you should make it a point to take a trip here (April through October 😬), enjoy the wonderful things MN has to offer and support our small businesses. It continues to be a really tough time for them.

What an effort you all. Amazing 🤩

things have not changed here. please, if you’re not in minnesota, do not look away. please prepare where you are. this is what they’ll do to your community next.

! New paper from the lab ! How does novelty impact value-based decision making ? What are the circuits and what mechanisms do they implement? Congratulations to Dr. Takaya Ogasawara and team www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Not to be a hater, but EVERYTHING we’ve done in the last 365 days, we done with *hundreds of thousands* of dollars less than the salary of the CEO of AAAS. So help us keep it up: www.standupforscience.net/donate

The tulips, the tulips.

Hey @eboyden3.bsky.social care to explain?

@sebastianseung.bsky.social Did you follow through on your plan to visit Epstein island?

We are watching in real time who some scientists are willing to sacrifice in favor of access to funding: early career researchers, trainees, scientists from historically excluded groups and immigrants.

Would love to see MIT take the same sort of action vis a vis high profile players in the Epstein files (beyond the Media Lab situation)

Brilliant.

I hear imagination in nonhuman animals is making news today! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...