Let's learn about some medical research that just left Earth on Artemis II, bound for the silver sphere in the sky. It's AVATAR, but it doesn't involve blue aliens. It stands for "A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response" & it looks like this USB drive-sized device.

POV: Watching NASA TV Artemis II pre-launch coverage www.nasa.gov

Submit your abstract until May 15 for the "Monitoring Molecules in Neuroscience" conference in Amsterdam (Sept 7-10, 2026) to get the latest update on in-vivo neuro-methods from a brilliant lineup of keynote and panel speakers: monitoringmolecules.org/invited-spea... Please repost!

As a reminder: I am hiring a postdoc and at least one research assistant for a project on VTA circuits and cognitive function that starts this summer. Get in touch if interested!

No Kings yesterday

We are estimating more than 200,000 people at the flagship No Kings rally in the Twin Cities. #NoKings

Inbox: Trump is announcing the new PCAST membership. It is dominated by CEOs and includes only one academic scientist, John Martinis.

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...

Incredibly proud of this paper led by @ossamaghenissa.bsky.social and @mathiasgua.bsky.social titled Basolateral 'Amygdala Astrocytes Encode Anxiety States'. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... 🧵 below

#neuroscience #trainees Call for Nominations for the NINDS Landis Award for Outstanding Mentorship! This year, NINDS is seeking nominations for established faculty mentors who are more than 20 years from the start of their first TT position. Nominations are due 4/24! www.nih.gov/challenges/n...

Our article examining the effects of chronic #GLP-1 receptor agonist (#semaglutide #ozempic) treatment on the incentive motivational value of a small #food reward and the cue that predicts it is now out in Psychopharmacology. Open access article 👇 link.springer.com/10.1007/s002...

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

1/8 New preprint alert! How are signals from the heart encoded in the brain? What could be the functional implications of cardioception? We found that neurons in the posterior insular cortex are precisely tuned to heartbeats, and that this cardio-insular coupling supports emotion coding in mice.

The CANDLab at Yale is hiring a new full-time research assistant! Excellent opportunity to gain post-bacc experience before applying to PhD programs in child and adolescent clinical psychology and neuroscience. 🧠 candlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/downloads/YaleCANDLab_RA_2026.pdf

UMN give me 15 million dollars. I will give you several better slogans for free and then disperse the 15 million to important research and educational efforts that are actually part of your mission.

Grateful to receive a ✨K99/R00✨ after much uncertainty! Still worried about scientific funding and the future of our work. Excited to reveal how estrogen modulates neuromodulator and neural dynamics, de novo protein synthesis, and temporal discounting with a novel task the rats are already crushing.

The Pentagon is requesting the equivalent of $1,500 per American household to fund President Trump's unauthorized, unconstitutional, and unpopular war. Congress must say no.

Excited to share my postdoc work is out in @natneuro.nature.com today! We examined how the brain enables social groups to collectively coordinate their behavior in the face of environmental challenge ❄️🐭🐭🐭🐭❄️ : www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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

Very proud to share our most recent work, now out in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social 🎉🎉🎉 We show that brief noradrenergic signals in the orbitofrontal cortex, triggered by surprising rewards, support reversal learning and predict how quickly animals adapt. www.cell.com/cell-reports...

BREAKING: @delauro.house.gov announces at a House Oversight hearing with NIH director Jay Bhattacharya that OMB approved the agency's apportionment last night. That means the agency should have access to its appropriated funds — 42 days after its spending bill passed.

Are you or someone you know graduating soon and looking for an exciting Post Bac opportunity? Come join us at Dartmouth!

Update 3/16: A very small handful of NIH apportionments have come through — with big exceptions. The ones that OMB has approved are all Congressionally mandated/earmarked. The broad discretionary funds that fund most NIH grants not yet been authorized. (1/2)

The NIH budget was basically the same in 2025 vs. 2024. This massive decline in health research funding was driven by *administrative* choices.

Snooping through the lab network drive for #FluorescenceFriday images and came across this stunning image from UAB master's student Caroline Fiore. 🟡 is mu opioid receptor protein in the rat brain in a coronal section that includes the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum.

What I find interesting about this line is that it’s an admission in order for this to happen, they need you to lose your ordinary intelligence that you already have. This is why they want to get into schools. They want kids to lose basic capacity so that they have to rent it forever.

Too excited about this image to wait for #FluorescenceFriday 🔬🤩👩‍🔬. Serotonin neurons 🟣 in the raphe nucleus along the midline of the human brainstem 🧠, flanked bilaterally by norepinephrine neurons 🔴 in locus coeruleus. Image credit to @ishbeldelrosario.bsky.social @svitlanabach.bsky.social

$1 BILLION a day for a war. That same $1B could instead could in the US: - Fund ~40% of the U.S. HIV treatment program - Feed ~5.6 million people for a month through SNAP - Equal ~¼ of the entire federal homelessness budget Every. Single. Day.

Check out our latest research drop! We show BLA dopamine signaling encodes the emotional weight of sensory transitions, but not the associative strength or value of stimuli. These signals dynamically rescale when the learning context changes: "this matters most!" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

New preprint 🚨🧠🔬 @sophiepeterson.bsky.social + @margole.bsky.social dissect the roles of 2 major OFC subcortical pathways in context-dependent reward prediction. TLDR: OFC→CDS: critical for hierarchical gating of predictions. OFC→MDT: more modest role, possibly limiting non-hierarchical predictions

Orbitofrontal circuits for context-gated reward predictions https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.05.709962v1

Anyways.

Preliminary Pentagon cost estimate of the war in Iran is $1 BILLION a day. So far.

This is why simply passing a budget that isn't a 37% cut is not sufficient. This is why "the extent to which funding was restored" cannot be the measure of success. www.sciencefriday.com/segments/slo...

IMPORTANT---IMPORTANT---IMPORTANT NIH is seeking input for the NIH-wide Strategic Plan. Open to everyone but Registration is Required! Your chance to listen and get your 2 or more cents in. grants.nih.gov/news-events/...

Excited to share our new paper: We uncover a locus coeruleus→amygdala circuit linking β-adrenergic signaling to transcription regulation in defined amygdala cells during memory reconsolidation—+ stress or elevated noradrenergic signaling at recall can strengthen memory. www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Surprise! The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post is against my 5% billionaire wealth tax. I wonder why? If enacted, Bezos would owe $12 billion in taxes, and an average family of 4 would receive a $12,000 direct payment. Poor Jeff would be left with just $224 billion to survive.

UAB is recruiting neuroscience faculty at two different levels - come join our vibrant neuroscience community!

The US is broadly a country that likes to invest in science. Even among Republicans this is true. But we are governed by an administration that is opposed to science, and is using procedural tools to limit spending and increase political control over the process.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers. The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

The richest man owns X. The second and third richest men control Google. The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?

🚨📃New Wassum Lab Paper 📃🚨 Out today, Melissa Malvaez, Nick Griffin, Andrea Suarez & team discovered that dopamine can enable reward predictions to shape how we pursue reward. Surprisingly, we find that dopamine can constrain instrumental reward seeking. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/8... 🧵👇🏻

America needs a Surgeon General who follows the science, not trending conspiracies and pseudoscience. Tell your Senator to vote against Casey Means as our nation’s doctor!

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...

One of the greatest bollard walks in history. #WorldBollardAssociation

This is more than 10.5 NIH budgets. Absolutely outrageous when they gutted NSF and destroyed USAID. For what?

New Special Issue out in #AddictionNeuroscience edited by @talialerner.bsky.social on dopamine circuitry and heterogeneity in addiction with articles by @daylab.bsky.social, Tom Hnasko, @mtorregrossa1.bsky.social, and Awatramani Rajeshwar check it out! www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

@niallw.bsky.social pointed out an error in a preprint of ours that contained a fabricated citation. The cause: we used Claude to fix an arxiv upload / compile error. It decided the best way to do that was to remove an actual citation and replace it with a fabricated one. bsky.app/profile/ben....