Awesome work by lead author Lauren Burgeno et al: Dopamine evoked by non-contingent cues increases over cocaine use, producing greater cue reactivity; whereas dopamine evoked by contingent cues decreases over cocaine use, producing escalation of drug consumption. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Wow, a Long Island jury awarded $112 Million to 674 immigrants who were unlawfully held by county police so they could be handed over to ICE

Folks at SfN come see the first Fraser Lab poster ever at FF6 on Tuesday Nov 18, 8am. Serena Miller has oodles of data to share on a new direction for us. Also, that day happens to be my birthday so you have to come say hi or else

All the artists showing work at #SfN25, now with pictures! #sciart

#SfN25 attendees - make sure to head to the posters when you get to the meeting on Saturday afternoon (V7-V11: Gretchen, Megan, Margaret, Louisa, Bella) and Sunday morning (KK17: Micaela) to hear about our work. We're printing the posters now and they look rad.

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #blueprint 1/7

Want a party that actually fights back? Run for office. We’ll help you. runforwhat.net

Spent 8 months organizing a massive Brain Day outreach event 🧠✨ We had ~240 faculty & trainee volunteers develop cool neuroscience activities about their research 🔬🧬 Over 300 community members joined us to play games, win prizes, learn, and see themselves as scientists 👩🏾‍🔬🧫

Have been obsessed with Mamdani’s graphic design and now you can have it for yourself!!

How do VTA DA neurons sculpt downstream representations to reinforce actions? VERY excited about our new preprint (by Alex Pan Vazquez & @czimmerman.bsky.social )

Sigh. NIH normally sends several hundred scientists to the SFN annual meeting to learn, exchange info, come up with new ideas, and advance science. (The exchange of ideas is the very core of the scientific enterprise.) This year, no one from NIH will attend due to the gov't implosion.

8 high level positions at NIH posted including 6 institute director positions (NIMH, NIGMS, NICHD, NIDCR, NHGRI, NLM). Only open for 2 weeks (applications due November 21). Application materials include a) CV b) vision statement c) a photocopy of doctoral degree. hr.nih.gov/careers/open...

Apparently the postings are up for several NIH director positions. Deadlines between 11/14 and 11/21. hr.nih.gov/careers/care...

Trump goes to court to starve kids should be a headline everywhere today

disappointed that @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social is implicitly endorsing the use of LLMs to replace scientific thought @richardsever.bsky.social this is a short-sighted move and a net negative for science

As a neuroscientist, I’d suggest there is a profound disconnect between what *some* computer scientists think is representative of “intelligence”, cognitive ability, or descriptions of consciousness from some in AI work. LLMs are not how neural systems process information, nor how brains function.

lol

the senate appropriations bill explicitly limits MYF while the congressional budget doesn't. Making sure the language in the senate appropriations bill ends up in the final budget seems like an clear goal tp push our representatives on

Warning. ⚠️ If you are writing an NSF GRFP, new this year, you need official transcripts to apply. Beware. They will not review applications without official transcripts. ‼️

Reminder, do not only work on #NIHGrant study section reviews with the online forms. Keep a document with your critiques. Cancelled meetings are removed from IAR view and potentially are unrecoverably scrubbed.

Aid cuts are devastating health services in Africa The sudden dismantling of USAID has led to more death and disease www.economist.com/middle-east-...

🚨BREAKING: The Department of Homeland Security quietly formalized sweeping changes to a federal immigration database, turning it into a national “voter verification” tool that appears to sidestep federal privacy protections and will make it easier to remove large numbers of voters from the rolls.

Nothing like a good cry over my morning coffee as Wei heads out 💔. The US is crazy to not do everything possible to keep and treasure people like her. I know she will do wonderful things where ever she lands - this is our loss

ATTN: Two faculty positions are available in my department (neuroscience) at the University of Minnesota. This is a general search with no topic focus. November 20th application deadline. Apply here: hr.umn.edu/jobs/Find-Job Assistant Prof job code: 364920 Associate/Full Prof job code: 364921

If you're heading to #SfN25 in a couple weeks, pop in early to the posters on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning to see a bunch of cool unpublished work from the lab.

Stoked to see our study out in final form! Big kudos to @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social for driving this along for the past 5 years.

We are hiring for a PhD-level Staff Scientist to join our teams in the Translational Neuroscience Division @lieberinstitute.bsky.social. This is an exciting opportunity to work at the intersection of human 🧠 neuroanatomy and molecular neuroscience recruiting.paylocity.com/recruiting/j...

direct relief is legit, and because they work in the region already, they can scale up more easily. please donate if you can

Excited to share that my co–first author paper has been accepted in @nature.com 🎉 We show that small molecules binding at the GPCR-transducer interface can predictably switch G protein selectivity - paving the way for structure-guided, pathway-selective drug design. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Now online @nature.com! Want to change the consequences of receptor activation? Small molecules binding the GPCR-transducer interface change G protein subtype preference in predictable ways, enabling rational drug design 💥 So many new possibilities! 🧪🧠🟦 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

ATTN neuroscience PhD prospectives! University of Minnesota Graduate Program in Neuroscience www.neuroscience.umn.edu is hosting a virtual open house event on Oct 30th, register here: forms.gle/wz7e3UVdsyNi... Also say hi at upcoming grad fairs. Learn about the program & meet students & faculty!

One of my tomatillo plants went off this year - 5 feet tall and around 150 tomatillos. Look at the amazing root system it grew.

They can't pass a budget but they did ensure that my health insurance premiums as an NC state employee rose 300% (literally)

That’s the other thing that baffles me about AI and creative writing, actually. The work IS the joy for me. I don’t want to be able to snap my fingers and have a completed “product.” I want to be transformed by the process. I’m an author but I do this because I enjoy the rigor of being a writer.

Dismantling the Institutional Review Board (IRB), that oversees all human subjects research, is bad. Really bad.

😍 Boston, you are beautiful. #NoKings

Minneapolis is showing up and showing out. #NoKings

Martin is fall maxing

Out today at Neuron, our experiments show that frontal cortical representation of economic variables is jointly determined by spatial organization and downstream connectivity of neurons, revealing a structured, multi-scale code for economic variables. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Seeing lots of reactions to this compelling paper - showing VTA dopamine is linked to cue and outcome induced behavioral reactions: www.nature.com/articles/s41... I have some thoughts…

Check out our latest, online now at @sfnjournals.bsky.social www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

"Delegation to artificial intelligence can increase dishonest behaviour" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congratulations to Rebekah Rashford and team, it’s finally out! We tagged early life stress-activated neurons in VTA and found that chromatin those cells was much more open, even into adulthood, and that open CREs predicted greater gene expression in response to stress later in life rdcu.be/eLa9z

🚨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! 🧵

ATTN neuroscience PhD prospectives! University of Minnesota Graduate Program in Neuroscience www.neuroscience.umn.edu is hosting a virtual open house event on Oct 30th, register here: forms.gle/wz7e3UVdsyNi... Also say hi at upcoming grad fairs. Learn about the program & meet students & faculty!

There is now strong, converging evidence that OFC neurons signal expected uncertainty. We manipulated probabilistic outcomes, and Zhang & Zhou changed reward delay and magnitude, finding OFC neurons dynamically modulate outcome-coding sensitivity based on variance www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Really excited to have this paper accepted for publication now in @natcomms.nature.com - stay tuned for the final version and huge congrats to @margestelzner.bsky.social!!!!

“CDC will have lost its ability to detect outbreaks and respond to them. It will no longer be able to track diseases, in America and around the globe. That includes infectious threats like flu, foodborne illnesses, and Ebola, as well as chronic diseases and injuries.” time.com/7325192/cdc-...