Your annual reminder that the most revealing difference between Irish and Scottish Gaelic is definitely in the words for December: Mí na Nollag (Month of Christmas) in Ireland, and An Dubhlachd (the Blackness) in Scotland. So once again may I wish you all a lovely Blackness.

Still amazing that a specific language impairment can be mapped to a mendelian single gene mutation. Reading about this discovery of a "language gene" is what first got me interested in biology, genetics and ultimately neuroscience!

Enjoyed this gig. Or as they're known in the UK: Maudlin-a Bay...

"The connectome is like a road map."

Really enjoyed this great book telling the story (and experiments) behind our understanding of the hypothalamus, neuron coding, and 'wireless' neurochemical signaling (oxytocin, prolactin etc)... mitpress.mit.edu/978026255193...

Some very nice 50 year old immunostaining that showed for the first time that Substance P was in sensory neurons and their central terminals. Only three pictures, published in Science! www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...

"A distributed coding logic for thermosensation and inflammatory pain" Proud to have been involved in this! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Turns out, two of pain’s most famous messengers — Substance P and CGRPα — might not be so essential after all. Mice missing both still felt pain just fine, challenging decades of assumptions about how pain signals travel. buff.ly/ypISrtx

In science, we don’t give negative data nearly enough love. Showing with genetic precision that CGRP and Substance P aren’t needed for different kinds of acute and chronic pain? That’s huge.

I'm shook!! www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Come join our lab as Postdoctoral Fellow! The project will investigate the maturation of spinal circuits and their plasticity within chronic widespread pain states. Apply here: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... until 11th April. @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @uclnpp.bsky.social @jobrxiv.bsky.social

This study challenges traditional views of pain biology by showing that deleting Substance P and CGRPα does not affect acute or chronic pain in mice, underscoring the complexity of finding effective pain targets. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...