The cell that wasn't there grist.org/science/nitr...

This profile of the artist on the Challenger expedition and his contributions to protistology was a very nice Saturday morning read. Though with some irksome bits...

"This is the soundest idea you've floated in the whole thread — and I mean that as a real assessment, not a nicety." Wow, thanks Claude! 🙄 In other news, in the next few days I plan to try GPT5.6 Sol. Fable is completely off-limits for biologists, even for totally innocuous work.

Revised preprint on mitochondria in central brain of Drosophila now online: much new analysis + details of largest resource for analyzing neuronal mitochondria generated so far, with ~6M mitochondria, >20k neurons, >5k cell types. Much thanks to all coauthors, enjoy! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Here are my slides for #fens2026 “A versatile and affordable array tomography workflow” https://jekelylab.codeberg.page/FENS_Array_Tomography_Barcelona_July2026.html#/title-slide for the 'Expanding Horizons: Array Tomography in Neuroscience for All' […] [Original post on biologists.social]

SHOW US YOUR BRAINS! Enter your beautiful brain images and videos into the Annual BRAIN Initiative Photo and Video Contest! Submission closes soon, and all are eligible to enter! 🧪🧠🎨 www.2026brainconference.com/event/44a17f...

Annual killifish continue to surprise us: they make neutrophils before almost every other cell type, even before gastrulation. Neutrophils usually arise from the lateral plate mesoderm (forming in cyan), but in killifish they are already patrolling around the embryo in gold. tinyurl.com/killiphil

My department, Neurobiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington (nbio.uw.edu), is hiring a new tenure-track Assistant Professor, application deadline 09/30/26. It's a broad search — molecular to organismal, all of neuroscience/physiology/biophysics welcome. apply.interfolio.com/187735

Terrible news. The need for independent, non-profit science journalism only ever seems to grow.

Job alerts! Senior Image Data Scientist (x2!) and Senior Scientific Software Developer - Bioimage Informatics at the Center for Bioimage Informatics at St Jude Children's Research Hospital. These seem pretty nice. forum.image.sc/t/opportunit...

The Battle over the Constitution Has Spread to American Science. I'm out in the @theatlantic.com today about the new OMB proposed rule. It's just the longtime agenda of the the Supreme Court. US science and cancer cures now all depend on us picking up a fight with the Roberts Court.

I am a neurodivergent neuroscientist. My bipolar brain brings struggle but it also helps me think off-the-map ideas. To help others who are similarly different, I co-founded the Neurodiversity Innovation Center for Excellence in Neuroscience (niceinneuro.org) with Leah Blankenship and Lila Kaye.

Looking for folks to study skilled movement across neurotypical/disease models (inc. autism), circuit resilience, smart closed-loop neuromodulation, or deer mice. We use high-density recordings, optogenetics, & dynamical systems analysis in a well-resourced, collaborative environment. DM or email.

Meet Eyewire II: a new connectomic resource for the mouse retina. ~1 mm² of retina at nanometer resolution, with synapses and circuits of ca. 100,000 neurons, plus visual responses from the ~400 neurons shown in the video! Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202... Data: eyewire.ai 🧠📈 🧠💻🧪 #VisionScience

Now published - the #BANC! A full central nervous system (CNS) connectome of a limbed animal at single-synapse resolution, enabling us to follow sensory-motor arcs and understand how the CNS controls the body. rdcu.be/fncjS. #neuroscience. Video by @quorumetrix.bsky.social 1/18

Better vitrification = better cryo-ET. We've opened an RFA for two-year grants to advance vitrification techniques for biological samples—welcoming applications from researchers in heat transfer, cryogenics, and materials science. Apply here: bit.ly/4uip6eJ

Tend to agree. Work by us & @kdmicheva.bsky.social showed that a strangely high fraction (~50%) of myelin in upper layers of cortex wraps short lengths of fast-spiking, parvalbumin-positive basket cells. We suggested it was to support their axons, rather than to speed up spike time arrival.

Nice piece in @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social about our @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social! I say a few things in it.

We want to hear from you about your experience using the OME-Zarr ecosystem and how we can improve it! We are joining the upcoming OME-NGFF community call to introduce ourselves to the community and to collect your feedback (May 26, 9AM and 5PM CET). See you there! forum.image.sc/t/join-us-fo...

And now it's out! Happy that PNAS selected for the cover this SEM image snapped by @samjlord.bsky.social, one of the most evocative visualizations of Euplotes that I have ever encountered. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Stay tuned for what is shaping up to be some fascinating follow-up in the lab...

I'm looking forward to this upcoming "Wild Thinking" workshop, organized by @jekely.biologists.social.ap.brid.gy and colleagues! www.cos.uni-heidelberg.de/en/wild-thin...

Great opportunity: The Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology @linmd.bsky.social + University @uni-magdeburg.de Magdeburg are hiring a Full Professor/Research Group Head in Integrative Neurobiology, especially computation, theory neurotech! Apply by 29 May 2026 ncloud.lin-magdeburg.de/s/cnSj2Ys5YE...

If you're still a connectome-hater, I suggest you consider this work. (converted me from connectome-agnostic to connectome-curious)

Heartbreaking to hear Sean Eddy (@cryptogenomicon.bsky.social) talk about how arbitrary cuts to his lab's NIH funding have decimated his lab Sean's lab has built computational tools that enable so much important biology research also quotes by @jeremymberg.bsky.social www.npr.org/2026/05/11/n...

We still have a few places to register for our "Heidelberg Wild Thinking Workshop - The organism, its self and its environment: from philosophy to physics." 19-20 May 2026, Heidelberg https://www.cos.uni-heidelberg.de/en/wild-thinking-workshop-1 […] [Original post on biologists.social]

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.

My institution @pittophthalmology.bsky.social is offering a Hearing and Vision Sciences Graduate Certificate Program to train the next generation of hearing and vision scientists in basic and translational research: www.hearingandvision.pitt.edu

📣 Exciting news: my lab is moving to the Krembil Institute at the University of Toronto’s University Health Network in Fall 2026. We’ll be recruiting for all roles, so reach out if you’re interesting in joining us to study spinal circuits for sensorimotor control www.levine-lab.org

In conclusion, an obligatory reminder that the president's budget request is often rejected by Congress—but that it is an important document of White House _intent_ which matters more and more as parts of the federal research funding process leave the traditional legislative route.

Our paper is now out in Science! Super excited to share our discovery that #mitochondria #pearling is the elusive mechanism driving the regular distribution and inheritance of #mtDNA nucleoids 🧬 [1/6]

#paper: Drying tissue samples enhances contrast in X-ray phase contrast imaging while largely preserving ultrastructure. 🧠🔬 doi.org/10.1107/S160... @safekhan.bsky.social @andreas-t-schaefer.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk @embl.org @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social @esrf.fr @uclnpp.bsky.social

The form is short. You can submit anonymously. Even one sentence counts. "I want NIH to fund the best science based on merit, not politics" is a valid comment. Deadline: May 16, 2026 grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Writing out a conversation I’ve been having a lot at this conference: Things in US science are far, far worse than people know. Far worse than even other scientists know. 1/

Check out the newest work from our, from Fabricio Nicola @fabricionicola.bsky.social on mouse jumping and spinal cell types. Excellent collab with @vulcnethologist.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Friday, 13:15 (Poster 2-048) at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #cosyne2026: @allierced.bsky.social and @lappalainenjk.bsky.social present how they made GNNs learn interpretable circuit models from neural activity. Code: saalfeldlab.github.io/flyvis-gnn/

this was a good interview

A central somatotopic map of the fly leg supports spatially targeted grooming https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.27.708590v1

Join us in building foundational datasets and models for microscopy with @jakobtroidl.bsky.social and many others AI Engineer Pre-Training: lnkd.in/eyEEV5nm AI Engineer Post-Training: lnkd.in/eShVQ3y9 Data Engineer Data: lnkd.in/eCvm58xH Data Engineer Pipelines: lnkd.in/ec6qGJkX ai.hhmi.org

Excited to share our new preprint exploring how Paramecium achieves diverse flow functions, i.e. feeding and swimming, simultaneously. This work was spearheaded by our ExM expert, PhD student Daphne Laan @daphnelaan.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Great to see our paper on light-intensity dependent swimming patterns in #Chlamydomonas out now in Phys Rev Lett. as an Editors' suggestion! With a nice commentary by @philipcball.bsky.social. Chlamy actively modulate the beat planes of their #cilia! journals.aps.org/prl/abstract... #protistsonsky

From @bdpedigo.bsky.social: a super efficient, highly reliable, and very generalizable method for mesh structure classification, applied here to spine detection across basically every synapse onto a cell in the MICRoNS dataset.

If your imaging system has poorly characterized constant distortions leading to chromatic aberration, shoddy stitching, or false measurements (the answer is likely yes), you may want to give this tool a try. Native installers for Linux, Mac, Win under Releases github.com/saalfeldlab/...

As money woes hit the University of Chicago, the oldest private marine laboratory in the United States is striking out on its own. https://scim.ag/4trAN3l

Please spread the word: We invite applications to a two-week Computational Biology workshop in Singapore, June 14-27. This NSF-funded workshop brings together 16-20 US grad students with international peers. Apply by March 21: compbioasia.net 🧵 Details below:

But, as they say, there is no time like the present [OK, maybe the 1930s if you want to nitpick] But, with some data wrangling, my first NSF Funding Curves! 2/3

beautiful protist ExM images here from @dudinlab.bsky.social and @gautamdey.bsky.social

Want to come do a postdoc with us? We’re interested in how sensorimotor function is carried out by the cells and circuits of the spinal cord. We have an awesome team, lots of cool techniques, and we’re open to new ideas/approaches/connections. Get in touch!

I usually hesitate to post obituaries but this one, of my literary agent, Georges Borchardt, born in 1928, is so unusual that it deserves to be widely shared. An incredible 20th century life www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/o...

Our CytoTape work is published today in Nature @nature.com! CytoTape is a genetically encoded, flexible, intracellular protein tape recorder for spatiotemporally scalable and multiplexed recording of cellular activities continuously across weeks in vitro and in vivo. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Another bit on eye-sight: I've put together a plot on visual acuity in birds and mammals. Interestingly, corvids seem to have acuity that is a lot better than expected for their eye size/passerines in general. Is anyone aware of structural peculiarities of corvid eyes that might explain that? 🧪🪶