my modest collection of flies with WIDE heads 🙇 a hammer-headed Richardia (Ecuador), a stalk-eyed Chaetodiopsis (Mozambique), a pointy-eyed Ophthalmoptera (Colombia), and an antlered Richardia (Colombia) why though? male-male competition? sexual selection? chime-in if you know!

Organelles do NOT have a single uniform pH. And if you think they must, because “protons diffuse fast,” this paper is for you. A thread on why that assumption is wrong; and what we found instead. 🧵 1/n

*First preprint from our lab* !!!!! How does the brain learn to anchor its internal sense of direction to the outside world? 🧭 led by Mark Plitt @markplitt.bsky.social & Dan Turner-Evans, w/ Vivek Jayaraman: “Octopamine instructs head direction plasticity” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Thread ⬇️

Our dispatch: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982225014691 on the recent Hydra volume EM paper by Zhang, Rafa Yuste and colleagues: #connectomics, without synapses https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982225013090 #neuroscience

🧠🪰 The adult Drosophila brain connectome now gives us a complete wiring diagram of ~140k neurons. But a wiring diagram alone isn’t understanding. How is this massive network organized? Our paper tackles that question by mapping community structure across the entire fly brain. 1/

A paper from my PhD lab is on Science! This is a really cool new way to utilize EM connectome datasets. Congrats to the team! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Love the caption of Fig. 3 in this impressive preprint: "A Goodsell-esque 3D orthogonal rendering of an IsoNet2-processed FIB-milled tomogram of C. reinhardtii" doi.org/10.64898/202... Since I am no expert, what does the cryoET community think of IsoNet? @cellarchlab.com doi.org/10.1038/s414...

In addition to the Comments linked to below, this news article ("Technology Feature") ties together perspectives from many additional workers in the field, including yours truly: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I had heard this was coming, but it’s still an amazing indication of how far we’ve come in the last decade or so!

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too! preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵 Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/9

Do you have 2D-to-3D image registration challenges? Let me know about them here forum.image.sc/t/toward-bet...

Our new paper showcasing molecular connectomics with pan-expansion microscopy is out in @natbiotech.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... This wonderful collaboration with @bewersdorflab.bsky.social was led by Ons M'Saad (now founder/CEO of Panluminate) and @allisonphysics.bsky.social. (1/5)

I will be co-teaching a summer course at Allen Institute on connectomics education please apply. Travel support, new connectomics data sets and learning directly from the scientists who built these datasets. Details here: alleninstitute.org/events/incor...

SO HAPPY to share our new paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social! Using volumetric EM, we found daily shifts in synapses, vesicles, and mitochondria that accompany neuronal remodeling, linking structural plasticity to changes in how s-LNv neurons influence their targets www.cell.com/current-biol...

This bring me back to one of my favorite anecdotes. In the early 1980s, a chemical physicist submitted a proposal to NIH that was assigned to NIGMS. It received a fairly poor score (~60th percentile). 7/13

How do cells adapt morphology to function? In a 🔥 preprint by @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social , with @dudinlab.bsky.social and @amyweeks.bsky.social , we identify a self-organizing single-cell morphology circuit that optimizes the feeding trap structure of the suctorian P. collini. 🧵 tinyurl.com/4k8nv926

Stop by Wangchu's poster Tuesday (11/18) afternoon to learn about circuit motifs supporting touch processing in the spinal cord.

Check these positions at @crick.ac.uk! It’s an outstanding opportunity to shape the way we can map neuronal circuits - and more broadly biological tissues.

If it’s your dream job to map the brain using light microscopy we should talk at #sfn25. Multiple opportunities. DMs open.

Our work on training biophysical models with Jaxley is now out in @natmethods.nature.com. Led by @deismic.bsky.social, with @philipp.hertie.ai, @ppjgoncalves.bsky.social & @jakhmack.bsky.social et al. Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For example, you can cut a huge gash and pull out most of the cytoplasm in Stentor and it will flow back in pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24378633/

Simultaneously a really nice portrait, time capsule, and economic manifesto. Mr. Grimes' accent is similar to ones I grew up around as a young boy in Jericho Vermont in the late 1970s. (Probably 5 dairy farms on our dirt road alone, back then; all gone now.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVja...

On the event of James Watson's death, I highly recommend this 2023 commentary from @matthewcobb.bsky.social and Nathaniel Comfort with crucial new insights into the discovery of the double helix. (And also check out Cobb's brand new biography of Francis Crick) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

That image is from 1961 and an idealization. Here is an actual trajectory of fixational eye movements. The dots are 2 ms apart. If a midget ganglion cell, with single-cone receptive field, fires at 100 Hz, then every spike reports about a different cone. How can we ever read anything?

In the spirit 👻 of Freaky Friday 🎃, here is a beautiful yet eery video of zebrafish retina development showing horizontal cells (🔵) finding their way out of the crowded amacrine (🟠) layer to settle beneath the photoreceptors. Happy #Halloween! 🎥: PhD student Rae Wong from the @nordenlab.bsky.social

Our paper is out! Take a look if you’re curious to see how we use expansion microscopy on diatoms ☺️ Very excited to keep using this!!

After 13 years in the US, I’ve made the difficult decision to leave. Having packed up everything and rethought about priorities, rather painstakingly, while I’m sad to leave the life I’ve made here, I’m also relieved that I won’t have to plan my life around immigration policies anymore.

What a time to be alive

Thank you so much @wellcometrust.bsky.social for supporting us to push the the limits of #X-ray #nanoimaging and #connectomics, and to make technology more broadly available to the scientific community! 🙏

Nice visualization. Maximize for full effect.

Edward Kravitz, a Harvard biochemist who proved GABA's inhibitory power, passed away last month. He will "be remembered for his humanity, for his social conscience and his desire to help those less fortunate than he,” says Ronald Harris-Warrick. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social bit.ly/479Ggmo

“Cellular Olympics” our catalog of freeky ultra fast cellular superhero’s is freely available “Ann Rev of microbiology” www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... This is a compilation of world’s fastest single cell organisms - enjoy this buffet of rare delightful protists with mind bending speeds. 🧪

New preprint from the lab: A reference brain for the clonal raider ant. With this resource, which is based on 40 individual brains, you can register and compare all kinds of samples in a common space. It comes with lots of detailed protocols and a user-friendly GUI. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Ingenious concept - light sheet on serial sections by photo-etching the expanded hydrogel, layer by layer. Photo-sectioning is quite slow, and the volumetric images are insanely large and complex, but the data look wonderful. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Final version of our paper on ciliary metachronal waves out now in Science Advances! doi.org/10.1126/scia... This is the main thesis work of my PhD student Rebecca Poon, who caught many #platnereis larvae and tirelessly ablated them with a laser. THREAD

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint: “Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous system” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We describe the #connectomics reconstruction and analysis of an entire adult #maleCNS #drosophila central nervous system. 1/10

And he's off! Well-deserved. :)

That's what we're saying people should try to do here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Interesting answer from Mark to a question I had about his piece on recurrence and active filtering in sensory cortex (at www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...)

Our group at the Allen Institute is recruiting a technician and postdoc to work on light microscopy-based connectomics. Please DM me or share with anyone you think may be interested in this NIH BRAIN CONNECTS funded project.

I love this piece! It shows the many ways a connectome can be put to use, AND the many complementary modalities that are needed, beyond the connectome, to answer real questions. And it makes me feel good about having helped to generate the thing. :)

Rendering this video was a nice test for #Blender3d, as the full set of bodies visible by the end involved almost 1.1 billion polygons. It all worked out well on our H200 cluster.

Exciting news for #drosophila #connectomics and #neuroscience enthusiasts: the Drosophila male central nervous system connectome is now live for exploration. Find out more at the landing page hosted by our Janelia FlyEM collaborators www.janelia.org/project-team....

📣 We’re hiring, please RT! Fully funded 4-year PhD position in our CVPD group at @informatikaehu.bsky.social! Research at the intersection of AI, deep learning & bioimage analysis. 🧠🔬 📅 Applications open Oct 6 (deadline: ~Oct 27) 📍 San Sebastian, Spain. 👉 cvpd.github.io/post/2025-09...

Case Western Reserve Department of Biology is hiring! We're recruiting for a tenure-track position focusing on eukaryotic microbiology, especially microbial/environment interactions. Please share widely: apply.interfolio.com/174456

I am so happy this perspective was published today, on Thanksgiving day!! 🥂🦃 I reflect on how keeping in touch with a field I left behind long ago continues to bring me joy and fulfillment.

Our new preprint!: arxiv.org/abs/2509.18399 Imaging fast glutamate or voltage sensors? New method to amplify electro-optical deflectors enables MHz line rate imaging. No new laser required. Led by @clwarkentin.bsky.social & @hari-shankar.bsky.social. MHz random-access imaging is in the works…

Ed Kravitz passed away yesterday. He was a remarkable scientist and mentor- brilliant, curious, creative, and kind. I am grateful to have learned from him. His legacy will endure through his science and through the many people he inspired. We will miss you, Ed.

Per NSF staff, the solicitation was cleared in the system, and should have posted automatically on the next business day. So it is being manually held—there's not some kind of logistical issue. Unclear what the rationale for this is.