Here's the full lineup of the Art of Neuroscience exhibitors at #SfN25 in San Diego #sciart 🧠

A loss of trust in information is just as bad as a loss of trustworthy information.

Nothing beats the tiny ceremony of clicking and dragging a project from the "my papers in progress" folder to the "my papers finished" folder

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?

These are great!

I beg your pardon?

A very cool series of studies on how olfactory receptor neurons find their target projection neurons in the developing fly brain. My fav part is how the partner-finding process gets reduced from a 3d to a 2d to effectively a 1d search.

Mixed feelings: a) Morris-Lecar models were my intro to bifurcation analysis! But b) last time I taught Morris-Lecar, a (theory) student did ask "but like... does anyone actually use this now?" so maybe a reminder is due. (Bif analysis was a big part of www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1..., for one!)

What a time to be alive

Grant: due Tuesday Reviews: due last week Brain: "hey I think I found a fix for that problem your undergrad is stuck on, let's code it up real quick!"

Check out this exciting new tool from @ajboender.bsky.social - An aav based CRISPR-Cas9 strategy to knockdown dopamine receptors. Works in mice, voles and hamsters. It was a fun collaboration. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In a grim world, some good things continue, such as the annual @princetonupress.bsky.social 70% off sale. press.princeton.edu/sale/70-off

doi.org/10.1126/scie... This seems rad: overexpressing FruM in a set of proboscis-motorneuron-projecting neurons makes melanogaster males add food-sharing to their courtship repertoire. It is fascinating to see evolutionary shifts in behavior be tied so concretely to shifts in brain development!

We couldn't not rate this classic early DAG by our beloved collective granddagy, Sewall Wright. 14/10. Ten for the DAG, plus one for each cute guinea-pig node. From Wright (1920) "The Relative Importance of Heredity and Environment in Determining the Piebald Pattern of Guinea-Pigs"

The bat island paper lives!

Come be my newest colleague! Scripps neuro is an energetic and supportive department, and uniquely benefits from proximity to our intimidatingly awesome chem and drug discovery programs. Happy to chat about my experiences here so far!

The number of academic software tools in the world only grows with time, and learning new ones is daunting. Here, my postdoc @rgast.bsky.social spoke about PyRates, a model translator that lets you study dynamical systems with a whole suite of tools built in Python, Julia, Matlab, and Fortran.

Weissbourd lab still wins the prize for best lab swag (also this is how I pick my collaborators)

The NIH has awarded a $14.2M Director’s Transformative Research Award to a team led by Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist @ardemp.bskyverified.social, Prof. @liye-tsri.bsky.social and Assoc. Prof. @xinjin.bsky.social to map interoception and build the first atlas of this hidden sixth sense.

PS- Having never worked on pain before, the background reading for this project was really fascinating. For example, this abstract from P.D. Wall's 1979 "On the relation of injury to pain". (But given Wall's opinion on theorists studying pain perhaps the feeling wouldn't be mutual.)

Brain area linked to chronic pain discovered — offering hope for treatments @nature.com @betleylab.bsky.social @antihebbiann.bsky.social @nitsangoldstein.bsky.social @pennngg.bsky.social @scripps.edu @pittanesthesiology.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Finally out: our recent work with Nick Betley is a view into how the brain reshapes its behavior in the face of competing survival needs- and also a potential angle on treatment targets for enduring pain. A brief rundown... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

we are almost booked! Only a handful of openings left. So, please do attend if you register. Also, here is the poster!

Attending #SfN2025 in San Diego☀️? Don’t miss the Dorris Neuroscience Center Symposium at @scripps.edu, happening right before the meeting. A great lineup of speakers to kick off your SfN week. Plan your trip accordingly and register for free here: www.eventbrite.com/e/dorris-neu... Please amplify!

A Peacock Fly (Callopistromyia sp.) showing off the beautiful display on those wings! They strut around waving their wings and doing a little wiggle, an amazing behavior right in your own backyard. #Invert #Diptera #bugsky 🌿 #entomology

Really cool story - bird species from across the world make the same sound to warn against cuckoos, and they can even understand each other. Feeds into ideas Darwin had about the origin of language! www.newscientist.com/article/2498...

When you live in an arid climate and your colleague is collecting VNO stimuli

A maternal-fetal PIEZO1 incompatibility as a barrier to Neanderthal-modern human admixture https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.29.679417v1

We’re hiring! My new Gut–Brain Axis Lab at Northwestern is looking for a Research Technologist 2 to help build the lab and explore how the nervous system shapes gut health and disease. 🔬 Apply here: myhr.northwestern.edu/psp/hrnu/EMP...

After 12 days over 3000 people have signed up for the MABe 2025 competition, and almost 300 have made submissions! If you'd like to join in, kagglers have shared a K-nearest-neighbors baseline notebook that gets a respectable F1 score of 0.39 across labs: www.kaggle.com/code/taylors...

Come be my colleague! Lots of exciting science, fantastic students and supportive colleagues. Emory University Biology Department tenure-track assistant professor position in neuroscience. share.google/945Jko4W1MTA.... Please feel free to retweet and share widely.

It continues to be weird to me that adult CNS neurons have a single, nonmotile cilium just hanging out, maybe acting as a site for receptor expression. Like a little extra antenna that we all just ignore in our drawings of neurons. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

When a typo in your Google search leads to new and exciting philosophical positions

Whether you think limiting student visas to 4 years is a good or bad thing, please comment. Be heard.

I'm returning home to the Columbia Theory Center for a seminar tomorrow at 11:30am. Come say hi! ctn.zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu

Thank you Paul @braininspired.bsky.social for inviting me to talk about my path into deep brain structures and survival behaviors! This was a fun experience.

In this episode of “Brain Inspired,” @braininspired.bsky.social talks to @antihebbiann.bsky.social, who argues that molecular signaling, like protein expression, controls innate brain responses to varying environmental contexts. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

If you are looking to get into the MABe challenge, there are some great notebooks popping up on Kaggle: Exploring the data: www.kaggle.com/code/antonin... Videos of pose + annotations: www.kaggle.com/code/kriyeng... And a baseline entry using k-nearest neighbors: www.kaggle.com/code/ambrosm...

GPT says: "Rodent Action Tracking Across Tasks: Objects, Utilities, Levers, Locomotion, Interaction, and Exploration — a mouse “kitchen” benchmark for dense, sequential, ethological behavior."

...more like a dense foragy/approach-avoidy mix of Josh's FOMO, SWC's AEON, some closed-loop stim control, some risky decision with shelter-seeking /-building, some sequential goal / spatial decision, some digging, some exploring. And yes: difficult. The acronym would have to be RATATOULLIE.

For last 10 years - we have worked with thousands of organizations around the world helping support them in integrating foldscope programs. To bring in a new cohort of organizations - we are re-launching “fast and curious” 2025 edition - apply and get a Foldscope trainer and Foldscopes for free!

MABe community notebooks continue to grow www.kaggle.com/competitions... the animations of tracking data will always be my favorite

One of the things I really like about Kaggle is that people there are super into sharing their analysis notebooks along the way. Less than a day online, and already there are eight notebooks to explore! www.kaggle.com/competitions...

And we are live! Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️ Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions! www.kaggle.com/competitions...

And we are live! Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️ Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions! www.kaggle.com/competitions...

In the early days of quantum chemistry, before we had computers to calculate the shapes of electron orbitals, one man invented a mechanical machine that simulated their shapes. My latest column for @chemistryworld.com www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/the-...

Nature Reviews Neuroscience has turned 25! To mark the anniversary, the October issue features an expanded selection of Comments and Journal Clubs, and our first World View and Tools of the Trade articles. Check out the issue here: www.nature.com/nrn/volumes/... #neuroscience #neuroskyence

Hello friends- some exciting news coming in the next day or so for folks who work on machine learning for animal behavior. Stay tuned! 🐁🐀🖱️

New funding opportunity from the BRAIN Initiative! Applications due Oct 28! grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...