Really enjoyed this story about maintaining your sailboat (and your sanity). "Sometimes maintenance involves shooting the shark." books.worksinprogress.co/book/mainten...

0.00003 foot tall xmas tree from a Drosophila flight steering muscle 🎄 image by @anne-sustar.bsky.social

Back from post-conference adventures in Bad Tölz. Takeaways: a) Bavarian are serious about their outdoor sports, b) I was not prepared to meet a whole-body relic at the local Catholic high school

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known" - Bertrand Russell, 1976. Time-lapse video of Vampyrella lateritia eating Spirogyra algae from Science Source/Oliver Skibbe. 🦠

🚨 We are recruiting a full-time Research Programmer to push forward several exciting machine learning projects in the lab! Work on computational behavior and joint neural/behavior models. Start date flexible, can be a pre-grad-school position or longer term. recruiting2.ultipro.com/SCR1003TSRI/...

It's finally out! Our paper on optogenetic interrogation of the lateral line: www.cell.com/iscience/ful... This one involved a lot of sweat and tears, and it was a real tour de force. It was also the last paper we got to write with Jim, so it's a special one (and hence, the tears).

An important dining etiquette tip: no matter your head angle, the ears must always point up. Auriculomotor reflex?

en*K*ephalins act on Delta opioid receptors and *D*ynorphins act on Kappa opioid receptors, and this is how you know the pain field is full of psychopaths

It's also just distracting because usually the image has some weirdness to it, and it doesn't tend to add explanatory value. So if you're just adding them for ambience or to represent a generic concept, just use a regular picture.

Neighbor was a hospital admin and put my resume on the pile, got a HS summer job in a glial stem cell lab and was hooked. Parents thought college was largely a scam and there was no $ in biology, but ok'd biomedical engineering. Fell in love with mathematical modeling of biology and that was that!

Check out the newest Editors' (that would be me and Eunjoon Kim) Choice issue in Current Opinion in Neurobiology. Superbly guest edited by Stephen Liberles and @zknight.bsky.social >20 review articles on Interoception www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

This Scripps place sounds like a pretty cool spot to work

NIH extends the Oct-Nov deadlines to Dec 8, 2025 drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/11/24/n...

Tenure track position in motor control at Northeastern University northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/...

Hello New York! Giving a Swartz seminar at NYU today, come say hi! as.nyu.edu/departments/...

Ive seen this work from Prof Liqun Luo’s presented a few times now and its stunning and heroic.

Beautiful collection of tessellated materials found in nature: tessellated-materials.mpikg.mpg.de/collection

🔔 NEW PREPRINT FROM THE LAB ‼️ We introduce a new ML model, LoRAX, for predicting olfactory responses from chemical features, a tricky problem that benefits from progress in ML for biochem. We combine LoRA fine-tuning with protein and chemical foundation models, www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Re-upping this - Neuropeeps! We have a TT Job in my wonderful department at Brandeis! First consideration to applications received by Dec 15 (but why wait?) www.nature.com/naturecareer...

And the final #sfn2025 attendance count is: 21,093

We’re thrilled to announce that Dr. Xin Jin has been named the 2026 Peter Gruss Young Investigator. Her pioneering work developing high-throughput in vivo screening strategies is unraveling the genetic mechanisms of neurodevelopmental disorders. buff.ly/RI9emVa

#sfn2025 three fun posters from us today: theory work by @rgast.bsky.social on the effects of neural heterogeneity on computation, a hippocampus+feeding collab with @liye-tsri.bsky.social , and LLMs for pose interpretation in rehabilitation data with @peabody124.bsky.social

At #SfN and want to hear about how BiomechGPT can provide a language interface to your biomechanics data? Checkout poster happening now at YY4 with Ruize Yang and @antihebbiann.bsky.social

I will be pinch hitting for Adi Nair at this awesome social neuro minisymposium today. Come say hi! #sfn2025

Personal apologies to everyone who came to “sunny” San Diego for #SfN2025.🌧️😱

Driving home from lab, stopped at light, glanced at odometer. 111111 miles on 11/11!

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!