Sleepless in Gaza: War-related trauma and the neurobiological toll on sleep pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

@jengoldschmiedphd.bsky.social Congratulations, Director at Large!

To follow up on this, I've gotten to an age / point in my career where I often look back and am in awe at how far we've progressed. I used to do single-unit recordings of the LC 20+ years ago. Back then, we used to imagine these figures from the little we knew. Brilliant and impressive.

Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1

How hot is it in Maryland right now? The guy seems to be sweating like crazy. About the same temp here. I’m planting things and spreading compost in the sun and I’m not sweating the way he is.

A direct hit on our two National Clonal Germplasm Repositories would be devastating. Big, if true.

Not sure if we can rename it "The American Gulf" after "Gulf of America" is already taken.

I cannot stop thinking of all the amazing and wonderful people I have known from Israel, Iran, Lebanon and other countries caught up in this war. It is people just like them who are being killed and harmed here.

Californians are incorrigible. What stage between "parking" or "the character of the neighborhood" and "we don't need more housing, we need affordable housing!" is "TRAFFIC!!!" at in the kill-development at any cost scale?

An utterly bleak picture of the future of academic science in America

I am just now catching up on the fact that the FDA was demanding Uniqure do sham brain surgeries (from what I can tell, comprising simulated burr holes and 10-12 hours of anesthesia) in their placebo arm for their Huntington's therapeutic, and I'm absolutely floored that this was a serious demand.

"Lunar gravity predicts sleep timing" - bookmarking this lunar rhythms & sleep paper as interesting. It uses a 30-day rhythm but not the 28-day declination rhythm - a claim of "gravity" should probably use the 28-day one, but I think "phase" should follow 30? europepmc.org/article/med/...

Shot: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Chaser:

Yes! We literally cannot shut up about our work.

$300 Million in jet planes lost to a fuckup. That’s 83 five year NIH R01 grants burned in minutes due to error, aka poor execution of this unnecessary war which serves only to make the world more dangerous.

Cool cool cool 🫠

The ratstronaut dataset is available on DANDI! (and analyzed with @pynapple.bsky.social 😍)

Reconsidering Causal Inference Approaches in Sleep and Dementia academic.oup.com/sleep/advanc...

A simple blood test might one day serve as a molecular ‘clock’ that predicts not only whether someone will develop Alzheimer’s disease — but when go.nature.com/4kHqfsV

When planting our garden, I sowed year-round wildflower varieties (here = Central Valley) so that bees in hive boxes in the orchards would know to visit anytime for food. Hoping that they'd also pollinate my fruit trees in the spring. Worked fine so far. This is a very cool visualization of that.

Definitely a huge win for higher ed. I think it's important to point out that the suit that led to this outcome was brought by *UC faculty and unions* and not the UC system. The academic workers are fighting back, and we should support them.

This is a genuinely huge, sweeping victory today for the University of California—or rather, for us, its faculty, acting through our faculty associations, while the UC itself maintained a strict policy of deer-in-headlights silence. The Trump admin has given up its appeal of a powerful injunction:

Depressed? Anxious? Lonely? What if mental health doesn’t just result from media use, but shapes how we choose media? In a new preprint, Valerie Klein, @gongxuanjun.bsky.social @aeden.bsky.social and I and I test this using a computational decision-making model: doi.org/10.21203/rs.... 🧵Thread

Regardless of your political views or perspectives on the region, this is a moment when simple acts of compassion, such as brief messages of support or offers of collaboration with colleagues based in Iran, can make a meaningful difference. hashtag#science_diplomacy.

If you have a chance to collaborate with an Iranian scientist, do it: I've always been struck by the quality and ingenuity of the work of my colleague/collaborator in Tehran. With devastatingly few resources, he makes big things happen! I wish we have a chance to meet in person one of these days.

Join us as we post the answers to the #AMA #AskMeAnything with Editors in Chief Drs. Allan Pack (SLEEP) and Sean Drummond (SLEEPAdvances) over the next two weeks! Question 1: What types of paper submissions would you like to see more of in 2026? 📝 🎤See the EICs' responses below!

Question 2: What advice do you have for a trainee interested in getting more experience with editorial responsibilities? 🎙️See the Editor-in-Chiefs' responses below!

I don’t know what the people on this golf course are doing but they really should knock it off…

Quite the quakeswarm in San Ramon this morning. Been going on for weeks now, but today is just a few more than normal.

Excited to share newly minted PhD Anu Korukonda's tour de force thesis work describing the impact of pathogenic tau on #locuscoeruleus function in a mouse model of early #Alzheimers. A must for #BlueSpot researchers! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/3

The grant that I'm writing. The state of funding it's in: "Like an Alzheimer's thing. Well, I don't have it." www.rawstory.com/trump-267503...

What’s that weird turn in the flight plan (after the actual turn back on the flight path) just past Long Island? Did he demand they tilt at windmills for him?

He’s gonna need a jet from Qatar and an autonomous arctic island to hedge against that.

“DBS demonstrates a favorable safety profile with substantially lower complication rates compared with the most widely performed elective surgeries”

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴? That I don't know but D Brooks discusses some ideas of my book, The Entangled Brain: '"neuronal ensembles distributed across multiple brain regions,” which, like a murmuration of starlings, “forms a single pattern from the collective behavior."' www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/o...

The 18 homicides investigated by the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office in 2025 are the fewest since the 1980s, sheriff’s officials said.

cheese eating surrender monkeys…

Here's a weird question: How do whales sleep without drowning? These sperm whales are power-napping below the water's surface, hanging like cocoons in the ocean. But whales evolved from land creatures: they breathe under *voluntary control*. What happens when the conscious mind shuts down?

"Take naps" is #8. We're getting there...

Looks to me that when he drew his gun, the driver briefly interrupted her plans to move the vehicle to the right until he moved out of the way. The fact she continues moving towards the right would indicate that she knew the gun was pointed at her but assumed he wouldn't shoot because he cleared.

Noradrenergic infraslow rhythm during sleep is the critical link between heart-rate dynamics and memory consolidation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.06.697926v1

Not satisfied with taking healthcare away from millions of Americans, Trump sets his sites on Danes…

It is also the night that we remember that the only time zone that matters to anyone is Eastern.

It is the night that we open enough bottles to keep us busy for the month of January. 6 currently open, one more to go. This one is a 2000.

Says the guy who…podcasts for a living. (And this guy too apparently). Do you know how many people met between 50-64 were just fired by the hundreds of thousands by the #federal #government? And how nobody in the private sector wants to hire anyone over age 50?

More news (not good) from NIH The renewal request from National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke Director Walter Koroshetz has been denied. I guess the NIH_leadership™ needed another position to fill with their time-tested recruitment process.

So I guess we got AD solved then, right? www.cell.com/cell-reports...

"If really good, would you like me to leave the Presidency in order to make “hosting” a full time job?" Yes, sir! You will be the greatest host of the Trump-Kennedy Center Honors the world has ever seen! Only Trump can do this job! Thank you for your attention to this matter. x.com/realDonaldTr...