We are recruiting 🌟2 postdoctoral researchers🌟 for a NERC Large Grant project on the eco-evolutionary dynamics of badger - bovine tuberculosis (bTB) interactions.

UVic is hiring a Terrestrial Plant Ecologist Assistant Professor! Come join our department! We're nice and Victoria is awesome. www.uvic.ca/science/biol...

New Beetles ready to frame. Message me if you have your eye on one.

Check out this incredible mural “Garbage Tail” from French duo Murmure done for the Milmurs Prod in Martinique. This monumental wall is part of their “Garb-age” series which is based on dreamlike and poetic twists of the garbage bag. Photo: Dan Beal #WhaleTales #TalesOfSavingWhales

Woo!!!!!! PenningtonLab.com is live!

Congratulations to @natashamhatre.bsky.social (centre) winner of this year's JEB sponsored Bob Boutilier New Investigator Award at the #cszscz2026 meeting in Ottawa. The award was presented by Emily Standen (right) with JEB Editor, Katie Gilmour (left)

Unfortunately, history often fails to acknowledge #WomenInStem. What's insane to me is that Lilian's work on sex determination, and Emmy Stein's on radiation-based mutation, were known in their day! It's just that full credit went to men like Bridges and Müller... 17/n

This #InternationalWomensDay I want to tell the story of Lilian Vaughan Morgan. I learned of Lilian this past year - what a badass. Lilian was a leading scientist when women weren't welcome in the lab, nor even the department. But she contributed immensely to the genetics of sex determination 1/n

I still love the theory a Year 6 child proposed to me that David Attenborough is actually God and he got fed up with people not noticing the amazing things he'd created, so he made documentaries to show off.

Don’t miss this session exploring the computational side of brains and behavior at #OptoGRC2026 🧠 💻 Discussion to be led by Sweta Agrawal, featuring speakers Yaniv Ziv, @mazenkheirbek.bsky.social, Takashi Yamaguchi & Jesse Kaminsky, Wednesday evening!

Happy 100th birthday Sir Attenborough!

happy 9th anniversary to the day we watched Zendaya fall madly in love with Tom Holland in real-time

warning, this image may not be for everyone but here's a spectacular F western widow, imaged last SAT night in the desert she's combing wrapping silk using small hair combs at the ends of her 4th legs. also appears to be moving in to apply some venom

Relatable.

New preprint: Whole-body 3D kinematics of freely behaving 𝐷𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑎 New tech from @blobology.bsky.social & others at @hhmijanelia.bsky.social, which @ispizua.bsky.social and @elliottabe.bsky.social used to gain insight into 3D structure of locomotion & courtship www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We have an *extremely* important announcement to make. From Wednesday, we will be launching our puffin live cam, coming to you from the Farne Islands. So you can watch puffins all day long. In celebration, please enjoy this clip of puffins being really busy for 39 seconds straight.

My first RN job was in Labor and Delivery, Postpartum and Newborn care. Mifepristone has SO many other uses, but they don’t care about that. In my job we used it to help induce labor when needed, or help it along. This is a slippery slope. I hate it here. We TOLD you this was going to happen.

This should be a bigger story. I didn't know Isaiah but almost everyone in my lab, my TA, and a few close colleagues knew him well. They all say he was a sweet guy who was just really into herps. This is a tragedy.

the floor is larva

Heading into May of 2026 and so far this year, no new grants have been issued by the National Institutes of Health, National Eye Institute. No council meetings have been scheduled. An absolute, unmitigated disaster for vision research is setting up.

There are creatures in nature with strange shapes. I asked them how they came to look that way, but they said even they didn’t know. #Illustration #CommentPls #RTpls

happy birthday to the OG MILF #HappyEarthDay (fanart of @sarahmackattack.bsky.social zine character, get more hot Earth facts from Sarah!)

Excited to share a new review by @kocherlab.bsky.social and me: Nature-inspired neuroscience We discuss diverse sensory systems and behaviors across the animal kingdom and argue for their integration into neuroscience. New tools in diverse systems are making this possible ✨ tinyurl.com/y5y9du27

Here they are (Zygothrica sp) going at it to defend their mushroom kingdom. El Refugio, Intag, Ecuador

just had a thought...

It is with great sadness that I'm sharing the news that Dr. Don Moerman passed away this weekend. He was such a legend in the #Celegans and Canadian science community.

There is ABSOLUTELY another story here about how higher ed has abdicated its commitment to education by counting on federal funding to provide salary support to scientists like Donovan

Glia gang, this is for you! In this video by our #ElectronMicroscopy team, shows a pyramidal neuron (PyC) surrounded by 8 glia brain cells – 5 microglia (MG) and 3 oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPC). 🧠📈 http://microns-explorer.org

The Orange Cat Brain Atlas is here. 🧠🐈 Today, we published the first comprehensive cellular map of the orange cat brain. The new atlas reveals a single, specialized neuron responsible for behaviors like staring at walls, knocking objects off tables, and the 3am "zoomies."

Instructions for making mosquito-killing buckets. Cheap, effective, and won't harm butterflies, fireflies, pets, or birds like pyrethroid sprays do. Spring is a great time to set them out. #mosquitoes colinpurrington.com/2024/08/bti-...

Just discussed this with another female junior PI... It's obvious but maybe more data helps. What is necessary, is that policies aimed at retaining parents in academia do not treat fathers and mothers equal. Early on, the impact is not equal and denying this ends up disproportionately hurting women.

"men continued to publish the same number of papers after becoming fathers, women experienced a significant drop in research output (mothers had 31% fewer publications than did fathers 8 years after the birth of their first child)"

Can confirm, very soft. Much stylish.

🎉 lab’s first data paper 🎉 TL;DR: we found profound changes in vocal calls produced by mice with early-onset dystonia caused by cerebellar dysfunction. Thus, vocal impairments in people with dystonia may, in part, be driven by cerebellar dysfunction. www.frontierspartnerships.org/journals/dys...

Cherry blossom photo of the day 🌸 #vancouver #weather #canada #bike

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

This is a core peril of connectome-body models: behavioral fidelity ≠ biological fidelity. Virtual animals are powerful, but ONLY if brain-body interfaces are grounded in biology. A model that walks like a fly might just be a worm in disguise. 👀

Genome of the Abominable Snowfly uncovers the mysteries of cold tolerance in a winter active insect! New cool (literally) paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social from Marco Gallio, @matthewcapek.bsky.social, @tuthill.bsky.social, myself, and fine colleagues! ⛄ 🦟 authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

How does an animal choose between exploring for a better food source and taking advantage of a known one? Our recent work in Current Biology demonstrates how recent feeding and metabolic state dynamically influence fly local search. bit.ly/3PfrIv3 #Science #Neurosky #Foraging #Drosophila

Sometimes failed experiments reveal gaps in how we are thinking about a problem, and digging into why an experiment didn't work can lead to discovery. This new preprint by Anne Sustar, in collaboration with Dion Dickman's lab, is one of those gratifying instances.🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Videos of talks from COSYNE (computational and systems neuroscience) are available on YouTube: www.youtube.com/@cosynetalks

Happy holi!

When a fly lands on your arm, how does your nervous system decide where to swat? By reconstructing tactile axons in a Drosophila connectome, we found a leg somatotopic map and downstream circuits that sample the map to initiate targeted grooming Led by Leila Elabbady, PhD doi.org/10.64898/202...

With this war on Iran costing $1B per day, we are now at 4$B, an amount that would fund 3,200 five year NIH biomedical research grants.

So true. Every mycological society meeting i would go to in Seattle would prove this to be true -- a whole community of people that are interested in/pursue fungal taxonomy FOR FUN. AS A HOBBY.

After 5 years of developing, a new preprint from the lab - introducing our workflow for comparative insect connectomics, aimed at democratizing connectomics. @erc.europa.eu @lundvision.bsky.social @biologylu.bsky.social Read it here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

NYU's Center for Neural Science is seeking a faculty candidate that would be jointly appointed with our Tandon School of Engineering. We are looking for post-doc applicants with neuroengineering or computational backgrounds. apply.interfolio.com/182074

University of Toronto is hiring: Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology #assistantprofessorposition

I don't really know what to say anymore but I know that it will take decades, if ever, for higher ed to recover from the deep, deep cowardice of these institutions.