New Perspective form Rory Maizels & me: "Gene regulatory networks: from correlative models to causal explanations" Gene regulatory networks are supposed to give us mechanistic explanations of development, so why are we drowning in 'hairballs' of statistical correlations? rdcu.be/e7zx7

1/n: A new collaborative preprint from the lab to start the year: "A multi-ring shifter network computes head direction in zebrafish" together with Siyuan Mei, Martin Stemmler and Andreas Herz from the LMU, Munich.

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... #neuroscience

Finally getting on top of new papers and god there are so many good ones. This from Lykken, Kanter, @edvardmoser.bsky.social & @m-bmoser.bsky.social is brilliant. Neuropixels showing differential phase shifts across grid modules drive place cell remapping. Elegant grid-to-place transformation story.

Dendritic arbors provide neuroscience with an ideal opportunity to study how individual neurons interact with their broader circuitry and are the field’s best bet to bridge cellular and systems neuroscience, writes @justinkohare.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/dendrites/de...

Mission: record hippocampal place cells in zero gravity Crew: 3 rats with electrode arrays Vehicle: Space Shuttle Columbia Status: data now publicly available on DANDI, 28 years later The ratstronauts' mission is finally complete. 🐀🚀 h/t NASA about.dandiarchive.org/blog/2026/02...

Calcium spikes know which way the wind blows! Lily Nguyen and I wrote a dispatch on this fascinating work led by Itzel [email protected]+Gaby Maimon! authors.elsevier.com/a/1mfk53QW8S...

Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐

Wonderful new paper from @mikehgoldstein.bsky.social 's lab! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅 Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1. I’m quite happy with this popular piece that Lee Dugatkin and I wrote recently. For the next two weeks it’s free to read on the American Scientist website.

🚀 New preprint from the lab! Our first foray into the subiculum uses in vivo whole-cell recordings to show that dendritic plateaus are a prominent, learning-dependent signaling mode of subicular neurons. Feedback is welcome! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

My paper on the head direction neurons in the larval zebrafish is now published on Nature! Read it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper alert! 🚨 We found that the brain's compass is remarkably stable at two scales 1️⃣ the system maintains its internal organization for weeks 2️⃣ It "remembers" its orientation for weeks, even after a single visit This may be key to how the brain aligns its other maps. Paper: rdcu.be/e3waP

PhD opportunity in "The role of neural development in multimodal intelligence" with me, @marcusghosh.bsky.social and @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social. Read details below 👇. Note there's a very short window for applying (deadline Feb 27). 🤖🧠🧪 www.imperial.ac.uk/school-of-co...

My first first-author paper is on bioRxiv! Here we ask whether the same subset of neurons in ACC always display object correlates during extensive familiarisation to 2 objects. A short 🧵1/10

There is a new wave of neuroscience research detailing how PIEZO channels contribute to the brain’s sense of what the internal organs are doing. It’s a “PIEZO-driven renaissance,” @wormsense.bsky.social says. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/interoceptio...

What drives the sequential emergence of spatial neurons in developing rats? In our ICLR 2026 paper, we show how changes in movement statistics drive spatial tuning. Our model replicates experimental timelines and predicts novel conjunctive tuning maturation. doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.30.696864

I'm very excited to finally see this one out in @natneuro.nature.com ! It has been an incredible journey alongside extremely talented people! Thanks to everyone involved and enjoy the reading! 1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...

After sketching out how PIEZO channels contribute to touch and proprioception, scientists are now using the channels as a tool to study internal organs, including the heart, bladder, uterus and kidney. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/interoceptio...

Amid the hype around prattling "AI" models, astonishing research into living minds gets overlooked. Wonderful piece by @yaseminsaplakoglu.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social about bats navigating in a natural environment, decoding the sense of direction. www.quantamagazine.org/how-animals-...

We had a lot of fun doing these experiments! Theta sweeps in MEC and internal direction signals in parasubiculum track moving objects during pursuit and reverse during backward movement. Simultaneously recorded HD cells in other areas remain locked to head direction across behaviors:

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... We had a lot of fun working on this project (led by Itzel Ishida, not on bluesky). Some interesting highlights from the paper -

Whether the system can be flexibly redirected to prioritize specific locations has been unclear. Using large-scale #Neuropixels recordings in freely behaving rats, we find that both sweeps – and the internal direction signals driving them – are dynamically modulated moment by moment. (4/6)

New great work from our lab. Check out the beautiful videos! Bravi @azvollan.bsky.social and the team!

Excited for the publication of our recent work on how pyramidal cells shape the identity of interneurons in the Cortex! Big shout out to @artofbiology and Sherry Jingjing wu! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I’m very happy to share the latest from my lab published in @Nature Hippocampal neurons that initially encode reward shift their tuning over the course of days to precede or predict reward. Full text here: rdcu.be/eY5nh

For decades, imaging has forced the same trade-off: Set a frame rate → sacrifice resolution or field of view to go fast. We break that rule Using an EVENT-BASED CAMERA, we record neural activity without frames. Signals are captured only where and when they occur: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is going to be an amazing conference in Athens in June 2026 The Neural Basis of Natural Behaviours I'll be there talking about recording brains while riding the waves between atolls on trimaran in the pacific: conferences.weizmann.ac.il/NBNB2026/spe...

Excited to share @rbrianroome.bsky.social ‘s beautiful paper on development of the dorsal horn of the mouse spinal cord @science.org This is how the anatomical organization and cell types that process pain, touch, body position and more are laid down. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1/6: New publication from the lab: “Plastic landmark anchoring in zebrafish compass neurons” by Ryosuke Tanaka (@ryosuketanaka.bsky.social) and Ruben is available here: rdcu.be/eX1L4

⚠️ New paper alert and what a way to end 2025! 🎉 Happy to share our story “Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals.” published today in Nature Neuroscience. Sleeping dragons 🦎 and functional ultrasound! Read the full paper here: rdcu.be/eWJHb 1/8

Adam Kampff’s passion for understanding and explaining the world was unmatched. Living by example and not ever compromising on his dreams, Adam was uncanny in making people realize they can learn and understand anything and everything. Keep his dream alive! In his own words: tinyurl.com/ye29csw3

Do you love quantifying animal behavior as much as we do? We have just the tool for you! Presenting #OCTRON - a pipeline that helps you create rich annotation data and enables training of custom segmentation models. Have a look, particularly if you work with non-model / invertebrate organisms!

Do direction and orientation preferences form maps in the mouse superior colliculus (SC)? We examined how motion and orientation tuning are organized in SC neurons and their retinal inputs—and how the retinal topography is transformed by collicular circuits. tinyurl.com/mr2zt5rm 🧵👇

Great read. Neural population activity for memory: Properties, computations, and codes: Neuron www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

I have a chapter in there on Variability in Neural Circuit Formation pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38253418/

Incredible resource of ~1M single-cell transcriptomes, NeuRoDev, that captures temporal and cellular variation across human brain development. Congrats to Asia Zonca and Erik Bot from the Davila-Velderrain group at @humantechnopole.bsky.social for leading this work! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

First neurons didn’t appear overnight. We trace their roots to ancient secretory cells - showing how lifestyle & behavior shaped the evolution of first synapses.🧠🌊 #Evolution #Neuroscience Our latest in @natrevneuro.nature.com Link: rdcu.be/eMX3E @jeffcolgren.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social

*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 ⬇️

🥳Excited to share our latest human multipatch paper, now out in @natneuro.nature.com 🧠 We studied the cellular and synaptic physiology of human L2–3 pyramidal neurons and identified subtype-specific local connectivity rules across individuals. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Join us: penglab.de

The fruit fly visual system gets a glow-up during pupal development. A new study reveals how non-neuronal calcium activity fine-tunes the boundaries between each portion of the compound eye. By @lauren-schneider.com #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/developmenta...

🧠📢 New preprint alert Large-scale ephys is exploding but spike sorting remains the computational bottleneck. A 2-hr, 6-probe Neuropixels 2.0 Quad Base session can take over a week to sort on a single machine. Here's a better solution. 🧵 #neuroskyence #compneurosky

Slate status: not blank

Non-neuronal calcium waves refine the geometric patterning of the developing Drosophila eye. Pretty awesome. 'Retinal calcium waves coordinate uniform tissue patterning of the Drosophila eye | Science' www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

***Publication alert*** "Pathological tau alters head direction signaling and induces spatial orientation" www.cell.com/cell-reports...

New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧠👩🏻‍🔬🧪🧵 #neuroskyence 1/

Mind over matter, matter over mind? Check out our fine mini-special (mini by our standards) special issue on how #brain and #body interact. 🧠🕺 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Fave illo by @vahrammuradyan.bsky.social: What are the fastest-growing areas in neuroscience? Respondents pointed to computational neuroscience, systems neuroscience, neuroimaging, among other subfields. @thetransmitter.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/neuroscience... #sciart