This has been a long time coming - but our M1 Development/M1-RN paper is finally out in its final form! Rather than re-hash the original story, I'm going to talk about one of the biggest reviewer-suggested additions, as well as some unpublished data! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I keep going back to how tough it would be to explain REM sleep and twitching to an alien (assuming they don't do it too, which maybe isn't a given)

New paper (with lots of cute animal videos!) Ever watch your dog "run" while asleep and wonder what’s going on in their brain? In Current Bio we suggest that those twitches aren't just leaky dreams—they’re a vital maintenance system for the most precise movements www.cell.com/current-biol...

New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... You've heard the phrase “sleep like a baby” - but what does it actually mean? Turns out, infant sleep is way different from adult sleep. And we still don’t understand the journey from infancy to adulthood. tl;dr babies are not just tiny adults 1/x

They did more than compare these two species - they crossed them! Super super cool sounding paper that must've been an unimaginable amount of work

What an amazingly cool project!

I think the fact that this post is resonating so strongly says something very important about present-day academia. Just had a DM convo with Mike about it - we've both had people tell us "your postdoc is your best stage in academia" - an idea we agree with (but wish wasn't the case...)

An argument always worth repeating. @marksblumberg.bsky.social I read this entire thread in your voice.

If you are funded by NIMH and only received 85% of your budget this year (like we did), check era commons to see if you have a new award notice. We just got the remaining 15% today.

Two years of (non-federal!) funding for the lab! Should be able to fund science and (nearly) all salaries in that time. I guess people weren't lying - you need at least 10 rejections before the funding gods give you a win.

Look what just moved to the top of our labs summer journal club reading list. Can't wait to take a look! So far, gorgeous visuals!

An editorial from the lab was published today about a recent paper published in the journal Sleep that characterizes the development of PGO waves. It's short, so if you have ~5 minutes, go ahead and click through. Still, a quick summary in the 🧵 that follows. academic.oup.com/sleep/articl...

Sky's are likely turning colors tonight. If you're in the Midwest, you should have cloudless sky's tonight - take a look at 10-11pm. And even if you can't see anything, point your phone to the northern skies, just in case

There's a very decent case to be made for no AI overviews for medical searches. Someone is going to search for this and panic...

If you rely on Federal funding, read this. And read it again next week, when it's updated to reflect today's budget requests

In late January, I said we were "still exploring" a cool thing we found in RN. Well, we're back, and we've got movement kinematics (thanks to ‪@deeplabcut.bsky.social‬)! (You can find all the details in our updated bioRxiv paper, linked below) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Another paper showing that circuits are never as straightforward as we'd assume... From the abstract: "The data suggest Purkinje cell spike activity changes cannot accurately predict nuclei cell changes" If it can't be straightforward, at least it's endlessly fascinating.

I think i saw someone else post this same idea a little while ago...

A huge majority of Americans (77%) oppose the cuts to medical research that the current administration has made. (Source: Wash. Post/ABC/Ipsos poll)

If we get a few more papers like this, saying "we pay too much attention to cortex" is going to stop being a hot take...

I think this is an important message (and an underappreciated one). It's hard to do, but ignoring the framing (that this is a reduction in spending) ignores the larger point that all of the "savings" are being offset by other increases.

I just finished @johngreensbluesky.bsky.social's book "Everything is Tuberculosis". It's excellent. As a scientist, it's easy to think that once we have a cure, the hard work is done. But this book gives a tragic counter example of why that isn't true. As he writes: Today, the cause of TB is us.

In my systems neuroscience class the week after next, we're going to discuss receptive fields and neural coding. Does anyone know of a basic (and ideally math-light) overview on rate codes, time codes, etc?

Love that this paper made the developmental connection! Subcortical motor structures can do more than we give them credit for.

First paper out of my lab is on bioRxiv! First, a super clickbait-y description. We stuck an electrode in a rat pup’s primary motor cortex and recorded lots of spikes. You’ll never guess what happened next… www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

If you study sensorimotor neuroscience there's still a chance to get on this starterpack!

That moment when someone else beats you to posting about your own paper... Proper runthrough to come, but for now: At 24 days old, M1 neurons should be JUUUST about ready to put the M in motor cortex. So how do they compare to a more mature motor nuclei in brainstem? Click the link to find out!

The Developmental Systems Neuroscience starter pack is up to 30 people! If you missed the original post, that's what @meikeesther.bsky.social and I are calling developmental neuroscientists who use systems neuroscience methods I thought now's a good time to post it again. Want to be added? DM me!

Wikipedia rabbitholes are worth it for those moments when the objective, neutral, wikipedia tone breaks down...

2 reposts but no recommendations... Starting to think this is a reflection of how the field views opto experiments in practice

I'm selecting papers for an upper-division undergraduate course on Systems Neuroscience, and want to have a paper that highlights the best of what's possible with modern genetic tools (particularly optogenetics, given the preceding lectures). Does any one have any recommendations?

Check out the 7th post in this thread - it's really rare that a motor prep. paper gives such simple and straightforward outcome. I'm excited to read the whole paper!

Super exciting study on Somatotopic development. I particularly love the behavioral adaptation story!

There has to be someone who (like me) didn't know this. I just learned that for ~$40 you can buy a USB "microscope" that works great for electrode placement. Here's the one that we just got for the lab that recorded this video: www.amazon.com/Plugable-Mic...

I'm looking for a high-resolution and detailed image of a cortical pyramidal cell for some office/lab artwork. Does anyone know of one? Ideal a microscope image, but a reconstruction that i can convert to an image works as well.

I think today I'm officially a PI For the first time, I saw data that: 1. Was collected by another member of my lab (in this case by Madi, an incredible grad student), and 2. Is getting me to rethink what's going on with this circuit

I want to read this review just because of this beautiful figure.... I love a good, ambitious, comprehensive, summary figure

This is awesome! I'm gonna try to open a lecture with this driveby next semester.

I may be biased, but SleepPeeps starterpack 2 is where it's at. Either that or the field has expanded beyond starterpacks 150 person limit and you should follow the complete list. Thanks @tonycunningham.bsky.social for putting these together!

Now that we’re on Bluesky, it’s a good time to bring back #badsciencedrawings – a collection of figures that prove that science is more science than art. Before Biorender, all we had was MS Paint and a dream. But ovals, lines, and lightning bolts were all we needed Morales-Botello et al., 2012

I don't want to brag, but this morning I got this Google Search Impact badge saying I've had 20 visitors in the past 4 weeks. If you do the math, that's getting awfully close to 1 click a day. #madeit

This reads exactly like the lecture my postdoc advisor, @marksblumberg.bsky.social, busts out every 3-4 years. And the story is just as interesting every time I hear it.

I just asked Timmy, a self-described "BroGTP" to come up with some metaphors to explain the major points from the ViewPoint article, and it did a pretty good job. I really like number 3

Looking for an escape over the holiday? @meikeesther.bsky.social and I published a ViewPoint looking at the intersection of Developmental and Systems Neuroscience titled “More Than a Small Brain: The Importance of Studying Neural Function during Development” www.jneurosci.org/content/44/4...

This paper gets at a tension that I'm seeing (and hearing) more and more about cortex: Most cortical neurons' response properties are too complex to be named in any way that isn't a misnomer (and therefore restrict thinking).

I guess cortex is the biggest through-line of my papers. It's a shame I have 3 different forms of the word development- otherwise it might be competitive too.

Doing a lit review today, and I spent the last 15 minutes closing the 50 tabs that got opened as I added papers into my citation manager. Every time I do this, I'm shocked at how many tabs popped up (and often lose which tab holds my original pubmed/google scholar search). Is there a better way?

Good to see Neurodevelopment warmth it's own starterpack!

This is so cool! I had no idea this existed - and I found it right when I'm putting together my first Undergrad Course for next semester. (I'm not just saying this because it's the first time I've seen a citation of mine in a textbook, I swear!)

Are you a Big10Neuro trainee looking to give a research talk to 100’s of neuroscientists? Register for the Big10Neuro conference (June 6-7 at Purdue). Early abstract submissions will get priority to be selected as 1 of over 10 (!) research talks at the meeting research.purdue.edu/big10conf/