Calling out political extremists for being hypocritical (“they claim to value free speech, but actually try to censor speech they don’t like!”) is like calling out a football team for playing both offense and defense. They’re not trying to embody fixed standards, they’re just trying to win.

Here's a question: With EM, you find a super weird cell type (n=2 animals). They have truly unusual characteristics, but it's structure only so you have no idea what they do, what their transcriptomic/molecular properties are, nor do obviously solve any problem that's been posed.

I'm close to releasing a python library that solves some tech debt (and documentation debt) that has been weighing me down for years now. Super excited to start using it, and amazed at how good Claude Code was for catching edge cases, writing tests, and debugging finicky indexing.

YO, what's up with all these almost-witchcraft techniques?? In this paper, they develop a way to freeze cells so quickly that it preserves Calcium waves midway!! WHAT??? HELLO??? So now you can do 3D reconstruction of calcium waves with just a normal confocal. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

When I was a second year physics PhD, my advisor suggested I go to this "Physics of Cellular Objects" summer school in Corsica. It consisted of a series of 2-3 day long lectures on how biology used physics to accomplish things from virus capsids and bacterial motility...

It was a good experience to step back and briefly take stock of the amazing progress in connectomics since I started working on this stuff (20 years ago!) thanks as well to @natrevneuro.nature.com for the constructive editorial interactions.

I cannot emphasize enough that the playbook being used against mRNA vaccines (and vaccines in general) is IDENTICAL to the playbook used to restrict voting rights after the 2020 election: actively sow public distrust, then cite the distrust you sowed as an independent reason for your desired policy

The interneurons continue to surprise!

A major NIH grant to study ways to restore hearing was terminated by the Trump administration bc it was awarded through a DEI initiative—to a researcher who qualified bc of his own hearing loss www.cnn.com/2025/07/29/h... @manorlaboratory.bsky.social

This is a great opportunity, and as usual Mo is too humble. Not just one synapse at a time, _all_ the synapses at a time!

Want to use the massive MICrONS dataset for your own research? We understand the challenges and we are here to support you. Submit your proposals for our Proofreading and Annotation program: Virtual Observatory of the Cortex (VORTEX) by August 15. microns-explorer.org/vortex

🚨 BREAKING: Nearly 4 months the NIH cut its first grants, a judge has ruled that the directives and process that led to cuts are arbitrary and capricious. "The explanations are bereft of reasoning — virtually in their entirety... unsupported by [facts]." Each of them are VOID and ILLEGAL, he says.

Even good reporting like this somehow still feels like it underplays that the stated goal underlying the intentional destruction of American science seems to be that there needs to be more prejudice in the system at all levels.

they're doing this because the Insurrection Act sounds cool and edgy but they can't actually justify using the Insurrection Act. it's a silly action by an insecure administration desperately to seem manly and powerful. it should be criticized relentlessly, but it should also be laughed at.

Believe it a not, a third multisite connectomic project also lost funding. The multi-PI R01 led by @darbly.bsky.social with myself and @bassemh.bsky.social as co-PIs.

Three things made the US a rich and powerful nation: the rule of law, its science & innovation system, and openness to foreign talent. Remarkable how Trump has taken a sledgehammer to all three. No enemy of this country could do more.

Mo and Hans's work here is truly a landmark in dense structural imaging, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Do yourself a favor and check out the Neuroglancer links and get an early glimpse at a technique I'm confident we'll see more and more over the next few years.

With NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya dismissing my reporting as "false" and "spreading rumors" hours before releasing a policy that confirmed said "rumors," I feel compelled to respond. Here's an inside look into how this story was reported. It was a weird one. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

NIH moving to ban all future grants to universities with DEI programs or Israel boycotts, document suggests. Story by @aniloza.bsky.social www.statnews.com/2025/04/21/t...

Sure seems like it would be good to ask the director of the NIH about. Aside from the snark about him being outspoken about "academic freedom," it seems important to document what is actually happening and who is ordering what.

📣 Now out in Nature Communications as part of the MICrONS package: Our study on excitatory morphological cell types in mouse visual cortex led by Marissa Weis. We describe a set of principles that capture the morphological diversity excitatory neurons. A thread: (1/12) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

To separate this from the rest of the rest of the thread, it's really tough to celebrate when a professional high point coincides with some personal low points and the ongoing attacks on science, health and general well-being. One step at a time, I suppose.

It's been done for a while, accepted almost a year ago, but I'm happy to share that my first analysis of the MICrONs cubic mm dataset is online! nature.com/articles/s41...

how to draw a medieval cat in two easy steps

I continue to be astonished that these folks aren’t being pressed for a substantive rationale for such obvious harm for zero benefit.

one thing i do not like about these days is that i am filled with hate for so many people

I went briefly to the local Stand Up For Science and it rubbed me the wrong way. Science in the crosshairs of authoritarianism not because of misconceptions, but for its independence.

A general update on this. I talk to a lot of people at NIH basically every day. There’s so many different things going on it’s hard to really convey the totality of it. There have been a few loosenings of the throttle. But overall it’s important for everyone to understand that medical …

Congrats to Leila Elabaddy and the other winners of this years Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award. Leila (in blue) is a grad student in my lab co-advised by Forrest Collman from @alleninstitute.bsky.social. www.fredhutch.org/en/news/rele...

One of my most reliable heuristics is that anyone who mentions IQ on the internet in anything but an ironic context is almost certainly a creep.

It's never been more clear that the typical professional science education (e.g. PhD, etc) doesn't prepare us for people working in bad faith, at least beyond a reviewer who requests extra citations. How do we improve this going forward?

This is so many words to say Trump fired the chairman of the joint chiefs because he’s black www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/u...

After a long journey, Segment Anything for Microscopy is now published in Nature Methods! We significantly improve SAM for interactive and automatic segmentation in light and electron microscopy and build a user-friendly tool. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My student's diversity F31 has been pulled from study section even though it's the SAME APPLICATION as regular F31s, normally reviewed together in the same panel. Throwing out all the applications from URMs while the ones from white/privileged students get to be reviewed is blatant discrimination.

One of our beloved cats passed away about a month ago and posted a goodbye on instagram. Now I’m getting random pet passing posts because of The Algorithm, and just screw that nonsense. How could their engineers not notice some topics don’t demand homophily.

From a reader, attentive to 'frog' metaphors. With an apt point.

Extremely disappointed to see HHMI decide to kill their Inclusive Excellence program, including terminating the current IE3 awards to over a hundred institutions effective this year in the middle of a 6-year grant. I was hoping HHMI (and other private funders) would continue to lead the way.

I would look pretty differently about any scientist that would volunteer their time to review grants that had to through any of this Orwellian bullshit.

@naddington.bsky.social , looks like I was totally wrong! I wonder if there are other organizations with similar legally mandated efforts.

I’m curious what @hhmi.bsky.social is doing with regards to this administration’s attacks on science. They are great proponents of talented biomedical scientists across backgrounds and uniquely disconnected from federal money. It would be a valuable voice, with the resources to be loud.

The Trump Administration is launching nothing less than a giant affirmative action program for straight white men, a great many of whom, including Trump and Vance, are utterly unqualified for their positions and would be mocked for their hubris if they were women or Black or gay or.....

Less than a week to apply for the Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain! 🐋🧠🌊 Apply by Feb. 1 to join us for this intensive, project-based residential course in the beautiful San Juan Islands. 🔗 alleninstitute.org/events/summe... 🧠📈

God, what a grim weekend. The most hollow and ignorant people take over control based on a platform of lies, blind selfishness and racism. The harms will be huge and opportunity cost for trying to solve real problems even larger.

good example of why I like connectomic datasets with nice ultrastructure: a scaffolding on which to model function across scales

The use of "woke" as a pejorative is always such a damning indication of small-mindedness. It's not a simple word, but I always thought it fundamentally signified the idea that we should believe people's descriptions of their lived experiences. And once you do, so many new things open up!

I didn't really predict that a a bunch of companies working to make life cheaper and more convenient would start us on a path to just NEVER INTERACTING WITH HUMANS and that seems very bad and like something to push back very hard against.

You can now watch the I2K video tutorial on #micro-sam by @anwaiarchit.bsky.social on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxjU... Check it out for an in-depth explanation for how to use our tool to segment your microscopy images.

If you - accept who is in power - align yourself to power to achieve positive impact - fail to achieve positive impact anyway That might be the thing that helps you sleep at night. But I believe that every person who does so will undermine trust in public health and other institutions.

Look at this absolute unit of a neuron! This is a layer 5 ET neuron in mouse visual cortex, which gets a crazy amount of synaptic input (15,326 synapses in the dendrites here) and sends its outputs not just locally, but to subcortical areas that can more directly affect behavior.

Very impressed with Apple's migration tools, which made moving to a new computer seamless, down to "recently opened files" menus. The only bit of a headache was some python path issues in virtual environments using hatch, which resolved after removing and reinstalling it via pipx.