Airlines should be required to show you a big warning banner when you select flights on Daylight Savings transition days.

Looking forward to heading off to Cosyne next week, and excited to be part of a two day workshop about connectomics, with day one being about species comparison and day two about using data for constraining models. alleninstitute.github.io/connectomics...

Below is the response to my question. The funny part of his response is that my research needed a control arm. My study actually did have a control arm (about 80% of the sample never reported discrimination). So the answer itself makes me even more confused.

In what world is it even helpful to treat this guy like he's not a vicious, churning, petty, malignant, Internet-rotted psychopath

This seems important when thinking about all of the people (especially academics) who stayed in Epstein's orbit. Not that all would agree in the details per se, but that they were not repulsed by deeply held misogyny, expressed in so many different ways

From @bdpedigo.bsky.social: a super efficient, highly reliable, and very generalizable method for mesh structure classification, applied here to spine detection across basically every synapse onto a cell in the MICRoNS dataset.

There are lessons from WaPo’s destruction for science too. Public funding (via NIH, NSF &c) built in the US a science superpower in large part b/c of democratic values: agencies are accountable to the public through Congress, not controlled by whims of a billionaire. Autocratic control…

I would love to organize a conference bringing together neuroscientists, video game developers, and VFX artists. Visualization, spatial methods, understanding of body mechanics, they all have different perspectives on some similar problems.

The last year has been a real lesson in what Orwell meant. So much energy goes into obfuscating and downplaying basic facts, since to say them clearly makes the stupidity and cruelty black and white. The second ICE murder seems to have finally broken through that a little bit.

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...

Please apply. Amazing opportunity to dive into connectomics datasets for research, educational initiatives, outreach and whatever else your heart desires. Feb 2nd deadline.

Back in 2010, I moved to Zürich with two suitcases. I knew no one there, but was tremendously lucky in that the other postdoc in my group at the time was this fellow named Mark. Within the first day or two, he invited me out to watch a World Cup game at one of the many outdoor bars there.

Hard to think of a person who brought so many good emotions to so many people as Rob Reiner. What an upsetting end to an upsetting weekend.

SKULL OF THOMAS AQUINAS: TAKE A LEFT NOW PRIEST: No, the GPS says we have to keep going— SKULL: I KNOW A SHORTCUT PRIEST: Do you remember the last ti— SKULL: FOR THOSE WITH FAITH, NO EVIDENCE IS NECESSARY; FOR THOSE WITHOUT IT, NO EVIDENCE WILL SUFFICE

Connectomics has a great presence here, with several instructors from our team! Apply if you want hands on training and feedback on working with cortical connectomics (and whatever else we might have available by then...)!

How do neural circuits generate the walking rhythm? Using connectome simulations, @sarahpugly.bsky.social found a minimal central pattern generator (CPG) that produces oscillations in leg motor neurons. Same circuit motif for each 🪰 leg. w @bingbrunton.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I had heard this was coming, but it’s still an amazing indication of how far we’ve come in the last decade or so!

The thing I love about No Kings as a theme and as practice is it cuts to the heart of it: this admin is a nonstop flood of the most unamerican bullshit and to wave the American flag is to protest.

I love this piece! It shows the many ways a connectome can be put to use, AND the many complementary modalities that are needed, beyond the connectome, to answer real questions. And it makes me feel good about having helped to generate the thing. :)

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?