The creativity is still mostly human, writes @kenneth-harris.bsky.social. The AI’s strength is relentless, moderately clever trial-and-error in the space of technical solutions. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-i...

Some sanity, for a change www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/o...

Today I'd like to honor the memory of my mentor and friend, Roger Tsien, born 1952 February 1. Today would have been Roger's 74th birthday. Most know Roger for his 2008 Chemistry Nobel Prize with Shimomura and Chalfie. Roger made GFP into the versatile imaging method it is now.

I should be proud of being a Fellow of the Royal Society, and yet I'm not. I wonder why.

I had missed this when it came out, and I think it's great news. Publishing false stuff on *cancer* potentially translates to more people dying, and I'm glad to see it now comes with some accountability for the institutions too.

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

If the deal between Putin and Trump indeed was: "You can have Venezuela, if I can have Ukraine", Europe had better focus on the latter. Although the Trump regime has stopped direct support for Ukraine already, there are still ways it can further harm Ukraine's position.

Out today in Journal of Vision: Mapping the visual cortex with Zebra noise and wavelets By Sophie Skriabine and Max Shinn, with Samuel Picard and @kenneth-harris.bsky.social doi.org/10.1167/jov....

Earthquake

NYE fireworks < neurons expressing iGluSnFR3! Developed at our Janelia Research Campus, iGluSnFR3 is a fluorescent sensor designed to rapidly detect & image glutamate — our brains' main chemical messenger — allowing researchers to observe (dazzling) neural communication as it happens. 🎆

Adam Kampff prioritized spreading knowledge over publishing flashy papers in prestigious journals, but colleagues say his mark on neuroscience was undeniable. The researcher and educator passed away on 9 December. By Lauren Schneider www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

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 🧵👇

I found this article really interesting. Especially the list of criteria [apologies, occasionally I stray from neuroscience]

iGluSnFR4 is now available @natmethods.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... Glutamate indicators with increased sensitivity and tailored deactivation rates 🧪

Great work by @sylviaschroeder.bsky.social and team

Look who's finally on Bluesky! Welcome Hendrikje (and lab). @nienborglab.bsky.social Let's get her follower count up. 🙂

This head is spinning continuously, but we see it rotating back and forth... ...presumably because of our strong prior expectation that faces are convex. This is a very nice example of the Hollow-Face illusion promoted by Richard Gregory: www.richardgregory.org/experiments/

Sequences are everywhere! In every brain region. And are written in stone. Invariant Activity Sequences Across the Mouse Brain. Out today, by Célian Bimbard, with @kenneth-harris.bsky.social. Based on data by Célian and by @intlbrainlab.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Seven feel-good science stories to round up 2025. All too often we forget to celebrate the positives 🧪 #AcademicSky www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This paper by Ken's group seems like a very important follow up to Stringer + Pachitariu et al (consistent a MSc in the lab found that UMAP could capture their data well): "High-dimensional neuronal activity from low-dimensional latent dynamics: a solvable model" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Fully-funded International Neuroscience Doctoral Programme🧠 Champalimaud Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal 🇵🇹 Deadline: Jan 31, 2026 fchampalimaud.org/champalimaud... Research program spans systems/computational/theoretical/clinical/sensory/motor neuroscience, neuroethology, intelligence, and more!!

Ok, this is nuts. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. Do you see it? (OP @drgbuckingham.bsky.social )

This is fantastic news

The European Research Council (@erc.europa.eu) has released the results for this year's Consolidator Grants, and yet again the UK, Germany, and Netherlands receive most of the grants. Interestingly, they contribute fewer awardees. Italy instead stands out for the opposite. (1/2)

Today we honour the memory of Adam Kampff, whose passing leaves an immense void in our community. We are profoundly grateful to Adam. The best way to honour him is to continue innovating, collaborating, and sharing generously, as he taught us. Thank you, Adam Kampff.

Best part about being a scientist is the people I get to work with. Valentin (@bio-emergent.bsky.social) and I got to give a talk at NeurIPS, bridging a gap between low- and high-dim perspectives of the brain. Thankfully, the audience was (somewhat) more awake than the San Diego desert 🏜️

The temperature in central the Netherlands over the past 320 years. Clearly shows that we're already well over 2 degrees of warming here. This year is heading for 11.5°C again. This coming Monday and Tuesday, we'll even have that average, in December...

Excited to share a new article, led by Barnes Jannuzi. Here we tried to pinpoint something about visual familiarity that isn't reflected in visual cortex via something putatively hippocampal. Nope! Per the theme of this era, the brain is not so simple. /1 www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

I’m keeping this one for the next time someone asks what harm it could do using “AI” to get started on some research.

Call is out for Champalimaud International Neuroscience Doctoral Programme 2026! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Since Trump took office, the US Is funding fewer grants in every area of science and medicine or 41 % below average www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Our lab plans to attend en masse. We think #FENS2026 will be the greatest FENS meeting ever. See you in Barcelona!

· #AcademicSky · The European Research Council is launching €7m Plus Grants for ambitious, long‑term research — open to researchers at any career stage but limited to about 30 awards; current ERC grantees and applicants are ineligible, reports @clanicholson.bsky.social.

An AI agent, run by collaborators on another continent, generated equations that explain the dynamics of the neurons we recorded 🤯 Finally had the time to read the paper after post-SfN recovery. The approach is v cool, & the Gaussian parametrization feels almost embarrassingly obvious in hindsight.

This 2017 preprint by @suryaganguli.bsky.social is foundational: the dimension of a neural code can't be > that of the experiment used to measure it. Yet it is not very widely known. Maybe because people don't like the message? And because it's "unpublished"? (After writing it, Gao left for SpaceX)

Hearing a rumor that NIH/HHS may now plan to retaliate against other Bethesda Declaration signers. I am one, but it’s not about me: we have been speaking out because of the ongoing damage to US medical research, cancer and Alzheimer’s research. As @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social put well: 1/

It is a small trip off the NIH campus in order to post this, but I have a bike and the weather is excellent!

Image screening is going to fail. We need audit trails for data provenance.

Sometimes it feels like the LLM is a Prima Donna, and the prompt is a motivational pep talk putting it in just the right frame of mind to get peak performance.

🚨 Big news for the neuroscience community! The Call for Abstracts, Travel Grants and Registrations for #FENS2026 is officially open! 🧠 👉 Register and submit your work today: https://loom.ly/usQR0ao

This is an excellent blueprint on a very fascinating use of AI scientist! And the results and super cool and interesting! 🤩 I have been asked this when talking about our work on using powerlaws to study representation quality in deep neural networks, glad to have a more concrete answer now! 😃

I've been super excited about @kevinjmiller.bsky.social and @neurokim.bsky.social's AI scientist project since I heard about it delighted to see them collaborating here with the awesome @kenneth-harris.bsky.social and lab to create full-on new science and new scientific insights. It's the future!

Now that the Sept and Oct data are (belatedly) in, it looks like 2025 will be the second warmest year in the record (~80% probability). The last three years are in a class of their own.

1. Overshoot 1.5°C unavoidable, but returning below is possible Every five years without substantial CO2 emission reductions locks in an additional temperature increase of about 0.1°C, and implies an additional need of around 200 billion tonnes CO2 of negative emissions to return to 1.5°C.

6. The AI scientist took 45 minutes and $8.25 in LLM tokens to find a new tuning equation that fits the data better, and predicts the population code’s high-dimensional structure – even though we had only tasked it to model single-cell tuning.

1. New preprint resolving a conundrum in systems neuroscience with an AI scientist, and humans Reilly Tilbury, Dabin Kwon, @haydari.bsky.social, @jacobmratliff.bsky.social, @bio-emergent.bsky.social, @carandinilab.net, @kevinjmiller.bsky.social, @neurokim.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Don't skip this. It's masterfully done, and many of the key points are GENERAL and apply to many other fields. "there can sometimes just be lots of smoke" I discuss the general case here: labrigger.com/blog/2025/11...

Our lab is looking for a postdoc! We have interesting projects and cutting-edge techniques such as Neuropixels Opto, Light Beads Microscopy and more. We would be delighted to receive your application. Deadline is 25 November 2025. More info here: www.ucl.ac.uk/cortexlab/po...

The end of the internal combustion engine? Sales of petrol and diesel cars in China peaked in 2017 and are now falling rapidly. The shift to electric and low-carbon transport is well underway—and EV sales are rising fast.

All talks of the 2025 UCL #Neuropixels course are now available: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... For more information on the course see the website: www.ucl.ac.uk/neuropixels/... And for those at #SfN, come say hi at the #Neuropixels booth (Number 3731) or at my Poster 👋. Happy Neuropixeling!