A new technology that simultaneously records and manipulates neuron activity deep within the brain could transform our understanding of neural circuits and neurological conditions. Co-authored by @carandinilab.net at @ucleye.bsky.social. In @natmethods.nature.com. www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-scienc...

Marjane Satrapi, author of 'Persepolis,' dies at 56

Scientists are raising the alarm about a White House proposal that could fundamentally recast federally funded science. The proposed rules would put political appointees in control of all federal grants and de-emphasize peer review, among other measures. go.nature.com/4ucZgsk

Mice use the same thalamocortical pathway to decode orientation selectivity established by Hubel and Wiesel in cats, showing that this visual feature “is preserved through evolution,” says Jose-Manuel Alonso. #neuroskyence By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/vision/unbel...

Neuropixels + Optogenetics = Neuropixels Opto Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics. 960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors. Today in @natmethods.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s415... Thanks to @wellcometrust.bsky.social, @alleninstitute.org, @hhmijanelia.bsky.social & team.

🪼 Your tax dollars paid a scientist to squeeze jellyfish through cheesecloth. Osamu Shimomura processed tens of thousands on an NSF grant to understand why they glow. He found a protein that glowed green under UV light. Called it "green protein." Nobody cared. For decades.

Yup. Sitting on a 3% scored R01 since Jan and I still don’t know if it’s getting funded. This is just not sustainable. How is the NIH going to spend its mandated budget?!

As with climate, society as a whole has amnesia for this kind of thing. When you're young, or you moved into the area a few years ago, it's hard to know how many birds were singing, and butterflies and bees were flying around here, a few decades ago.

New method for identifying the fine transcriptomic types of thousands of neurons recorded in vivo!

A deeply thoughtful piece. Galileo, Newton, and Darwin communicated theiories and discoveries by writing books. Einstein, Adrian, and Crick wrote journal articles. What will be the next form of scientific publication?

Scientific funding is under attack in both the US and the UK. In the US the attack is intentional, with a tinge of evil. In the UK it's apparently unintentional and just due to utter stupidity. Not sure which one is better.

Breaking news: Indiana University plant microbiologist Roger Innes has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders. The move comes after Innes complained about the government’s prosecution of Chinese postdocs. https://scim.ag/4tsDqRr

We’re excited to welcome a new cohort of project partners to the International Brain Laboratory (IBL). Advancing open, collaborative neuroscience at scale. Explore the projects: internationalbrainlab.com/projects-new... #Neuroscience #OpenScience #DataScience

Who else is going to #FENS2026 in July?

Rewards are too rare in academia www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations doi.org/10.59350/5zt... 🧪

Many regions code for impact factor. Very cool!

An insightful distinction: prediction vs. understanding.

The footsteps illusion-like pausing and sticking illusion The rectangles in the upper half appear to move to the right and stop periodically; however, they are moving to the right at a constant speed in the same way as the rectangles in the lower half.

Neuromatch has been denied our Office of Foreign Assets Control "Iran license" renewal. We had renewed successfully before, but now our request is “inconsistent with current U.S. foreign policy.” I am absolutely gutted by this denial.

On this day 70 years ago-May 1, 1956-the polio vaccine was first made widely available to the public. The vaccine’s developer, Dr. Jonas Salk, did not patent the vaccine so that it would remain available to as many people as possible in the US and internationally. Image: Harvey Georges/AP.

Excited to see our paper describing a stereotyped receptor map for smell (led by @davidhbrann.bsky.social ) out in the world! See below for short thread with open access link to paper www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/s...

Excellent new review about the current state-of-the-art in large scale neural recordings from Josh Siegle and @steinmetzneuro.bsky.social: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🎉 We’re delighted to announce Professor Erin Schuman, will become Director of the UCL Queen Square Institute (@uclqsion.bsky.social) from 1 Jan 2027. www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2026/ap...

📖 “This paper changed my life” — Erin Calipari In a recent feature by The Transmitter, Erin Calipari reflects on a pivotal 1960s study by Kelleher and Morse that reshaped how she thinks about behavior. Read more 👉 www.thetransmitter.org/this-paper-c...

Fantastic news! @erin-schuman.bsky.social is coming to UCL!

Last year my book The Animal and the Thinker came out. Basic idea – how the operating principles of instinct and reason together answer big human questions. Right and wrong. Culture wars. Family and work. The meaning of life. That sort of thing. Now as an add-on I’m starting a blog…

Finally online @natmethods.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... This was a fun collaboration with @finkryan.bsky.social @massecklab.bsky.social @tpatriarchi.bsky.social @martinfuhrmann.bsky.social @campbell-lab.bsky.social @jangrundemann.bsky.social 🧪🧠🔬🧬

Hiring: Neuroscience roles at the International Brain Laboratory. We’re looking for: Neuroscience Community Engineer Neuroscience Research Software Engineer / Data Scientist All applications must be submitted by May 8th. Flexible US/Europe locations. www.internationalbrainlab.com/opportunitie...

For nearly a century, we believed the therapeutic effect of ECT is the seizure. Our latest research suggests we may have been looking at the wrong event. A thread on why cortical spreading depression (CSD) might be the driver of therapeutic benefit. Work led by @therehugolad.bsky.social

New @ucleye.bsky.social & @uclqsion.bsky.social research reveals a unified explanation for how neural activity shapes blood supply across the entire brain. www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-scienc... @carandinilab.net @agnesland.bsky.social

Going from neural activity to blood flow just became easier! Two brainwide populations, each with its neurovascular coupling. (But going backwards... is now a tad more complicated.) By @agnesland.bsky.social & team. Thanks @intlbrainlab.bsky.social @wellcometrust.bsky.social @simonsfoundation.org

When it comes to blood flow in the brain, not all neurons are created equal. Rather, only a subset of neurons may be driving vascular changes, a new study finds. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neurovascula...

How does blood flow relate to brain activity? We discovered that it reflects two neural populations affected oppositely by arousal. Together, they explain neurovascular coupling in all brain regions and brain states! Out today in Nature: rdcu.be/fdC2A @uclbrainscience.bsky.social

New preprint, on a very different topic: a mathematical theory of evolution for self-designing AI. AI is increasingly designed by AI. What systems might emerge after generations of self-designing AIs competing for computing resources? ↓ arxiv.org/abs/2604.05142

Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1

Want to explore connectivity & projection patterns yourself, like we do here? We released brain_street_view to let you pick any injection site in the Allen Connectivity Atlas and visualize where it projects in your favorite region of interest: github.com/Julie-Fabre/brain_street_view

Fellow X-scientists! Curious who among you might want human iPSCs stably expressing ASAP-family green fluorescent voltage indicators. Cardiomyocytes and neurons differentiated from these iPSCs can self-report voltage with <1-ms and <1-mV resolution by standard widefield imaging.

It’s brutal in academia right now. A lot is out of our control, but it doesn’t cost anything to remember that there are humans behind papers and grants…reviewers, program officials and funders can be more empathetic in the face of unprecedented chaos in the US scientific enterprise.

How do the basal ganglia turn what you see into what you do? New preprint w/ @kenneth-harris.bsky.social, @flickerfusion.bsky.social & @carandinilab.net: we recorded across striatum, GPe & SNr in a Go/NoGo task. Striatum encodes which stimulus, GPe & SNr encode action. 🧵 biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Some reports say over 500 schools, 55 libraries, & 25 universities hit. You can debate the numbers, but hitting Sharif University & Beheshti is like hitting MIT & Stanford. I keep wondering: How would the scientific community respond differently if it was those universities? What’s the difference?

Fascinating to learn about how this quirk of the US legal system that dates back to the Civil war is contributing to the battle against scientific fraud, especially in areas like cancer research where falsification is most abominable.

The research is freaking cool. But please, please, journalists and influencers, absorb this sentence: "Functional emotions...do not imply that LLMs have any subjective experience of emotions." We're moving into unfamiliar territory, and it's so important that we think clearly about it.

Wait… localized norepinephrine transients in the awake visual cortex?! Who would have guessed this neuromodulatory signal is that spatially precise, right where visual processing is happening. Brain state control just got a lot more local. @ruedigersarah.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fascinating analysis from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com in today's @financialtimes.com Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite www.ft.com/content/3880... (Paywalled)

‘The UK is saying the same thing as the Taliban’: the women banned from studying in Britain

How psychedelics push your brain to dream while awake – new study theconversation.com/how-psychede...

Congratulations to Ian Thornton and colleagues who published their Mainz-Linez illusion in i-Perception (@pec-ipe.bsky.social): the red dots appears to wave left and right when one looks at one of the black dots, but they actually move straight journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

PSA: One consequence of AI language models is that you should check your spam folder regularly. LLMs can generate targeted/tailored outputs at scale, resulting in a growing overlap between spam and email meant for you. Filters are failing: more spam in your inbox AND more of your mail in spam.