4) “the complexity of biological phenomena is an argument for the use of mathematical methods rather than against it. In the case of a simple phenomenon we may hope to understand it without the use of mathematics, by simple inspection. But in a complex case we are left hopeless without mathematics.”

I'm looking to recruit a post-doc to help push forward our growing interests in insect ecotoxicology. Apply here by Nov 30th! (thanks for reposting) career5.successfactors.eu/sfcareer/job...

Maud Menten was born in Canada in 1879 and completed her UG and MD education at University of Toronto. As a research assistant with Leonor Michaelis in 1912, they wrote the classic paper describing the “Michaelis-Menten” model of enzyme kinetics.. #WomenInScience

Our new study modeling selection for (behavioral) variability has been covered in a lovely @genetics-gsa.bsky.social podcast featuring first author Shraddha Lall and @ecoevogal.bsky.social academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad...

Mouse brain, the next TopoTome step towards the holy grail

Exciting news for #drosophila #connectomics and #neuroscience enthusiasts: the Drosophila male central nervous system connectome is now live for exploration. Find out more at the landing page hosted by our Janelia FlyEM collaborators www.janelia.org/project-team....

"[F]rom the 1940s to the 1970s, a Bell Labs job was said to be just like working at a research university, except the pay was better, the equipment was more up-to-date, the machine shop was available for all your needs and you didn’t have to spend time teaching or applying for research grants."

🚨Preprint🚨 What started as an attempt to compare CT scans of diverse fly brains, ended up a new concept for analysis & segmentation of difficult tomographic data. No ground truths, no training, just maths. This is TopoTome, topological data analysis of 3D images www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The #EDS has the pleasure to announce that, after #EDRC2027 in Bonn, we will have #EDRC2029 in Szeged! Don’t forget these hashtags!

I wonder if the pilot was aware he just flew and safely landed practically the entire Swiss Drosophila fly community to Alicante. High pressure flying the fly people. 🪰✈️

The paper itself (with Henry Potter) is here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... (and is the European Journal of Neuroscience's most downloaded paper over the last two years! 😊)

The larger problem is the textbooks frame things in a "X does Y" kind of way. It's very hard to get people to envision a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system and what that will mean for where signals of different types can be observed...I don't have a good answer for this...

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🥳 Thrilled to share that our lab has been awarded an ERC StGrant for our project SigReg: Signal to Regeneration! How can we unlock limb regeneration in adult mammals? It’s time to apply what we learned from 🐸 ➡️ 🐭 Thank you @erc.europa.eu for supporting ambitious science!!!

Here's a #GiftLink for those who want to read the full NYT obit of historian of science & gender, Margaret Rossiter. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/s... #histSTM 🧪🗃️

My lab cannot afford donating at the moment, so I donated privately. Even if you don’t work on flies we all owe so much to FlyBase. Consider donating, and importantly, let’s strive to make the more official funding bodies aware of how much is at stake.

𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 by Earl K Miller, Scott L Brincat, Jefferson E Roy This promises to be a must read One day we should create an online journal club to just read these kinds of papers! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Why would anyone want to be a scientist? url: journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

If you run a fly lab and have not yet contributed to save FlyBase, please look at our wiki page for the latest information!

I just got the notice that all the FlyBase people at Harvard, including me, will be laid off on October 12. I'm devastated.

How it started / How it's going 😱 (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... / www.nature.com/articles/s41...) #preprint

Academia should not be a production where efficiency = many flawless but low penetrance pdfs. People become avoidant of taking risks and become burocrats. It's fine to be wrong. Reproducibility problems is related to ethics, not being right all the time.

Progress with my grant proposal:

Apply to this amazing lab and work on exciting and relevant challenges in AI-powered microscopy! Super opportunity to work with someone as cool as Martin!

So what can we do in response? A key problem: The transformation from long- to short-term funding leads researchers to flit from topic to topic, and move across fields chasing 'sexy' stories. Science is done better when you leave someone to geek out on a single topic for their whole career. 5/n

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field? That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience A 🧵 1/n

Yes, we should give you guidance up front. Also, as I frequently say, if you ever have a question about what your editor wants to see in a revision, ask us to review/approve a revision plan. I never want my authors losing sleep over my expectations. Truly.

Attractors are usually not mechanisms - new blog post: open.substack.com/pub/kording/...

Congratulations Samuel on officially being a PhD now!! Declared in French! You deserve all of it!! Congrats to @merianelion.bsky.social for successfully releasing 2 PhDs in this wild world in less than 5 years!! More to come!!

There are now three printed PhD theses on my bookshelf 🥹

Why is academia riddled with stale, incremental “low hanging fruit” science programs? When we make decisions on what kind of science to pursue, we can optimize for career payoff or scientific payoff, almost never both. I know I’ll always pick exciting science despite the cost. How about you?

Call from 6 Swiss Fields Medal laureates to preserve science funding science-under-threat.com

calling all fly folks, keep an eye out for new system coming soon, through which you can help support FlyBase in this time of dire need.

"OnlyFlies"

Towards more sustainable research: reducing the environmental impact when working with #Drosophila. Challiner, Saurya., Patel, Raff, Fostier, Prokop, A. (2025) @genetics-gsa.bsky.social‬, in press -- doi.org/10.1093/gene... - Always happy to discuss and hear your ideas and views!

And directly from the translation "Otto Hahn, a scientific autobiography."

Translated: “Lise Meitner's presentations in the "Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau" were obviously so good that one day the editor of Brockhaus' conversation dictionary asked Professor Sklarek to give him the address of Mr. Meitner, because he wanted an article for his lexicon. 1/2

The first three years I was entirely non-competitive for ERC StG: as a small experimental lab working on evolution and behavior we worked hard to establish the lab which in hindsight we did incredibly quickly, but no manuscript was even close to ready yet. 1/n

Remember all the way back in 2008 when they tried to track down the researcher who isolated the gene responsible for the glowing jellyfish nobel prize and he was a bus driver, now. www.npr.org/2008/10/09/9...

Happy Pride. Take a few minutes to listen to some queer voices of the past. Because queer, trans, LGBTQ+ people have always existed and will always exist. No matter what certain lawmakers in DC try to do.

71.5% proposed cut to NSF BIO directorate.

Presidential budget is out. Here's NSF. Biggest cut, by amount, is $1 billion, or 66.8%, from MPS (Physics & Math directorate). nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

Bumped into this meme on reddit and omg it’s so true and hilarious that I just had to make a real photo version of it 😂

The related study:

I love this video and a video that often goes with it of humans being way slower at doing the same task. I always wonder, why did the ants want that thing so much? If given a physically impossible version of this puzzle would they try forever?

I had a magical time at the University of Oxford - I stayed at a Magdalen College cloister, strolled through the School of Divinity, gave a talk and spent an amazing science day visiting the DPAG. Thanks to Scott Waddell for hosting me! Still in awe of the Oxford vibe, I hope to return there soon 🧙

If you're in the US, considering Europe for your PhD, and you identify as a minority, I will chat with you and review any application documents you need 🧪

Remain calm and carry on. We at Flybase have a plan and will make an official statement very soon.

Shit.