Wow this looks really cool. Would love to hear more.

New research from @profafia.bsky.social at the UCL School of Pharmacy. Human stem‑cell microcircuit models Alzheimer’s hyperexcitability with patient cells—an early human platform to study mechanisms and test therapies. Read more: www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science... @alzheimersresearchuk.org

Lovely paper on multi-room navigation — RSC has cells whose tuning rotates with each room's geometry, while hippocampal place cells simply remap or translate. Different solutions to encoding repeated structure across complex spaces. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.08.22.609122

Missed this when it came out last year. Peng et al. find that grid cells in mice running a self-motion task don't hold a single global pattern — instead they reanchor to task-relevant objects, encoding position in multiple local reference frames. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02054-6

I'm hosting a #PintOfScience night on the 19th May! Come along for a fun evening with awesome talks from UCL's @caswell.bsky.social and Holly Gregory! @ucllifesciences.bsky.social pintofscience.co.uk/event/maps-m...

Not about the HPC but still cool — preprint comparing representational drift in visual cortex with the same phenomenon in artificial neural networks. The two look strikingly similar. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.05.686897

Our next workshop will be on May 14th - hosted by @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social Come along for some great discussion on building better experiment-theory collaborations in neuroscience! Registration is free, but required

Get a pint with your science!

Awesome opportunity here!

Read it and weep visual cortex!

Great news indeed - at least some common sense has prevailed.

Nicely contrary to how I'd thought this worked: disrupting theta-timescale spiking impairs learning but leaves hippocampal replay intact. Suggests replay doesn't need clean theta sequences during behaviour to form. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.15.675587

What draws researchers into the world of #biodiversity science? 🎥 Hear from our academics about the moments that sparked their passion for understanding and protecting the #natural world. youtu.be/9BT3bL13K4s #EarthDay #EarthDay2026

Two of my favourite things in one paper — replay and SR. Wittkuhn et al find that during brief task pauses, human visual cortex replays task states, and the structure of those replays tracks implicit learning of a successor representation. Nice. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2507516122

This is intriguing and it models (among other things) an experiment we carried out back in 2004. Uncertainty underlies geometric effects on navigation and grid-cell tuning, Kang et al., preprint. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very much on board with this. Uncertainty also predicts grid expansion in novel environments — where uncertainty is transiently high — extending the framework beyond the geometric distortions they cover here. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.01.30.526278

How can we build better experiment-theory collaborations in neuroscience? We're hosting a series of 6 in-person, interactive workshops to discuss this. Come along! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/understand...

This was so much fun - a great initiative. I’d encourage anyone within striking distance to go to the rest of the series

This looks interesting… a unifying account of replay as context-driven memory reactivation. Reframes hippocampal replay not as a distinct phenomenon, but as a natural consequence of memory retrieval under changing context. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.03.22.533833

Feel just a bit more optimistic suddenly

"Humanity's next great voyage begins" #Artemis

Our paper is out today!!! (not an April fool's day joke) Congrats to authors @azulsilva.bsky.social, @belalima-paiva.bsky.social, Ele Pronier, and mostly to the amazing scientist and human being who led this project @facuumm.bsky.social #neuroskyence #hippocampus www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Join the UCL People and Nature Lab and @batconservation.bsky.social on 15 April, 5pm – 8.30pm, for a screening of The Invisible Mammal followed by a bat walk in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and then bat-themed drinks at a local pub. Register: www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science... #BatAppreciationDay

Really exciting human data from Staresina & team: ripples orchestrate single-neuron reactivation during sleep, driving memory consolidation. Direct evidence hippocampal replay supports episodic memory in humans. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.27.714528

Great papers in spatial neuro this week. Csicsvari's group: hippocampal place fields stabilise during learning while mPFC stays flexible. Giocomo's lab: CA1-subiculum topography actively shapes boundary coding & corner cells. doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.27.714523 doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.24.714092

Seems important!

Really interesting work from the Leutgeb & Bloodgood labs: NPAS4 — an activity-dependent transcription factor regulating inhibitory synapses — is crucial for place field precision and theta phase precession. Knock it out and the spatial code degrades. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.22.713468

This is really interesting. A more positive spin would be that we’re really not that different to each other. Note log scale

Well done Pip - more good news!

I am very much here for this level of shade (it's almost dead salmon fMRI level)

UCL now has its own beer — UCaLe. 3.4% ABV, which is roughly the percentage of my week I get to spend on actual research. Still, excellent pun. 🍺 anspachandhobday.com/shop/ucale

Great place to work!

A cautionary tale...!

Really cool modelling paper: ultraslow MEC oscillations drift grid fields, messing up path integration but generating new spatial memories in the process. A feature, not a bug? https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.13.711323

Simultaneous place cell and head direction cell recordings during cue conflict — Knierim's lab in Current Biology. Path integration recalibrates in coordination during locomotion but diverges during head-scanning immobility. Really nice experiment. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2026.02.031

Nice to see @caswell.bsky.social featured in this UCL post.

… though I really need to learn to keep my head still while I’m talking.

Ha ha. Great to see this out. It’s a very cool study.

There's still time to apply for the Royal Society Industry Fellowships, which allows talented scientists and engineers to move between industry and academia to foster the exchange of knowledge and support collaboration. Find out more: #RSGrants https://royalsociety.org/grants/industry-fellowships/

To accommodate applicants and PIs attending Cosyne, we’ve extended the MCN application deadline to Sunday, Mar 22. Please repost.

"Neighborhood street connectivity and hippocampus volume in older adults" Impressive study linking hippocampal volume in later life and street connectivity: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Big news from @edvardmoser.bsky.social and @m-bmoser.bsky.social — the grid cell toroidal manifold, like the HD ring, is preconfigured before experience. Guardamagna et al. show it’s there at P10, before eye opening, before locomotion. The spatial map exists before the animal has ever navigated.

20 years in, do we understand grid cells? Dorrell & @jwhittington90 say mostly yes — but the normative "why hexagons?" question still has legs. Great review that's honest about what we know, what we don't, and what deep learning has and hasn't contributed.

Ooooohhhh a real rib tickler!

The UCL cloisters have been beautifully restored for UCL200. Also they have a jar of moles.

Dogs evolved to eat your leftovers! Comparing dog & wolf genomes revealed dogs have up to 30 EXTRA copies of the amylase gene (AMY2B) that helps digest starch. This is a key genomic signature of living alongside humans & table scraps for thousands of years 🐕 www.nature.com/articles/nat... #2026MMM

Really happy to be part of this work with @masahironakano.bsky.social and @clopathlab.bsky.social. Theta sequence alternations can emerge from MEC dynamics alone — not intentional planning. Changes how we think about what theta sequences do. biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.29.696939v2

Meet Prof Mine Orlu. An expert in Pharmaceutics, she is the Head of Pharmaceutics at the UCL School of Pharmacy. Her research centres on creating advanced drug delivery systems designed to enhance therapeutic outcomes, particularly for patients with specialised needs. www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...

Meet Dr Laura Porro - a palaeobiologist uncovering the biomechanics of extinct species. Laura's research blends anatomy, engineering and evolution to understand how ancient animals lived, moved and adapted. Explore her work: linktr.ee/ucllifescien...

Meet our next IDW2026 Spotlight, Mohadeseh Shafiei Kafraj. Mohadeseh is a PhD student at @gatsbyucl.bsky.social, working on mathematical models of associative memory. Find out about her research to understand human memory by visiting: linktr.ee/ucllifescien...