New preprint: Neural manifolds that orchestrate walking and stopping Here we develop a new theory for neural generation of walking and how it can stop- Next we test the theory using Neuropixels probes in the lumber spinal cord of freely moving rats. See more: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

✨ Super stoked to announce that I will soon be joining the #SLEEB-Lab with @roesslerdaniela.bsky.social at @unibonn.bsky.social! Really excited for what’s to come!🕷️💤

Breaking News: Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, died at 91. Her discoveries in the 1960s about how chimpanzees behaved in the wild broke new ground and represented what was called “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.” nyti.ms/42kpGxt

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

And we are live! Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️ Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions! www.kaggle.com/competitions...

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

👁️The retina — strikingly conserved across vertebrates, but an oddity among bilaterians! So how did it evolve? With @mikebok.bsky.social, @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social, we argue that retinal complexity may 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑦𝑒 𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/n

Biology Department xkcd.com/3140/

🚨 PhD alert! IMPRS brain & behavior in Bonn just opened their calls for applications. Great PhD funding opportunities. Check it out! PS- I just joined their faculty, meaning you could do a rotation in my lab or even a PhD with me on spider sleep 🙃 Apply! 🚨

This should have been big news! Ten funding agencies from eight European countries have pledged to support a public infrastructure that is poised to replace academic journals: FWF 🇦🇹 RCN 🇳🇴 Forte 🇸🇪 ARIS 🇸🇮 SRC 🇸🇪 FCT 🇵🇹 CSIC 🇪🇸 DFG 🇩🇪 Formas 🇸🇪 ANR 🇫🇷 Only two of them issued press releases in […]

New paper: Drones & Computer Vision for Collective Animal Behavior 🐾 We show how edge AI + smart mission design turn drone footage into real-time behavior insights—with less disturbance. 🎥 Video Abstract: youtu.be/0DErP4Z5C7Q 📄 Paper: doi.org/10.1111/2041...

#rstats folks, is anyone aware of whether it is possible to plot data loaded with @duckdb.org - say I want to generate a density plot on a data set that's too large for in-memory?

Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇

Could someone try to submit a fellowship to the #EU #Fellowship Database - and give some feedback on the form: Is everything clear? Have I missed anything? Feel free to just try it out with a fictive fellowship (please label the title as "FICTIVE"). opnform.com/forms/eu-fel... #ECR #postdoc

Inspired by @deniswirtz.bsky.social and team, I'm collating a database of #PhD and #postdoc fellowships in the #EU. I'm standardising the information an entry needs, making it easier to (1) search and (2) contribute - and I would appreciate input, especially from other #ECR! Please share! 1/3

Inspired by @deniswirtz.bsky.social and team, I'm collating a database of #PhD and #postdoc fellowships in the #EU. I'm standardising the information an entry needs, making it easier to (1) search and (2) contribute - and I would appreciate input, especially from other #ECR! Please share! 1/3

Fellow #neuro / #animalbehaviour video tracking nerds: If you were to buy a brand new computer, your dream configuration (within reasonability), what would you go for and why? Would love some specs, models, GPU… asking for a friend (maybe 👀).

Fellow #neuro / #animalbehaviour video tracking nerds: If you were to buy a brand new computer, your dream configuration (within reasonability), what would you go for and why? Would love some specs, models, GPU… asking for a friend (maybe 👀).

New preprint!

 tl;dr — We ran around late at night to record wild rats in NYC and figured out how to quantify their behavior and environment. 🧵 w/ Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, Emily Mackevicius www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I’m thinking of writing a #Julia package and then writing an #Rstats package that provides an interface to the functions. Does anyone know which packages/frameworks that are best for this in 2025? Eyeing {JuliaCall}. Does anyone have experience with this, pointers or other things to consider?

📜🪇[PUBLISHED]: NEW PREPRINT!🪇📜 I am incredibly excited to announce that we have published our paper on how "Dynamical independence reveals anaesthetic specific fragmentation of emergent structure in neural dynamics" [email protected] @anilseth.bsky.social Barnett, Carter Strap in! 1/n

What are y'all learning that is fundamentally new to you? Having never done any geology, I'm currently having a blast going through a Geology 101 with Shawn Willsey on YouTube while travelling through the Andes. Next up will be some complexity courses from @sfiscience.bsky.social.

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

“The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.”

I need help identifying a #bumblebee! I’m in the Peruvian Andes, cloud forest near Salkantay (and Machu Picchu). We spotted this monstrously big orange bumblebee, 3-4cm long (see picture. We actually spotted them twice, but only managed to photo once). My best ID so far is Bombus dahlbomii, but…

I’d take it even further: Hype starts with a hyper-competitive, precarious job market which incentivises sensationalisation of papers - especially for early-career researchers.

Can anybody recommend good learning material for the use of DAGs in time series analysis? i'm interested in thoughtful takes on e.g. whether time should be a node or an index of several nodes, how to represent estimates of temporal differences in a clear way etc. #statssky

International students upend their lives to join American science, bringing their novel insights that drive innovation. Now, they are being illegally targeted by Trump, because Harvard won't back down. Classic bully behavior. We Stand Up for International Students. www.npr.org/2025/05/22/n...

Info theory offers powerful measures for capturing complexity & interaction among elements of a complex system, like the brain! 🧠 Here's our new unified reference for key info-theoretic time series measures ft. 📊 visuals, ➗equations, & 💬descriptions: arxiv.org/abs/2505.13080

You've heard of the many analysts projects, right? Scholars give the same dataset/question to a bunch of researchers & they still get different answers. Why is that? Data cleaning! This is consistent with Gelman's "garden of forking paths." Small coding decisions often drive results.

After two decades of modeling how brains make predictions & form predictive representations for memory & planning, I’m experimenting with slime mold & building evolutionary models. I’m humbled by the capacities of single cell organisms. This paper by Sole et al on how cells predict feels timely.

A question for #rstats plotting wizards: When working with big data, do you have cool ways of minimizing file sizes? I'm thinking of points and lines, without prior filtering, but any tricks are welcome! I've found the packages {scattermore} and {ggrastr}, but maybe there are more?

Had a blast at #ASABSpring2025, presenting movement and meeting many enthusiastic early career researchers. If you're into tracking animal movements in videos, do apply for the "Animals in Motion" workshop I'm organising in London this August: neuroinformatics.dev/open-softwar...

🦇👂🧠Our first bat paper is out! 🧠👂🦇 How do bats tell navigation from social calls? Led by the fearless Dr. Jenni Lawlor, we used 2P imaging to show that the auditory midbrain encodes categorical primitives. Check it out @natneuro.nature.com: rdcu.be/ehEgz

📖Published📖 Pereira et al. developed the Intertidal Environmental Chamber: a modular, open-source system designed to realistically simulate the complex thermal environment of intertidal habitats 🌊 🌎 🧪 buff.ly/s333yZ7

Any folks needing to make a new CV? 📝 I've made a pretty, customisable Typst template that let's you write all your information in YAML, offers many different section layouts and allows a great deal of customisation. typst.app/universe/pac...

📚😅🎉 Yay!! I just submitted the complete manuscript of my upcoming book to the publisher! Learn to easily and clearly interpret (almost) any stats model w/ R or Python. Simple ideas, consistent workflow, powerful tools, detailed case studies. Read it for free @ marginaleffects.com #RStats #PyData

Excited to share our new pre-print on bioRxiv, in which we reveal that feedback-driven motor corrections are encoded in small, previously missed neural signals.

Ethologists and neuroscientists: What is a theoretical ethology paper that has shaped the way you think about behaviour? Here I'm not thinking experimental papers with a point, or even tools that are developed to prove a point - purely theoretical, making conceptual, general points.

Ethologists and neuroscientists: What is a theoretical ethology paper that has shaped the way you think about behaviour? Here I'm not thinking experimental papers with a point, or even tools that are developed to prove a point - purely theoretical, making conceptual, general points.

Big news: we are setting up a new non-profit organization to run bioRxiv and medRxiv. It's called openRxiv [no it's not a new preprint server; it's dedicated organization to oversee the servers] openrxiv.org 1/n

Excited to present the latest from the lab out today in Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex.... See Thread! 1/8

In other news: I SUBMITTED MY THESIS TODAY!!!🪲📕

If you know anyone who would like to spend the summer contributing to open-source neuroscience software (and getting paid), please get in touch. Projects can include neuroanatomy, behaviour, ephys and data management tools.

Where do people publish their papers at the intersection between philosophy and animal behaviour? Both for preprinting and a journal.

I find it crazy that there's literally ZERO Danish postdoc Fellowships that enable Danes to be in Denmark in the Natural Sciences, apart from within specific domains (e.g. neuroscience, diabetes, cancer). www.sdu.dk/en/om-sdu/fa...

🗣️ Arts and Humanities Scholars: Are you ready? 🗣️ We are 👏 thrilled 👏 to announce that ORCID now supports an expanded range of work types, such as 🎼 musical compositions, 🎨 still and 🎞️ moving images, and even 📝 teaching materials!! Learn more: https://info.orcid.org/new-work-types/

Has anyone attempted to use {ggdist} to visualise predictions made from either {marginaleffects} or {ggeffects}? I love those packages and would love for them to meet! #rstats @mjskay.com @strengejacke.bsky.social @vincentab.bsky.social

In some fields it's customary to not show regression lines (and CI) when they aren't significant. I think that's silly (the CI shows the uncertainty). But what do do wiser stats-wiz'es think about this? Will reviewers be on my heels if I stray from the norms? #stats #rstats

For the animal computer vision folks: this is big! Installing your favourite tools such as idtracker.ai just became a whole lot easier!