Pleased to have this review out in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social. In it we discuss various aspects of the intersection between foraging behaviors and neuroscience, and offer some future directions: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨Big news!🚨 The lab is relocating to Lisbon, joining a great team of experimental and theoretical neuroscientists, and the Neurotechnology Warehouse, a new initiative to bridge basic and translational research. I'll be sharing postdoc openings soon. Come join us in this new incarnation of the lab!

#geff v1 is released! 🎉 GEFF is a zarr-based Graph Exchange File Format with special support for tracking applications in Python and Java. Thank you to all the amazing developers who contributed at the Janelia 2025 Trackathon! liveimagetrackingtools.org/geff/

Our first preprint has been accepted for publication www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... !! tldr: @ezeyulu00.bsky.social , @amartyapradhan.bsky.social , @dkoveal.bsky.social and I developed a method using injectable nanoparticles to turn mice into…constellations in motion. 🧵⤵️

BREAKING: WE WON!!! 💥 💥 💥 Federal Judge William G. Young ruled today in our lawsuit against the Trump administration that the policy of arresting, detaining, & deporting noncitizen students & faculty members for their pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the 1st Amendment. Full ruling here:

Our new study featured in The Transmitter by @lauren-schneider.com! 🎉 Big thanks to @zeronoiselab.bsky.social and @computingnature.bsky.social for their comments on the work.

Mice do play with humans: Our new study found that selective breeding makes mice more playful toward both humans and other mice. We also found that both mice and hamsters produce distinct vocalizations depending on the species of their interaction partner. authors.elsevier.com/a/1lsK5_3oCG...

@scadsai.bsky.social training coordinator @haesleinhuepf.bsky.social provided insights into his professional career in the podcast series “The Microscopists.” If you want to know why he'll never ask biologists for better images again, click here: 🍍 themicroscopists.bitesizebio.com/episodes/rob...

Did you know that facial expressions reveal more than meets the eye? 🤯 Our new study shows that even a mouse's face 🐭 can reflect hidden neural computations🧠. Turns out, facial expressions are more than just emotions! We're so excited to see this paper out @natneuro.nature.com 🎉 🔗: rdcu.be/eIQzO

One thing that comforts me in the current era is that, despite everything, really cool science continues to be published: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... This could be a breakthrough for managing so many autoimmune diseases (still, in mice—don't get too excited).

The WB-ExM protocol described here works with.... every sample we tested! Here a 3do quail embryo (white= pan-protein; red=MF20) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint! How can you remember an image you saw once, even after seeing thousands of them? We find a role for humble mid-level visual cortex in high-capacity, one-shot learning. doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.22.677855 🧵🧪1/

Is visual cortex more like chatGPT or a masked autoencoder? Come to my BCCN seminar tomorrow at 10am ET on zoom (or read the paper) to find out! #neuroscience Zoom: urldefense.com/v3/__https:/... Paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🛑 Attention researchers who train freely-moving rodents! Jess Breda and I developed a protocol for training center-port nose fixation 61% faster than a previous curriculum while keeping violation rates low. Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Does predictive coding work in SPACE or in TIME? Most neuroscientists assume TIME, i.e. neurons predict their future sensory inputs. We show that in visual cortex predictive coding actually works across SPACE, just like the original Rao+Ballard theory #neuroscience www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

A spatially resolved transcriptomic atlas of the primate amygdala (human, macaque, and baboon) now out in Science Advances (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...). The amygdala contains 32 types of neurons with many neuron types specific to particular subdivisions. Lots of updates from the preprint!

In another exciting development our new preprint is online: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... This is the work of my brilliant graduate student Katerina Kourkoulou in collaboration with Maggie Liu and Arnold Mathijssen. Here is a video of the subject of our study:

New paper with @mujianing.bsky.social & @prestonlab.bsky.social! We propose a simple model for human memory of narratives: we uniformly sample incoming information at a constant rate. This explains behavioral data much better than variable-rate sampling triggered by event segmentation or surprisal.

Excited to announce that my first postdoc paper is now online! Links: www.nature.com/articles/s41... rdcu.be/eAcN7 In it, we examine the perennial question: what changes in the brain when learning a new motor skill? Read more below to find out 👇

I still get chills Meet Mike *30+ years severe depression *first hospitalized @ 13y *20 meds *3 rounds of ECT *2 near-fatal suicide attempts Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE see videos, read paper, follow thread doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Wanna know about *internal* reinforcement learning? We'll show you seemingly random switches during perceptual multistability is a form informational foraging, is task-modulated & how RL explain them all! Poster B71, Wed 2-5pm, talk to @neuroprinciplist.bsky.social 2025.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=8...

Looking forward to attending #CCN2025 for the first time and presenting the first steps of my postdoc project! If you’re interested in how learning the temporal structure of the environment affects foraging decisions and how we’re testing this in a naturalistic experiment come by poster B90, Wed.

Because I am angry I will share this again. One of the reasons that Israel is able to target individuals so precisely is that it collects every phone call in Gaza and stores the recordings in Microsoft Azure, then uses AI to analyze and pick targets.

Beyond outrageous: The IDF has confirmed killing noted Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, and three of his colleagues, inside a tent for journalists outside Al-Shifa hospital. Call your reps and insist on a halt to US support of these war crimes. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

New preprint + thread 🧵 #Psychedelics induce the formation of new synapses, but where do they connect? Our rabies tracing study reveals that #psilocybin shifts connectivity across specific cortical networks. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/12

🚨 New preprint + thread 🧵 We've gone back to studying motoneuron control principles and their applications & here's paper #1: A proof-of-concept study showing that people with tetraplegic spinal cord injury can control up to 2DoF from a single intramuscular implant www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Episode 11 - In which @erinweisbart.bsky.social and I talk about just how much we love ilastik (@ilastik-team.bsky.social) and how it's great for so many problems! Also, that you should use a small brush.

The Neuroscience Dept at American University is hiring for a tenure-track position at the Assistant level with expertise in Computational Neuroscience. Apply by Sep 15: american.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/AU/job/Main-... #FacultyJobs #AcademicJob #Neuroscience #CompNeuro #AI #ComputationalPsychiatry

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

Excited to work at Janelia, with mentorship from me or another theory and computation group leader? This is a great program for theorists ready to be semi-independent and tackle their own questions!

Our new paper is out! When navigating through an environment, how do we combine our general sense of direction with known landmark states? To explore this, @denislan.bsky.social used a task that allowed subjects (or neural networks) to choose either their next action or next state at each step.

Public access to the first fly connectome that spans the whole CNS - BANC!: codex.flywire.ai?dataset=banc Different from prior connectomes - it is brain + cord (think spinal cord) We use it to ‘embody’ the system and find it resembles ‘subsumption architecture’ doi.org/10.1101/2025...

With @megyounger.bsky.social's lab, et al., we present the first connectomics work in the disease-vector mosquito Aedes aegypti, revealing how its brain is wired to detect host cues. Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... #Neuroscience #Connectomics #vEM #VectorBiology 🧪

Super excited to see this paper from Armin Lak & colleagues out! (I've seen @saxelab.bsky.social present it before.) www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... tl;dr: The learning trajectories that individual mice take correspond to different saddle points in a deep net's loss landscape. 🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

How can magellanic #penguins navigate tidal currents while balancing #EnergyEfficiency & foraging opportunities? This study reveals how they adaptively make S-shaped return paths to their colony, optimizing travel in complex oceanic flows @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/40nKyD4

Beautiful work! Very cool that the cancelation of self-generated motion seems to rely on proprioception rather than efference copy. Electric fish seem to also use proprioceptive signals for their own cancelation of posture-specific sensory cues (www.cell.com/neuron/fullt....

What’s better than a one-channel #Miniscope? 🥁 A TWO-CHANNEL Miniscope! Our new Miniscope2C is a dual-channel, open-source Miniscope that lets you record 2 fluorescent signals simultaneously in freely moving animals. Read the paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (1/10)

I'm a professor at the flagship university for the fourth whitest state in the US. Over 80% of our students are white. The biggest barrier to access here is that due to lack of state funding, we have top 10 highest tuition per capita of public unis in the country. We also have a food pantry.

About 84% of students attend colleges that are considered “non selective”. If these dudes really wanted to improve access they would push to make public universities free. These dudes don't want more students attending public colleges. They want universities to keep certain people out.

1/ New paper out in @commsbio.nature.com, led by @marinv.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1038/s420...! Across several past studies, we showed how newborns' degraded vision may benefit human development and inspire more robust deep networks. We have referred to this as Adaptive Initial Degradations (AID).

Mice learn these tasks and are robust to perturbations like fog. Now, we invite you all to make AI agents to beat mice. We present our #NeurIPS competition. You can learn about it here: robustforaging.github.io (7/n)

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions. Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

New by Agnès Landemard (@agnesland.bsky.social‬) & co Brainwide blood volume reflects opposing neural populations Brainwide fluctuations in blood volume arise from two populations with opposite relation to brain state and distinct relationships to blood supply www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🔬API-first feature extraction for image-based profiling workflows If you need to obtain interpretable features from your segmented microscopy images, but want to do it in a fully automated way, we know the struggle. 1/6

I would love (and am trying) to build a whole lab off of data reuse + modeling. This article pointed to some useful resources I hadn't heard of. I would also add that reuse can be for things far afield from what the data was originally collected for. Your data may have value you've never dreamt of!

Yes! Sharing neural recordings improves reproducibility and transparency, and reduces the need for new experiments - we should value it. And reuse is really happening: @steinmetzneuro.bsky.social's datasets (highlighted) have over 80k downloads! 🔥 figshare.com/authors/Nick...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

(1/7) New preprint from Rajan lab! 🧠🤖 @ryanpaulbadman1.bsky.social & Riley Simmons-Edler show–through cog sci, neuro & ethology–how an AI agent with fewer ‘neurons’ than an insect can forage, find safety & dodge predators in a virtual world. Here's what we built Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06981

Elon Musk casually, and illegally, dismantled USAID. According to a new study in the Lancet, that action will lead to *14 million* premature deaths between 2025 and 2030. Again: Elon Musk is directly responsible for 14 million coming deaths. 4.5 million will be children.