Super useful tips & tricks for insect specimen imaging from @andrewjohnston.bsky.social! He shares how to build an affordable focus stacking system on your own. Handy guide available here: www.insectid.org/post/focus-s... #ECN2025 📸 🪲

Fish in Michigan are getting smaller. Warming water, agriculture runoff, microplastics, and chemical toxins now flow through every tributary, every gill, every egg. Climate change heats the surface. Pollution poisons the depths. Between them, the lakes are starving. apple.news/AhaipZbCLT5G...

Findings reveal how TGF-beta signalling keeps the brain’s blood vessels healthy. Disrupting this in brain blood vessels disrupts retinal development and triggers immune cell invasion, revealing its role in maintaining vascular–immune balance in the CNS. buff.ly/1mIc6m0

If we had more of people like him… scientists like me would’ve never had a chance 😒

the only "honor" Watson's getting from me is that i've built a lab full of outstanding students who are everything he hated: Black, Indigenous, female, trans, queer, neurodivergent, disabled, immigrant, and beyond. he might be what the past of our field looks like- but the future looks like my lab.

Scientific breakthroughs are rarely unique; someone else would’ve made them soon enough. But when prominent scientists cause harm, that harm isn’t inevitable; the world might simply have been better had the harm not been inflicted. liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/j...

In case anyone is wondering if Watson was really THAT bad, @lpachter.bsky.social compiled a list of quotes that are absolutely not for the faint of heart. liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/j...

I talked with the @scifri.bsky.social peeps the other day for an episode on resolution and vision.

😭

Evidence from 14 research funding programmes confirms that early winners tend to keep winning (Matthew effect). But the idea that an early setback makes you stronger later doesn’t replicate widely. buff.ly/UEtcRd4

Well this was neat. World's biggest spiderweb discovered inside 'Sulfur Cave' with 111,000 arachnids living in pitch black | Live Science share.google/IcsbD2Lb3zhT...

Supercool deep dive into sawfly ovipositor functional morphology, with applications to surgical tools!

REMINDER: A socialist act by a New Yorker was a major reason why polio was eliminated in the US.

New article from the lab out today, in which we discuss how social behavior evolves at the molecular level. From parenting across the animal tree of life to caste systems in social insects, it’s all connected (and, therefore, slowly starts to make sense)…

Glia gang, this is for you! In this video by our #ElectronMicroscopy team, shows a pyramidal neuron (PyC) surrounded by 8 glia brain cells – 5 microglia (MG) and 3 oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPC). 🧠📈 http://microns-explorer.org

Now out in Cell! Congratulations to all involved, especially @chiarafornetto.bsky.social For a breakdown, see the bluetorial from when we posted the preprint: bsky.app/profile/neur... Funding: @erc.europa.eu @wellcometrust.bsky.social @ukri.org @leverhulme.ac.uk @thelisterinstitute.bsky.social

Ms Chalcoscirtus diminutus, being a tiny shiny nugget 🖤 #EmotionalSupportSpood

Annual plug for the fabulous phylopic.org website with tens of thousands of easily searchable silhouette images for almost every life form imaginable. They make nice additions to your biology plots!

Quite a bit of visible migration today @flamboroughbird.bsky.social Thrushes flying low in the strong south westerly wind with cloud, coming off the sea and making landfall. A flock of 11 Snipe and several Woodcock. A marvellous sight.

Proud to have contributed to @gaiabianchini.bsky.social and @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social new paper on how the superior colliculus temporally integrates multisensory information

Awww wolf spider with babies 🥰

A film you’ve seen more than seven times with a gif (Tis the season)

@nadjageiger.bsky.social & @roesslerdaniela.bsky.social are back in the field in Australia filming and experimenting with the best spider in the world - PORTIA. More soon!

Layers of vision, glowing green #FluorescenceFriday Here, #photoreceptors expressing a #glutamate biosensor mark the first step in visual processing, with a single inner-retina #neuron (likely amacrine) revealing deeper circuit activity before signals ever reach the brain. #Neuroscience #Microscopy

Sensory receptor expansion and neural accommodation in butterfly color vision https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.30.685642v1

In the spirit 👻 of Freaky Friday 🎃, here is a beautiful yet eery video of zebrafish retina development showing horizontal cells (🔵) finding their way out of the crowded amacrine (🟠) layer to settle beneath the photoreceptors. Happy #Halloween! 🎥: PhD student Rae Wong from the @nordenlab.bsky.social

Whoops, I’m keeping her. Her name is Whisper (Wisp for short.)

🧘🏽‍♂️🧘🏽‍♂️🧘🏽‍♂️ Random rocks and stuff that I have been picking up over the past few years from various water bodies are back in the water ✌🏽

Do flies feel pain? Spooky new preprint from our lab on the cells and circuits that mediate nociceptive behaviors in adult Drosophila, led by graduate student (and newly minted PhD!) @jonesjes.bsky.social. 🪰⚡👻🎃 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Arthropod Photo of the Week: October 29, 2025 Net-casting spider Asianopis sp. Araneae: Deinopidae By Dennis Botterbusch, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany #arthropodPOTW

Lab members are once again outdoing themselves at the annual @rockefeller.edu pumpkin carving contest. This year’s submission: an ant farm pumpkin with a carpenter ant colony digging to find a chamber of prey Drosophila.

After all these years, It eventually got the frame it deserves. Respect 🪰

Age and attitude: How longevity influences cognitive biases in #honeybee workers: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... @royalsocietypublishing.org

How do pleiotropic TFs generate organized diversity in developing tissues? @spinalorga.bsky.social shows that PAX3 & PAX7 organize #SpinalCord by acting as both repressors & pioneer activators, regulated by #morphogens to ensure precise neural subtype specification @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4qumsla

the basis of optimism is sheer terror (Oscar Wilde); perhaps this applies here

Look. At. Him. Look at him!!!!

Our beautiful Juniper (Phidippus Adumbratus) moulted recently and is looking magnificent 🥹 We're pretty sure she's mature now, but we'll check in a week or so for that signature shiny epigynum. Just look at her monching on her toe beans 😍 #jumpingspider #cute #arachtober

With how horrible everything is… picking up aquaculture as a hobby is pretty calming 🧘🏽‍♂️

Isopods!! 🧡

Spiders are precision hunters, not just creepy crawlies. 🕷️ This PNAS Science Sessions episode dives into cutting-edge research on spider webs that hear, silk-powered lifts, and REM sleep-like states in jumping spiders. Tune into this Halloween Special: https://ow.ly/W5NO50XhCZ7

Fall is hereeee 🍁

What makes PhD students happy? Good supervision @nature.com 🧪🎓 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Mechanical forces can affect the way tissue grows. Ideally, we want to characterize them without interfering with the processes we are studying. Is there a way to achieve this? I am @borgesaugust.bsky.social Welcome to my stress inference tutorial! #EpithelialMechanics

Exciting new work from former team members Eric Romero, Cwyn Solvi, Fei Peng and colleagues makes the cover of Science: affective contagion in bumblebees! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Stop killing bugs ffs.

A pair of new studies in ESA journals offer some reassuring findings about Jorō spiders: “These spiders are easy to manage and pose a minimal health risk.”

For #FluorescenceFriday - projection neurons from the mouse prefrontal cortex to the locus coeruleus 🔴 with Fos labeling activated cells 🟢. Image credit to the Circuits team in the Translational Neuroscience Division @lieberinstitute.bsky.social 🧠🔬🧪