It’s been a 24 hour traveling day from Portland to Pécs, which includes 2 planes, a bus, a metro, a train & a car. I am so excited to be at ERM2025 and to be selected as a speaker in the New Perspectives, Tools and Resources session!

Our EMBL Press office has a nice little article on our recent paper on how the pupil's dynamics shape visual responses in the mouse and human. A new look at the pupil: more than just a gatekeeper www.embl.org/news/science...

*New preprint from the lab* – “Granularity of thalamic head direction cells” doi.org/10.1101/2025... 🧠📈 🧪 1/11

Neurons in mouse primary visual cortex that respond emergently to illusory contours drive pattern completion www.nature.com/articles/s41...

OUT NOW from @zvrlab.bsky.social in Nat. Communications: Fear conditioning activates brain areas linked to emotion and stress. Brain responses vary by task and mental health, showing different patterns in people with anxiety or depression. doi.org/10.1038/s414... #URochesterResearch

Heroic experiments recording in SC and V1 in unrestrained animals to see how the two areas differentially respond to visual detection (with causal perturbation)

Cool study showing the LC has dopaminergic as well as norepinephrine release differentially in different circuits--relevant to our understanding of how arousal shapes responses throughout the brain

🚨New preprint alert! The thalamus has long been seen as a relay of sensory signals to cortex. But could it also generate its own structured activity? Our study explores this question in the head-direction (HD) system. Some explanation 🧵👇 1/13 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excellent end to the Italian Congress for Neuroscience (SINS) - our postdoc Lucia Zanetti chairing a fascinating session on the retina & beyond together with @serenariccitelli.bsky.social! Well done & thanks to the speakers Stefano Di Marco, @santiagorompani.bsky.social, Norma Kühn & Max Joesch

Thrilled to share that our work is now published in Science! ✨ We found a preference for visual objects in the mouse spatial navigation system where they dynamically refine head-direction coding. In short, objects boost our inner compass! 🧭 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵1/

New (methods) preprint from the lab! NERV: A Comprehensive Framework for Rapid, Reproducible, and Hardware-Synchronized Neuroscience Experiment Design and Execution (1/10) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today! A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour www.nature.com/articles/s41... Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Amazing opportunity to apply for a PhD program with over 100 groups across 6 sites throughout Europe! No fee to apply, and we welcome applicants from all over the world.

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.

What a wild thing to read. "If such a prompt injection is included in a submission and it consequently results in a positive LLM-generated review, we consider this a form of collusion...that both the paper authors and the reviewer would be held accountable for, blog.iclr.cc/2025/08/26/p...

I wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it! Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Visuomotor mismatch EEG responses in occipital cortex of freely moving human subjects https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.14.670295v1

A new preprint from our lab with @zelechowski.bsky.social & @georgkeller.bsky.social ! Using wireless EEG + VR, we recorded visuomotor mismatch responses in freely moving humans. Huge thanks to all participants, Keller Lab members and FMI facilities! Read more: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Age-related cognitive decline in house crickets reveals conserved patterns of sensory and learning deficits across the lifespan https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.14.670304v1

The lab's first paper is out! We find that pupil constriction in mice drives strong retinal activity in vivo, and that humans can also perceive pupil-shaped stimulus. This has repercussions for anybody using pupillometry. 🧵1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence #neuroscience #neuro

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 “Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures,” by Fernando Rosas @frosas.bsky.social 𝑒𝑡 𝑎𝑙. in 𝑁𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑅𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤𝑠 𝑁𝑒𝑢𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

☣️🐀 Pesticide exposure in rats changes epigenetic signatures in different brain regions! Latest paper from our fruitful collaboration with Emily Rocha and Tim Greenamyre, linking epigenetic signatures of exposure to toxicants to Parkinson's disease: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

DNA Methylation Ageing Atlas Across 17 Human Tissues 👉“Our open-access atlas provides a foundational resource for dissecting the molecular architecture of human aging and identifying testable targets for intervention..” @nireynon.bsky.social and coauthors www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Neural Basis of Quantity Discrimination in Mice https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.26.666982v1

We talked about this back when the first trial for lenacapavir first said the magic words everyone wants to hear, "halted for efficacy"(*), so a recap: this is not a vaccine or a treatment. It's PrEP aka "pre-exposure prophylaxis": you take the drug so if exposed to the virus, you will not catch it.

Finally it's out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... How flexible are essential innate behaviours and their underlying neural circuits? @felixbaier.bsky.social & I, with Hopi Hoekstra and @farrowlab.bsky.social, addressed this by studying the #evolution of threat avoidance in Peromyscus mice.

Introducing our new favorite stimulus. A few minutes are enough to map the visual preferences of thousands of neurons. Mapping the visual cortex with Zebra noise and wavelets www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... By Sophie Skriabine and Max Shinn, with Samuel Picard and @kenneth-harris.bsky.social

Opportunity for anybody with a PhD who wants to develop technologies and methods, in particular in the context of scientific services (e.g. in a facility), a 3-year fully funded postdoc, with openings at many EMBL sites. My lab at EMBL Rome, for instance... (1/3) www.embl.org/training/ari...

A new study led by @timothysit.bsky.social reveals that different layers of mouse V1 integrate visual and non-visual signals differently. Activity is dominated by vision (or spontaneous fluctuations) in L2/3 and by movement in L5. This leads to different geometries. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Pupil dilation as a marker of attention/effort in aging and mild cognitive impairment https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.18.663475v1

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction. But... 🧠📈 🧪

TetO‐jGCaMP8s is a drop in replacement for the @crisniell.bsky.social mice with all the nice properties of 8s. High, dense expression, and doesn't have the aberrant activity. Was used here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yes, we used the TIGRE2-GCaMP8s line (037719), crossed with CaMKIIa-Cre. Although the GC8s sensor is great, we found the Tg mice had high neuorpil and low somatic expression in L2/3, not ideal for cortical imaging (never tried hippocampus) - we went back to GC6 as our workhorse Tg line.

Has anyone got any experience with gcamp8 transgenic mice yet? Eg the Thy1-GCaMP8s line? janelia.figshare.com/articles/dat...

The University of Sydney is recruiting senior and mid-career academics "within the top 5–10% of academics in their field, with a strong track record and availability to relocate to Australia within 6-months". If you're a psychologist/neuroscientist and are interested, get in touch with me soon.

#AltPride #AltGov To close out Pride Month, we are recognizing neuroscientist Ben Barres. Beyond making seminal discoveries related to glial cell function, he was also a staunch advocate for equality in science for both women and the LGBTQIA+ community. 1/n www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Switches in Orientation Coding by Mouse Primary Visual Cortex Neurons Depend on Stimulus Predictability. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.29.662227v1

Hey all, faculty position here at EMBl Rome closing in 10 days! We looking for people at the intersection of neuroscience and epigenetics (broadly interpreted, totally OK if stronger on one side or another) 1/x embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...

Very happy to share the latest from my postdoc‬! 10 yrs of mouse social networks + 1.25 yrs of acoustic data ➡️ insight into vocalization & sociality in a wild population of your favorite lab model 🐁 paper: bit.ly/4n93yyD data: bit.ly/4lfFBEk code: bit.ly/4kNnMwx #bioacoustics #neuroskyence 1/8

Now out in @natcomms.nature.com‬: Mice and monkeys spontaneously shift through comparable cognitive states - and it's written all over their faces! (1/7) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Place cells are activated when chickadees are *in* a location or *look at* a location. Not revolutionary given the Ulanovsky Lab's results with fruit bats, but still pretty cool. #neuroethology www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks for using DLC, and I’d be happy to provide more formal feedback, but one concern is you are comparing top down (thus cropped) models with full resolution bottom up models; mAP would be the appropriate metric to consider. 1/2

Please read and share this opinion piece written by Carole LaBonne (our fellow Xenopus researcher) published in STAT in support for animal models in biomedical research. www.statnews.com/2025/05/19/a... #science #devbio #xenopus #frogs

How does APOE change your risk of developing Alzheimer's disease? At least partially by changing the function of immune cells in your brain 🧠🧬 New paper out in @natcomms.nature.com today: www.nature.com/articles/s41... @ukdri.ac.uk @kingsioppn.bsky.social @imperialbrains.bsky.social

Ahem... While on the topic of #aphantasia & #mentalimagery: This preprint reports correlations between questionnaires & some measure of hippocampal asymmetry that explain 90-100% of variance. Whenever I see data like this, I'd immediately suspect a bug in the code. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

It's bad that this difference exists (& yes, I think men often behave poorly), but please pay attention to the actual effects sizes - they are really very small (even if significant). Look at the difference between "Man" and "Woman" in the key Figure from the original paper, and the Y axis size.

5.)A perspective arguing against the focus on 'category selectivity' (e.g. face v body v scene selectivity) in visual cortex and for a shift toward centering visual information needed for behavioral goals. The paper discusses how to re-interpret existing data in this light. arxiv.org/abs/2411.08251

Going through months-worth of Google Scholar Alert emails getting caught up on neuro papers, so I figured I'd share some fun findings here 👇

For your Sunday enjoyment, a 110-hour dataset of mice solving puzzle boxes: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15408 I got to see some of these videos during a visit to the Sprekeler lab; a very cute task.

I guess I should say we "may" differ - I need to read the book to know. I only know that I once wrote this, and I stand by it (especially as I transition to the unruly field of mood research). www.nature.com/articles/nn1...