8/10 TL;DR Arc capsid signaling links serotonergic neurons to dopaminergic neurons to regulate sleep. Not through classical neurotransmission. Not through a classical neuropeptide. Through a capsid-dependent signaling mechanism. ⬢⬡⬢

ALT:

static.klipy.com

Another fun fly Arc paper with the @thecaronlab.bsky.social! Turns out fly Arc mutants Sleep a ton. Like a LOT. See Sophie’s entertaining thread below and the preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Arc capsid signaling between serotonergic and dopaminergic neurons sets sleep depth in Drosophila

Arc genes evolved from Ty3 retrotransposons and encode proteins that self-assemble into virus-like capsids that package and transfer RNA between cells. This capsid-forming property may mediate a form ...

biorxiv.org

Sophie Caron@thecaronlab.bsky.social · yesterday

1/10 We all know that person... Fast asleep in the back of the seminar room. 😴 Suddenly, they WAKE UP 😳 ask the sharpest question ⚡ and everyone wonders whether they were listening all along. Our Arc mutant flies are THAT person. A thread! 🧶

I refused to meet up with any of the couples from our NCT class afterwards & to be honest it's one of my greatest parenting regrets. I'd love to track how they are now - the guy who wanted to ban his partner from painkillers, the woman who used 'gaming' as her solution to everything, they were awful

Stephen Bush@stephenkb.bsky.social · 10h ago

Literary plots I am surprised aren’t more common: friends fall out due to different parenting styles. (Yes, I *was* earwigging on the neighbouring table)

We should have an accelerated NHS roll-out of weight-loss drugs - given the overwhelming health benefits. Just 220,000 people due to receive in the next three years. www.arguably.uk/p/britain-ne...

Politics UK@politicsuk.com · 2d ago

🚨 NEW: The UK has become the first country in Europe to approve the daily weight loss pill Foundayo It helps people lose 12% of their body weight on average

This week Andy Burnham is going on a tour of the UK talking about dodgy shops. In the spirit of providing him with some ideas, London Centric partnered with Edinburgh Minute to look for the Londoner running gift shops that recently burned down in Scotland. www.londoncentric.media/p/edinburgh-...

Exit through the gift shop

Plus: "Vertical drinking" politics • Robocop comes to Greggs • Robotaxis controlled by humans • London's festivals-in-parks mess

londoncentric.media

The amount of impact just a few committed local journalists are having going up against a billionaire landlord is honestly hella inspiring. That they won’t let it go just makes me so fiercely proud of these folks. Get ‘em.

EdinburghMinute.com@edinburghminute.com · 2d ago

An update on who was running the tax-evading gift shops during the the Princes Street fire. Thanks to @jim.londoncentric.media and @pollysmythe.bsky.social of @londoncentric.media for persisting with investigating this shady Edinburgh saga: www.edinburghminute.com/investigatio...

Happy to share the CA3 dataset is published. First large-scale dense connectomics from hippocampus. First connectomic dataset imaged in @princetonneuro.bsky.social. A harbinger of many larger datasets to come (for both). doi.org/10.1038/s415... #hippocampus But my personal favorite is (1/2)

Hippocampal CA3 connectomics reveals a gradient of mossy fiber inputs and selective feedforward inhibition onto pyramidal cells - Nature Neuroscience

The authors present a dense connectomic reconstruction of a 0.1 mm3 hippocampal CA3 volume and reveal spatial gradients, high convergence and cell-type-selective feedforward inhibition of inputs to py...

doi.org

My newsletter turns five years old this month. It's time to take stock of where the climate is, and where the fight is. billmckibben.substack.com/p/take-five-...

Take Five

The Crucial Years at the halfway point

billmckibben.substack.com

it's always odd when "you should expose yourself to more diverse ideas" always means a certain kind of conservatism instead of like, Indigenous art, new fusion foods, math paradoxes, or the Dvorak keyboard layout

Google appears to be getting worse as a search engine at a rate of knots.

Very excited to be a part of this major initiative. Great things to come for Mitochondrial diseases.

Minczuk Lab@mitogene.bsky.social · last wk.

Delighted to share the launch of the Cambridge-led, £50m MRC Centre of Research Excellence in Mitochondrial Genome Therapeutics (CoRE-MitoGT). Over 14 years, we will unite international expertise to understand mtDNA disease & develop therapies targeting its root causes. www.ukri.org/news/mrc-fun...

Over at @pitchfork.com, I review Ever the Optimist, the lovely new album by the Trashcan Sinatras that now seems achingly poignant after the unexpected death of their rhythm guitarist John Douglas this week.

Trashcan Sinatras: Ever the Optimist

Read Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s review of the album.

pitchfork.com

I'll actually be playing my OG G&L ASAT on the tour that starts in, umm, two days. G&L stands for "George and Leo" and is the company George & Leo Fender started after they sold Fender. They just liked making guitars

Maria Bustillos@mariabustillos.com · 7d ago

Private equity strikes again: Fender's sudden decision to enforce its copyright on the 1950s Stratocaster design, 70-odd years later, is creating havoc in the guitar world. Misha Angrist has an absorbing account at @flaminghydra.com flaminghydra.com/issue-622/

After lengthy repair, the 172m Porto’s Dom Luís I Bridge reopened to public transport, taxis, cyclists & pedestrians only. After lengthy repair, #Edinburgh’s 160m North Bridge reopened with a lane of hatching, no cycling provisions, without widening busy pavements and no traffic reduction measures.

"Here we apply DNA Typewriter, a prime editing-based recorder that writes stochastic symbolic insertions to an engineered genomic TAPE in strictly sequential order, to trace mouse development from zygote (E0) to late organogenesis (E13.5)" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

In vivo reconstruction of the cell lineage history of a developing mouse with DNA Typewriter, from zygote to late organogenesis

The complete cell lineage of C. elegans, mapped over four decades ago, was tractable because the animal is small, transparent, and lineage invariant. Most animals are none of these, having orders of m...

biorxiv.org

Completely forgot to promote this wee article we wrote about ARUK 2026! pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... @britishneuro.bsky.social @alzheimersresearchuk.org #ARUK2026 #ARUKconf2026 @elizabethsimzer.bsky.social @sorayam.bsky.social

Avocados come in 2 varieties - A-types start each day female and switch to male midday. B-types do the reverse. In work just published from the last chapter of my PhD, we show this system evolved 40+million yrs ago and is regulated by alleles of 1 transcription factor www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Balanced polymorphism in a floral transcription factor underlies the ancient rhythm of daily sex alternation in avocado | PNAS

In avocado and certain wild relatives in Lauraceae, a highly synchronized daily rhythm of floral sex timing promotes cross-pollination between two ...

pnas.org

This is a proper proper jaw dropper www.thetimes.com/sport/footba...

Gianni Infantino’s plan to sell stakes in the World Cup

Fifa president could become ‘commissioner’ of new company in plan discussed with Trump’s administration, but critics fear it’ll be a ‘nuclear bomb’ for the game

thetimes.com

How does the brain know where the body has been touched? In our new eLife paper, we map how touch-sensitive bristles on the fruit fly head connect to circuits that guide precisely aimed grooming, revealing how brain maps turn touch into action. (elifesciences.org/articles/108...)

A comprehensive mechanosensory connectome reveals a somatotopically organized neural circuit architecture controlling stimulus-aimed grooming of the Drosophila head

A synaptic-resolution map reveals how spatially organized touch pathways in the fly brain shape aimed head grooming through parallel excitatory circuits and inhibitory control.

elifesciences.org

New paper: Spinal circuitry modeled for locomotion using spatial transcriptomics and cell-type projections. Local excitation, long-range inhibition, and a longitudinal skew—an asymmetric "Mexican hat"—give rhythm, rotational dynamics, and gait, with no pacemakers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Impossible to put into words how useless Gmail search is. No wait, these guys did it!

Glad to see this work finally out! A joy working with the incredible Nurun Fancy to figure out the interaction between TREM2 and CD33, how TREM2 variants differ and what happens to other cell types in cases with TREM2 variants. Thanks to everyone involved in the study, it was a great team effort!

UK Dementia Research Institute@ukdri.ac.uk · 3w ago

Could a protective gene counteract risk of Alzheimer's in people with a high-risk gene variant? 🧬 Researchers led by Dr @jojacksonhere.bsky.social revealed how TREM2 – a well-known Alzheimer’s risk gene – interacts with CD33, a gene that can reduce disease risk. ukdri.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

One of the best gigs I’ve been to was Prince at the Roundhouse. Halfway through, the crowd parted to let a very sweaty man through who had been having a dance down the front. It was Bill Oddie, resplendent in bird watching gilet. It made our night, almost as much as the show itself!

In news that will surprise nobody I am really enjoying the new Charli album and the line about shopping at APC made me laugh out loud and feel seen

I'm not sorry to see Anas Sarwar stand down as Scottish Labour leader; I think he should have done so immediately following the disastrous loss in May. But doing it now to take up a junior ministerial job in Westminster sends a terrible message about what Labour thinks of Scotland. Really terrible.

Another Labour election loser whose principles melt away at the first chance of a job for life without any pesky voters to worry about.

Do #tintinnids dream of electric sheep? 🤯 Here is a single cell capable of building a lorica and living inside it for protection... it also swims, feeds, hunts Can even detect and habituate to mechanical cues! #celllearning #protistsonsky #cilia Read more in our preprint doi.org/10.64898/202...

Today I'm posting a blog about another ridiculous antibody blunder. Dozens of papers in the senescence and ageing field have mistakenly used an antibody for E. coli β-galactosidase when trying to stain for the human protein with the same name. forbetterscience.com/2026/07/21/d...

a beautiful parting gift to centrist dads everywhere from Sir Keir, homebrew electricity to power your mobile aircon from next month!!!

Josiah Mortimer@josiahmortimer.bsky.social · 3w ago

I know it's not the biggest news of the day, but I just spotted this... One of Keir Starmer's last acts in Govt is this: Laying legislation that will legalise 'plug-in solar' (aka balcony solar) panels in Britain It means plug-in solar panels do not (legally) have to be wired in by an electrician.

It was a pleasure to present our emerging story @cambridgeflyclub.bsky.social. Great feedback from an engaged and enthusiastic audience of young (and some not so young 😜) fly researchers. Now let’s hear from some ECRs…

Cambridge Fly Club@cambridgeflyclub.bsky.social · 4w ago

💡 First, Dr Alex Whitworth @labwhitworth.bsky.social, explored the emerging concept of the gut–brain axis in neurodegeneration. His talk highlighted how Drosophila models provide insights into gut homeostasis, systemic inflammation, and their links to neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s.