Venki Murthy
@neurovenki.bsky.social
Neuroscience Professor at Harvard University. Personal account and posts here. Research group website: https://vnmurthylab.org.
Some Carl Sandburg, from his 1963 collection Honey and Salt. Love is a Deep and a Dark and Lonely. #poetry
Saw this iridescent insect dead on our floor. Image search says it could be a blue mud dauber. What say you, entomology friends?
Midsummer, by Arthur Sze. "I smell eucalyptus where there is no eucalyptus and locate summer in rain." #poetry
'You'll choke too' - an aerial embroidery landscape inspired by all the wildfires happening right now... I'm upset every time I smell smoke outside and somehow we have people starting them maliciously too! But we all breathe the same air so they'll choke too (1/2 - see thread for close-ups)
Wow!!! "To investigate how these seemingly conflicting demands are resolved, we have carried out volume electron microscopy based reconstructions of the head direction circuits in the central complex of four species of bees and ants."
Deep conservation of head direction circuits in bees, ants and flies
To navigate, animal brains must continuously estimate the body's heading in space and compare it with internal goals to guide movement. In the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster a neural circuit in the...
biorxiv.org
This paper from Shadmehr and colleagues looks amazing. "Thus, the climbing fibers solved the credit assignment problem by providing the gradient of a loss function with respect to the output of their individual P-cells."
Climbing fibers encode the gradient of a loss function for the cerebellum
Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...
biorxiv.org
I wrote about the Nolan Odyssey for the LRB. I'll summarize some of my main points below, in case you don't feel like reading all that. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Man
As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Christopher Nolan has read at least the first line of my...
lrb.co.uk
Two-photon calcium imaging. What makes for good data? How can we optimize experiments to get good data? New post labrigger.com/blog/2026/07... and new free web apps from @filip-tomaska.bsky.social (1/8)
Some views from the amazing caruggi in Genoa's historic city center - astonishing how contemporary daily life thrives within this medieval maze!
Here in Genova, visiting the group of our wonderful collaborator Agnese Seminara for science. Trying to learn about poets from here. Here's "The Wall" by Eugenio Montale, the 1975 Nobel Laureate (born in Genova, but seems to have chosen Milano for the latter & significant part of his life). #poetry
Excited to be in Trieste again for a week (visiting @ictp.bsky.social). Knew well the city's literary connections to Joyce and Svevo, but discovering Umberto Saba now. Here's his ambivalent poem about his hometown, translated by Geoffrey Brock. "Trieste has a sullen grace"
"What you say doesn't have to be true. It only has to be imaginable." Not the Almost-Right Word, by David Kirby in the July/August 2026 issue of POETRY magazine by @poetry.foundation
Scottish soccer fans have left another gift to the region: a $15,000 donation to a charity administered by the Massachusetts Teachers Association that helps students in financial need.
A switch to school buses prompted Scottish soccer fans to donate to Mass. charity
Scottish soccer fans have left another gift to the region: a $15,000 donation to a charity administered by the Massachusetts Teachers Association that helps students in financial need.
wbur.org
Congratulations to #KempnerInstitute researchers Binxu Wang, Cengiz Pehlevan, and Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth, whose paper received an #ICML2026 Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention! Read more about the paper here: bit.ly/4w6Qsq1 @binxuwang.bsky.social @jzv.bsky.social @cpehlevan.bsky.social
Kempner Institute Researchers Receive ICML 2026 Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention - Kempner Institute
A paper by Kempner Institute researchers has received an Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention at ICML 2026, the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning, held July 6–11, 2026, in Seoul, South ...
bit.ly
This #CapeVerde team is nothing short of magical! Un-freaking-believable. #WorldCup
OK, someone, anyone, PLEASE just score a goal and end the game please - it is excruciatingly mid. #Australia #Egypt #WorldCup
This Manzambi guy is pretty good, perhaps a bigger club might want to talk to Freiburg? 😀 #WorldCup #Switzerland
People liked it, but that Ted Chiang essay on AI published earlier last month is actually not very good on the technical merits. Critics of AI companies need to be much more conversant in how LLMs work in order in order to propose meaningful regulations and responses to them. Let's discuss...
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.
theatlantic.com
Naoshige Uchida to Lead MCB as New Department Chair 🧠🧬🔬 #AcademicSky #higherEd www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @cryptogenomicon.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @dulaclab.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @harvard.edu @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social
Naoshige Uchida to Lead MCB as New Department Chair - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology
After nearly two decades at Harvard, neuroscientist Naoshige Uchida is preparing to take on a new role: chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB). Uchida, […]
mcb.harvard.edu
My department, Neurobiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington (nbio.uw.edu), is hiring a new tenure-track Assistant Professor, application deadline 09/30/26. It's a broad search — molecular to organismal, all of neuroscience/physiology/biophysics welcome. apply.interfolio.com/187735
