I'm thrilled to announce the opening of the Kaplan lab at the University of Virginia @uvabio.bsky.social ! We are a neuroscience lab aiming to define circuits underlying naturalistic behaviors in infants and adults. We're actively recruiting students and postdocs. Learn more at kaplan-lab.org.

We do an awful lot of looooong video recordings in our lab and have long wanted an easy way to clip, compress and combine videos for our workflows. So here's #croppy! 🦀 I hope others will find it useful too - I'd love to hear if you do! And would appreciate if you give it a star on Github! 🌟

Daniela Rößler@roesslerdaniela.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Our postdoc @roald-arboel.com made a thing! #Croppy is #free and awesome for fast and effective #video #editing and it has a #GUI! Need to crop a part of a video? Need to trim a video? Need to combine videos? Need to compress a video? roald-arboel.com/croppy/

We do an awful lot of looooong video recordings in our lab and have long wanted an easy way to clip, compress and combine videos for our workflows. So here's #croppy! 🦀 I hope others will find it useful too - I'd love to hear if you do! And would appreciate if you give it a star on Github! 🌟

Daniela Rößler@roesslerdaniela.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Our postdoc @roald-arboel.com made a thing! #Croppy is #free and awesome for fast and effective #video #editing and it has a #GUI! Need to crop a part of a video? Need to trim a video? Need to combine videos? Need to compress a video? roald-arboel.com/croppy/

🌟 NEW OCTRON RELEASE! 🌟 Want to track your animals using the command line? You can now train models and predict videos with single prompts in a terminal! Ideal for batch jobs, headless servers, and remote machines. Big shout-out to @roald-arboel.com for helping with this release!

Off to the caves! We’re finally back in the field: filming sleepy cave spiders! 🕷️🕸️ Let’s see what we find! #fieldwork #animalsleep #caves @roald-arboel.com @nadjageiger.bsky.social @roesslerdaniela.bsky.social @unibonn.bsky.social

🔥 Our latest work is state of the art 3D pose estimation, with video analysis from a single camera! 🎥 Just train with 3D data, and then only 1 camera is needed! 🖤 Presented this week at #CVPR2026 by lead author Ti Wang! Please repost🩵🙏🏼 xiu-cs.github.io/FMPose3D/ arxiv.org/abs/2602.05755

New paper alert!🕷️✨ Tiny spider. Shiny abdomen. Suspiciously wiggly bum. In our new study, we asked what abdomen bobbing in this jumping spider is really all about: Cute? Yes. Meaningful? Let’s find out...! [1/8] @unibonn.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-026-03745-1

🚨 TWERK ALERT 🚨 New publication from @sleeblab.bsky.social ! This was a very fun project to write up, co-lead by @nadjageiger.bsky.social and Chiara Hirschkorn. If you are interested why these spiders might bob their abdomen: link.springer.com/article/10.1... (Short thread following soon)

We tracked mice in space! This video shows our estimate of their self-induced centripetal force during circling in 3D 👩‍🚀 Preprint thread below 👇

Amelia Eisch 🧪🧠👩‍🔬 🐁@eisch.bsky.social · 5mo ago

1/ New preprint! 🧪With @talmo.bsky.social and team, we used deep learning on archival NASA video of mice on the ISS. Turns out mice in microgravity become tiny acrobats: huddling to sleep, doing backflips, even briefly generating their own ~1g. #SpaceBiology #OpenScience #NASA #SLEAP

New preprint: Whole-body 3D kinematics of freely behaving 𝐷𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑎 New tech from @blobology.bsky.social & others at @hhmijanelia.bsky.social, which @ispizua.bsky.social and @elliottabe.bsky.social used to gain insight into 3D structure of locomotion & courtship www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The hardest part of science is posing the right question, not answering it.

M. Nolan Gray 🥑@mnolangray.bsky.social · 7mo ago

What's something that experts/practitioners in your field universally agree upon, but that remains a "hot take" among the general public?

Have you ever wondered why mice do what they do when they are free to do whatever they want? Check out our latest (and this slightly delayed thread about our recent paper, led by Caleb Weinreb and friends...) www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Spontaneous behavior is a succession of self-directed tasks

Weinreb et al. reveal a hierarchy of timescales in mouse behavior, including low-level syllables and high-level behavioral states. States and syllables are encoded in different brain areas. Prefrontal...

cell.com

➡️ New Classics in Biological Theory article out! ⬅️ Revisiting Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow’s “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology” (1943) by Auguste Nahas (@augustenahas.bsky.social) Open access, also to Rosenblueth et al. (1943) (supplementary material) on: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Revisiting Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow’s “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology” (1943) - Biological Theory

Biological Theory - This article examines Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow’s 1943 article “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology”, which is widely remembered both as the foundational...

link.springer.com

BIG UPDATES! OCTRON now supports the new SAM3 models (alongside SAM2)! We’ve also added a global switch for Detection vs. Segmentation: Use the same annotations to train either lightweight detection or full segmentation models. Plus, we’ve added support for the new YOLO26 models. ⤵️ 1/12

Ants! Ants! Ants! 792 species of ants (!!!!!!) 3D scanned (high-throughput synchrotron X-ray microtomography) in luxurious detail: spectrum.ieee.org/3d-scanning-... paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... website: www.antscan.info Phenomenal.

Antscan’s 3D Atlas Reveals Ant Anatomy Like Never Before

How does a particle accelerator help us understand ants like never before?

spectrum.ieee.org

Out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social! A dive into the deep history of vertebrate vision, together with @mikebok.bsky.social, @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social Photo credit : Vasilis Karkalas

George Kafetzis@gkafetzis.bsky.social · last yr.

👁️The retina — strikingly conserved across vertebrates, but an oddity among bilaterians! So how did it evolve? With @mikebok.bsky.social, @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social, we argue that retinal complexity may 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑦𝑒 𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/n

Using BORIS to annotate animal behaviour and want a model to automate it? 🐦 DL classifiers need short, focused clips — not hour-long recordings. 𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘀-𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗽 extracts those from your `.boris` files, ready for BehaveAI, Octron, and friends. 🤖 roald-arboel.com/boris-clip/ #ComputationalEthology

Our BehaveAI paper has just come out! Easy & effective tracking & behavioural classification, even with tiny (2px), fast moving, camouflaged objects. Paper: doi.org/10.1371/jour... Download: github.com/troscianko/B... @uniexecec.bsky.social @kevinjgaston.bsky.social @jimamclgalloway.bsky.social

The @asab.org animal behavior ethics guidelines now reference our work on humane husbandry and ethical study design for insects and decapods! See the full guidelines: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Guidelines for the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals in behavioural research and teaching

sciencedirect.com

This workshop was one of the highlights of my PhD! Highly recommend applying! Amazing science and amazing people allround - and all (reasonable) expenses paid!

Janelia Conferences@janeliaconf.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Junior scientists 👉 applications are open for our workshop on the mechanistic basis of #cognition. 🧠 🤝 Joint sessions with our #TheoreticalNeuroscience workshop ✈️ Hotel, meals + reasonable travel expenses covered Apply by May 7 ➡️ janelia.news/CNW26 @michaelreiser.bsky.social @jvoigts.bsky.social

We are responding to this call for evidence: ec.europa.eu/info/law/bet... Do you have concrete examples of the added value of #Rstats in the public or private sectors? Include the most important factors (risk, lock-in, security, innovation...) to assess the added value. Thanks!

Does anyone here use or have used EthoVision XT and/or ANY-Maze, and could possibly share some sample data with me? I'm making functions for importing movement data into R, and these are tools that I have yet to cover, but I need some data to help me on! #animalbehaviour #neuroskyence

⚠️ New paper alert and what a way to end 2025! 🎉 Happy to share our story “Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals.” published today in Nature Neuroscience. Sleeping dragons 🦎 and functional ultrasound! Read the full paper here: rdcu.be/eWJHb 1/8

Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals

Nature Neuroscience - Bergel et al. show that an infraslow rhythm connecting the brain and body during sleep is shared by lizards, mammals and birds, revealing an ancestral process and reshaping...

rdcu.be

Machine learning should not be a replacement for human judgment but rather help us embrace the various assumptions and interpretations that shape behavioral research, write Nedah Nemati and Matthew Whiteway. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/behavioral-n...

Beyond the algorithmic oracle: Rethinking machine learning in behavioral neuroscience

Machine learning should not be a replacement for human judgment but rather help us embrace the various assumptions and interpretations that shape behavioral research.

thetransmitter.org

Do you love quantifying animal behavior as much as we do? We have just the tool for you! Presenting #OCTRON - a pipeline that helps you create rich annotation data and enables training of custom segmentation models. Have a look, particularly if you work with non-model / invertebrate organisms!

About to do a major documentation revamp for an R package. Does anyone know whether it's possible to use Quarto `.qmd` files for vignettes and articles? #rstats

New preprint: Neural manifolds that orchestrate walking and stopping Here we develop a new theory for neural generation of walking and how it can stop- Next we test the theory using Neuropixels probes in the lumber spinal cord of freely moving rats. See more: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

✨ Super stoked to announce that I will soon be joining the #SLEEB-Lab with @roesslerdaniela.bsky.social at @unibonn.bsky.social! Really excited for what’s to come!🕷️💤

Daniela Rößler@roesslerdaniela.bsky.social · last yr.

Two awesome news for our #SLEEB-Lab @unibonn.bsky.social 1) we finally had a lab photoshoot and 2) I can now officially announce @roald-arboel.com is joining our team as a Postdoc starting in November!!! Sweet tracking stuff ahead. Welcome to the #spider #behavior fam, Mikkel!

Breaking News: Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, died at 91. Her discoveries in the 1960s about how chimpanzees behaved in the wild broke new ground and represented what was called “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.” nyti.ms/42kpGxt

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...