Now in Science: How does the brain’s navigation system allocate its limited representational resources during behavior? We found that grid cells sweep toward locations of interest, providing a potential mechanism for allocating spatial attention in the cognitive map.🧵 science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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

Come join the @socialfluids.bsky.social lab in Cambridge to study the evolution of Socially Transferred Materials! Fun new HFSP project btwn UK, NL and Costa Rica! Deadline September 7th #Postdoc #JobAlert #Evolution #Bioinformatics #STM #socialfluids www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc... leboeuflab.com

Ants normally use about 24% of their energy for brain functions, but when food-deprived, this percentage nearly doubles to 45%. Preferential energy allocation to the brain has previously been found in humans and other mammals. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/kVkU50ZwbrB

New Study! @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social Often foraging models assume that the forager knows the environment and proceed to predict decision strategies but how does the foraging learn the structure of the environment ? A new preprint delves into this question

Finally out in @natneuro.nature.com! A forgotten memory isn't always gone. We show that forgotten memories persist as silent memory traces, can be recovered by reminders, and can even be reconstructed into false memories. Excited to finally share this work! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 I am very happy (and relieved!) to announce that I secured Emmy Noether funding by the @dfg.de to start my own group at @unimainz.bsky.social , hosted by Marion Silies & Jakob von Engelhardt in August! 🚨 Website coming soon - open for name/logo suggestions. They better be funny tho!

Sophia Petrillo with Megaphone in Golden Girls

ALT: Sophia Petrillo with Megaphone in Golden Girls

static.klipy.com

I wrote about the need for this kind of faculty development several years ago, grateful that @alleninstitute.org had the same vision: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...?

The next generation of neuroscientists needs to learn how to code, and we need new ways to teach them

In this NeuroView, Juavinett outlines the challenges of teaching the next generation of neuroscientists how to code, arguing for more innovative ways to bring discipline-relevant coding into the class...

cell.com

We are excited to share our collaboration with @pheereynolds.bsky.social, Robert Hindges & team on retinal plasticity, now out in Neuron! This work shows how visual experience during early development changes the anatomical and functional properties of amacrine cells and ultimately behavior!

Early visual experience elicits cellular and functional plasticity in the retina and alters behavior

The understanding of experience-dependent plasticity in the vertebrate retina is largely incomplete. Reynolds et al. discovered that raising animals in differently patterned visual environments change...

cell.com

Our new paper is out in @nature.com! We uncovered how a naked mole-rat queen 👑 controls an entire colony: a natural contraceptive scent that suppresses reproduction in other females! A remarkable mammalian parallel to bees and ants! 🐝🐜 @garyrlewin.bsky.social youtu.be/enfv3zJrWKM?...

Naked mole-rats are ruled by a queen: this chemical puts her in power

YouTube video by nature video

youtu.be

This paper is now published in its final (and much improved) form in @currentbiology.bsky.social. Check it out: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Huge thanks to @sanderliessem.bsky.social, Stefan Dahlhoff, all our co-authors & our collaborators in the @postpop.bsky.social and Büschges labs.

Control of walking direction by descending and dopaminergic neurons in Drosophila

Animals fine-control the speed and direction of locomotion to navigate complex and dynamic environments. To achieve this, they integrate multimodal se…

kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me

Jan M. Ache@jan-ache.bsky.social · last yr.

Preprint Alert! Walking mostly feels natural and easy to us - but the neuronal control of walking is actually incredibly complex. We leveraged the fruit fly as a genetically tractable animal model with a compact nervous system to ask how the brain controls walking direction: tinyurl.com/flywalk. 🧵..

In an article published today, we show that ancient feeding-related neuropeptides have been repurposed to control brood care in clonal raider ants. Photo: Bart Zijlstra, UNIL /1

New paper out: www.cell.com/iscience/ful... Congratulations to our former PhD student @maxcapelle.bsky.social whose work reveals that the switch in light preference across zebrafish development is driven by a reweighting of three parallel visual processing pathways. Check out a short summary below!

Bahl Lab @bahllab.bsky.social · last yr.

We are proud to have @maxcapelle.bsky.social's paper out on bioRxiv! He found that phototactic behavior in #zebrafish switches during #ontogeny🐟🔆 Through elegant behavioral dissections, he identifies the navigational strategies related to this transition. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread 👇

Enter your name into this NASA image generator to have it spelled out by various rivers and landmasses. You can refresh 🌎🔭🛰️ science.nasa.gov/specials/you...

Now published - the #BANC! A full central nervous system (CNS) connectome of a limbed animal at single-synapse resolution, enabling us to follow sensory-motor arcs and understand how the CNS controls the body. rdcu.be/fncjS. #neuroscience. Video by @quorumetrix.bsky.social 1/18

The #ThermoFisher #antibody scandal is an ugly reminder, I think, of how few people (including those at TF, it seems) are trained to properly validate antibodies before use. Some advice on antibody validation in the posting 👇 totalinternalreflectionblog.com/2022/09/18/h...

Hitting the target (a short guide to validating antibody specificity)

Antibodies are essential and ubiquitous tools in biology, but their unguarded usage can easily lead to error. Here’s how to validate their specificity, and ensure that they’re hitting the rig…

totalinternalreflectionblog.com

Reese Richardson@reeserichardson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

New article: We studied how volumes of different brain regions vary between workers, males & alate females in 2 species of Australian ants. First paper from Saroja Ellendula's PhD thesis! Article is available here: bit.ly/4fVwCIN @neuroethology.org @austentsoc.bsky.social @animbehav.bsky.social

Zandawala lab is looking to recruit a postdoc to work on neuromodulation of feeding in Drosophila and other arthropods at KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium). Details for the position can be found here: www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo... Please share!

Postdoctoral Researcher in Neuromodulation of Feeding

We are recruiting a postdoctoral scientist to join the recently opened Zandawala Lab at KU Leuven. The position is funded by an Odysseus grant from FWO (Research Foundation – Flanders). For more infor...

kuleuven.be

Macrophages in the liver as sensors for the earth magnetic field with signals sent to the brain via the vagal nerve 😮 I'm struggling to understand how this would actually work as a compass signal but it would be very cool. Also, this pigeon portrait makes for an adorable cover! 🕊️

Science Magazine@science.org · 2mo ago

Researchers have identified superparamagnetic macrophages in the livers of rock pigeons to be crucial for magnetic sensing. The finding uncovers an unexpected role for immune cells in sensory perception and may fundamentally change our understanding of animal navigation. https://scim.ag/4nTQ3nq

A small contribution to an important topic, in Nature Reviews Biodiversity. I highlight @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social and Harvey's work in 2000 and illustrate it's pivotal role in our understanding into the principles of brain evolution. Have a read - it's short! www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Great new paper from @dudman.bsky.social and @fluketc.bsky.social. It’s going to immediately change how we train our animals and make us think hard 🤔https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeb0813

Reward magnitude determines reinforcement learning efficiency

Standard animal learning studies minimize individual reward magnitudes to maximize the repetitions of reinforced behaviors. We investigated how reward magnitude influences initial learning across five...

science.org

This is fucking insanity www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

Report: NIH, NASA Restrict Co-Authoring With Foreign Scientists

The National Institutes of Health and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are targeting collaborations between U.S. scientists and foreign researchers, Science reports.

insidehighered.com

Story time friends... Ring attractor networks rely on fine-tuned symmetric connectivity. The fly head direction network has ring attractor dynamics but heterogeneous connectivity. How is this possible? 1/🧵 Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint with @lingqiz.bsky.social: Neurodata Without Boredom: Benchmarking Agentic AI for Data Reuse arxiv.org/abs/2605.12808 1/10

🚨Job claxon🚨 4-year #Postdoc available in our lab in @camzoology.bsky.social developing molecular and anatomical approaches to mapping evolutionary changes in the brain, using #Heliconiini butterflies. Come join us, we are nice. 🧪 www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

This #InternationalWomensDay I want to tell the story of Lilian Vaughan Morgan. I learned of Lilian this past year - what a badass. Lilian was a leading scientist when women weren't welcome in the lab, nor even the department. But she contributed immensely to the genetics of sex determination 1/n

Really pleased that this work with @dudman.bsky.social is now out in Neuron: A global dopaminergic learning rate enables adaptive foraging across many options

Neuron@cp-neuron.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations doi.org/10.59350/5zt... 🧪

Free and open-source images, icons, and tools for creating scientific illustrations

Phylopic, NIH Bioart, Bioicons, Scidraw, Open Science Art, Health Icons, Servier Medical Art, Biodiversity Heritage Library, the Noun Project, Segment Anything, Excalidraw, draw.io, Biographics

doi.org

NEWS: The ERC Scientific Council has listened to the concerns from members of the research community about changes to the re-submission rules, intended to manage the surge in demand for grants. The Scientific Council will readjust some of the changes: link.europa.eu/TBqRQJ

ERC Scientific Council readjusts rules for reapplication

The ERC Scientific Council has listened to the concerns from members of the research community about the recent announcement on changes to the re-submission rules. The changes, intended to manage the ...

link.europa.eu

This is definitely something that should be discussed before implementation. Read and provide feedback. What we need is more funding, not more restrictions. A particularly bad move for Starting, and specially, Consolidator stage.

Johanna Joyce@johannajoyce.bsky.social · 4mo ago

What should Europe do when demand for #ERC funding keeps rising? Restrict access or invest in excellence? Please read our open letter calling for reconsideration of the ERC 2027 resubmission restrictions & for constructive alternatives that preserve openness Consider to share & sign - see below 🧪