Cow Tools! We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years. We breed them and exploit them It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS Here I describe our study (paper) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... in @currentbiology.bsky.social with @auersperga.bsky.social

Happy new year! I wanted to share my new Python package called chatter that streamlines the process of applying AI/ML models to animal communication 🦜🦇🐋🐵👨‍🌾 masonyoungblood.github.io/chatter/

Very pleased to announce our research on #nestlinggrowth and #broodreduction in #hornbills has been published! I started this work as an undergraduate and am grateful for everything I have learned from my co-authors. @dialektical.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Nestling Growth and Brood Reduction in the Southern Yellow‐Billed Hornbill (Tockus leucomelas)

In the southern yellow-billed hornbill, Tockus leucomelas, we found first-hatched nestlings had a higher growth rate and that growth rate was negatively correlated with mortality, such that early hat...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #blueprint 1/7

Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience

Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.

nature.com

Family identity is represented within vocal categories by the gerbil auditory cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.24.684438v1

Super excited to share the first part of my thesis work! Perhaps how you might be able to both recognize someone’s voice *and* understand what they’re saying, we find that both social identity and vocalization category can be decoded from gerbil auditory cortex activity👂🧠 tinyurl.com/4fba6wk4

What do neuroscience labs and the streets of New York City have in common? They are both commonly home to rats, a feature this research team is leveraging to study rat social cognition in the wild. By @martajhill.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/social-cogni...

Great news: NIH postbac program is recruiting again! If your grad school plans were affected by program cutbacks or admissions freezes this year I highly encourage you to apply, this could be a perfect opportunity. Please repost. www.training.nih.gov/research-tra...

Instead of cutting costs for working families, Donald Trump is slashing the federal investments that fund their lifesaving care, fuel their local economy, and lower their health care costs. It’s cruel, short-sighted, and will cost jobs and devastate millions of families.

NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately

Researchers say it would hurt facilities that work on medical issues such as cancer research and heart disease. Elon Musk contends the old policy was ‘a ripoff.’

washingtonpost.com

Happy holidays, happy new year, happy to reintroduce our gerbil vocal dialect paper! Final version now available in eLife elifesciences.org/articles/89892

Unsupervised discovery of family specific vocal usage in the Mongolian gerbil

Gerbils exhibit stable, family-specific vocal dialects over weeks, suggesting vocal communication may play a key role in representing kinship in natural social groups.

elifesciences.org

Hi 🔵☁️! My name is Ralph - I am working on my PhD in neuroscience at NYU where I research auditory processing and vocal communication. I’m generally interested in how the brain controls behavior, perception, and understanding neural function in natural contexts (e.g. social interactions, in the wild)