Abstract submission for #SfN26 is now open! Share your findings, spark new conversations, and connect with researchers who care about the same questions you do. Avoid the last-minute rush. Submit your abstract today! 🔗 vist.ly/55m24

New preprint from our lab! In an olfactory DNMS task, we find a sensory -> choice gradient across mouse frontal cortex. The secondary motor cortex showed minimal sensory coding and less intermediary characteristics.

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Hierarchy in the mouse frontal cortex in mnemonic olfactory decision-making https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.20.726442v1

Excited to see our paper describing a stereotyped receptor map for smell (led by @davidhbrann.bsky.social ) out in the world! See below for short thread with open access link to paper www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/s...

Scientists Unveil ‘Long Lost’ Map for Smell

nytimes.com

🚨 Preprint alert! 🚨 How does the olfactory bulb transform overlapping sensory inputs into representations that are easier to distinguish? New study by Sina Tootoonian, Yikai Yang, @andreas-t-schaefer.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk and myself.‬ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A short 🧵 below

We are recruiting a post-doc to study olfactory processing and decision-making in rodents, combining quantitative behavior with neurophysiology. www.oist.jp/careers/post... Please share with interested colleagues and trainees 🙏

Post-doctoral Researcher - Sensory and Behavioural Neuroscience Unit

Post-doctoral positions are available in the Sensory and Behavioural Neuroscience Unit (https://www.oist.jp/research/research-units/sbn) at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate Univers...

oist.jp

New preprint from our group (collaboration with @sueyeonchung.bsky.social) showing that discriminating odor components within a complex mixture is constrained by neural sensitivity rather than background interference - likely due to sparse representations at the front end.

The second paper from the lab is now available on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We discovered that cannibalistic behavior in fly larvae is social-context dependent. Larval groups avoid dead conspecifics; individuals show high attraction. They only do it when no one is watching 😉

You now have more time to submit a proposal for a #SfN26 session or workshop. Your ideas are crucial to building a dynamic and impactful scientific program. 📅 Submit your proposal by the final deadline: Monday, January 26, 5 p.m. EST. 🔗 vist.ly/4nj67 #neurosky #neuroskyence

Share your expertise, inspire early career researchers, and help cultivate a supportive neuroscience community. Submit a proposal for an “Ask Anything" session or a Professional Development Workshop at #SfN26 by Wednesday, January 21. 🔗 vist.ly/4m7hv #neurosky

X-rays can resolve ultrastructure - milestone for ultrastructure imaging w/o cutting. Thanks to an amazing team - @carlesbosch.bsky.social @adrianawanner.bsky.social Ana Diaz and collaborators @crick.ac.uk @psich.bsky.social and @esrf.fr and funders @wellcometrust.bsky.social @ukri.org

Carles Bosch@carlesbosch.bsky.social · 9mo ago

#paper! X-rays can resolve #ultrastructure in tissues non-destructively. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Shoutout to key collaborators at @crick.ac.uk and @psich.bsky.social Ana Diaz, @adrianawanner.bsky.social and @andreas-t-schaefer.bsky.social, and to the whole team that made this possible.

📣If you are attending #SfN in San Diego this year, make sure to stay until the end. Sonja Hofer @sonjahofer.bsky.social from @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social will give a ✨special lecture ✨on Wednesday 19th Nov, 10:30-11:30 🗓️ Not to be missed!! www.sfn.org/meetings/neu...

Independent researcher fellowships (non-tenure track) at OIST, with a focus on broadly defined theory www.oist.jp/research/bur...

Buribushi Fellowship

oist.jp

🧠 The Lipid #Brain Atlas is out now! If you think #lipids are boring and membranes are all the same, prepare to be surprised. Led by @lucafusarbassini.bsky.social with Giovanni D'Angelo's lab, we mapped membrane lipids in the mouse brain at high resolution. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

📣If you are attending #SfN in San Diego this year, make sure to stay until the end. Sonja Hofer @sonjahofer.bsky.social from @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social will give a ✨special lecture ✨on Wednesday 19th Nov, 10:30-11:30 🗓️ Not to be missed!! www.sfn.org/meetings/neu...

Lots of exciting clinical PhD projects at Crick - including the opportunity for neurosurgeons to work with us and record electrical activity in patients with neuropixels probes. Please share widely!

The Francis Crick Institute@crick.ac.uk · 11mo ago

We're looking for clinicians who are passionate about research to join our 3-year fully funded clinical PhD programme. 🔬🩺 Apply by 14 November 2025. 👇 www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

(edited repost) Thrilled to see our computational work on adaptive shaping of behavior (we call it outcome-based curriculum learning) in PLoS Comp Biol! @wl-tong.bsky.social, @gautamreddy.bsky.social & I formalize curricula in any RL task that can be framed as sequential simple-to-complex behavior.

Adaptive algorithms for shaping behavior

Author summary Animals are commonly trained by ‘shaping’ their behavior using a sequence of simpler tasks towards a complex behavior. Numerous schools of thought have proposed heuristics for shaping b...

journals.plos.org

Open faculty positions in Physics at OIST

OIST (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology)@oistedu.bsky.social · last yr.

📢 #FacultyHiring: OIST is hiring! We invite exceptional scientists to apply for faculty positions in: - Ecology, Environmental Science, Earth Science, and Oceanography - Physics and Quantum Science (including related fields) 🔗: www.oist.jp/careers/facu...

We watched mice follow scent trails drawn on an “endless” treadmill. By manipulating trail geometry/statistics, perturbing mouse nose & brain, and modeling behavior with a Bayesian framework, we show that mice use predictive (rather than reactive) strategies.

Humans and Neanderthals are virtually identical at the genetic level. Scientists are probing the differences to understand why we are here, and they aren’t.

One gene reveals clues to why humans thrived and Neanderthals didn’t

Some mice were more adept at seeking water after the gene change, signaling a behavioral change and potential cognitive advantage.

wapo.st

Tiny changes in our brain chemistry sets us apart from Neanderthals and Denisovans – and when introduced into mice, seem to help females compete better for scarce resources 🧠 Read about how ADSL may have influenced our evolution www.oist.jp/news-center/...

Tracing brain chemistry across humanity’s family tree

Small changes to an enzyme suggest how modern humans differ from Neanderthals and Denisovans in biochemistry and behavior.

oist.jp

Talking of understanding the brain in the evolutionary context… We have a new study out, led by Xiang-Chun Ju in Svante Pääbo’s lab at OIST: The activity and expression of adenylosuccinate lyase were reduced during modern human evolution, affecting brain and behavior www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Fantastic to see this collaborative work with Hopi Hoekstra out in Nature (tinyurl.com/3at3zvby). Lead by @felixbaier.bsky.social and @katjareinhard.bsky.social. Not possible without @bramnuttin.bsky.social , Chen Liu and @arnausd.bsky.social. Excited to see where this work leads.

NERF@nerflabs.bsky.social · last yr.

📢 New paper out in Nature! The Hoekstra lab at Harvard and @farrowlab.bsky.social lab at NERF reveal how a brain switch is tuned by evolution to control freezing vs fleeing in two sister species of deer mice. 👏 Huge congratulations to the entire team https://tinyurl.com/3at3zvby

Great technique from my @crick.ac.uk colleagues in @petrznam.bsky.social lab Reconstructing neural circuits with barcoded Rabies virus & in situ sequencing www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Barcoded Rabies In Situ Connectomics for high-throughput reconstruction of neural circuits

Sequencing of oligonucleotide barcodes holds promise as a high-throughput approach for reconstructing synaptic connectivity at scale. Rabies viruses can act as a vehicle for barcode transmission, than...

biorxiv.org

Massive congratulations to everyone - predominantly of course @janice-bulk.bsky.social and @sophiesteculorum.bsky.social

Sophie Steculorum@sophiesteculorum.bsky.social · last yr.

📢 🤩Excited to share our latest paper👃🧠! Huge thanks to the amazing first author @janice-bulk.bsky.social‬ and all co-authors, especially @andreas-t-schaefer.bsky.social and ‪@tobiasackels.bsky.social‬ 🙌! ‬‬ www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Animals’ sniffing drives rhythmic input to the olfactory system. How does this timing contribute to perception, especially beyond first steps of olfactory processing? We tested this using simple closed-loop optogenetics in our new paper: www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Decoding olfactory bulb output: A behavioral assessment of rate, synchrony, and respiratory phase coding

Neurogenetics; Behavioral neuroscience; Sensory neuroscience

cell.com

How do brain circuits evolve? We started looking for some answers by using synapse-resolution cross-species comparative connectomics on an entire olfactory circuit 👇 bit.ly/44aVm9E

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain - Nature

Individual dopaminergic neurons encode future rewards over distinct temporal horizons.

nature.com

Read the full research article in Physical Review X: doi.org/10.1103/Phys...

Hyperdisordered Cell Packing on a Growing Surface

In rapidly growing oval squid, skin pigment cells form a ``hyperdisordered'' pattern where density fluctuations grow with scale, revealing a novel link between growth and patterning that may apply bro...

doi.org

For students in USA who are affected by the current situation: OIST Graduate School is accepting special applications right now. Deadline June 15, 2025 www.oist.jp/admissions/s...

Special Application Deadline for Students Accepted or Studying in the United States

oist.jp

A vital and very enjoyable component of my academic work is teaching students at all levels how to extend the frontiers of knowledge. So I’m pleased to announce a set of Jupyter notebooks organized around our ideas for “physics of behavior”. You can find them here: github.com/oist/Physics...

GitHub - oist/Physics-of-Behavior-Tutorials

Contribute to oist/Physics-of-Behavior-Tutorials development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com