Do you use neuronbridge.janelia.org to match electron and light #microscopy? The "View in 3D" button lets you visually confirm the match right in your browser. And now it does a quick sweep to pick a better initial saturation for the light microscopy. Here are some examples (EM green, LM magenta).

San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas battled aggressive brain cancer for years but continued to guest-conduct and teach, leaving a lasting legacy in the classical music world.

Michael Tilson Thomas, transformative music director of S.F. Symphony, dies at 81

The longtime San Francisco Symphony music director battled aggressive brain cancer for years but continued to guest conduct and teach, leaving a lasting legacy in the classical music world.

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For #Neuroscience videos in #Blender3D, importing lots of neurons from separate OBJ files is slow. It's faster to import subsets into temporary scenes in parallel with `subprocess.Popen`, then add them to the final scene with `bpy.data.libraries.load`. It's 10x as fast for this example (16 cores).

When #HHMIJanelia released the #Drosophila hemibrain in 2020, rendering all cell types at once with full shading/shadows was too hard, so the video showed them region by region. Technology has since advanced, and I went back and rendered them all together. I like how it shows the internal structure.

On this day 10 years ago, #Tableau released Vizable for the iPad. It gave a way to explore data with gestures: pinch/unpinch to aggregate/disaggregate, swipe to filter out, etc. The development effort, led by Robin Stewart and Dave Story, was great fun. #DataViz #DataVis vimeo.com/142648727

Some fly neurons are “dimorphic”, existing in both males and females but connecting to different neighboring neurons. Neighbors may be “isomorphic”, the same in both male and female; or sex specific; or dimorphic themselves. Here's an example, the type AOTU012, present in left and right instances.

Greg Jefferis@jefferis.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Comparison with previous female connectomes reveals sex differences across the adult brain at synaptic resolution for the first time. Full news story and preprint describing this massive team effort coming soon!

A connectome spanning the brain and nerve cord reveals interesting pathways. Visual-motor pathways connect visual neurons, which help the fly detect objects, to motor neurons, which help the fly move in response. Here's one such pathway, from R1-R6 visual neurons to the DNg13 motor neuron.

Greg Jefferis@jefferis.bsky.social · 10mo ago

This dataset provides two major advances. It is the first fully proofread and annotated brain and nerve cord connectome with 166,696 proofread neurons annotated with 11,691 cell types. It is also the first connectome of a male brain.

Rendering this video was a nice test for #Blender3d, as the full set of bodies visible by the end involved almost 1.1 billion polygons. It all worked out well on our H200 cluster.

Janelia Research Campus@hhmijanelia.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🪰 A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system—a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the millions of connections between them. 🔗 https://hhmi.news/4o3EJnk

🌟 Launch your own lab at Janelia 🌟 Advance our understanding of biology through theory, computational modeling & machine learning. 🔹 No teaching requirements 🔹 100% internally funded 🔹 Collaborate with expert support teams 📅 Apply by Nov. 4 👉 https://janelia.link/groupleader

A second AI Engineer position is now open, for work at the intersection of protein engineering, evolution, and machine learning: hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

Philip Hubbard@philiphubbard.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Come to #HHMIJanelia to work on the frontiers of AI and biology. Apply now for an AI Engineer position working on protein biosensors: hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern... More openings coming soon. Interesting AI is widespread at Janelia, like this diffusion model from Larissa Heinrich.

Come to #HHMIJanelia to work on the frontiers of AI and biology. Apply now for an AI Engineer position working on protein biosensors: hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern... More openings coming soon. Interesting AI is widespread at Janelia, like this diffusion model from Larissa Heinrich.

Fly labs — Now is the time to show some solidarity and chip in support for this vital resource!

Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center@bdsc.bsky.social · 12mo ago

FlyBase needs your help! Visit the link below for more information, and please consider donating to help save this amazing resource. wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase...

The #HHMIJanelia FuncEWorm project is building the first cellular/molecular blueprint of an entire organism, the C. elegans nematode. Here's a video showing some of what's involved: light sheet fluorescence microscopy, electron microscopy, spatial transcriptomics. www.janelia.org/project-team...

What does a neural network look like? Maybe like this view of Larissa Heinrich's U-net for organelle segmentation, with edges between layer inputs and outputs. Want to help build networks like this? Join #HHMIJanelia's new AI initiative as a data engineer: hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

Interested in AI and scientific discovery? HHMI Janelia has openings for data engineers as part of a new AI initiative. Preference for senior candidates with experience developing pipelines for scientific data, especially in biology or medicine. hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern... #FediHire

Igor Siwanowicz created these images of the underside of the front foot of a male diving beetle. You can see suction cups that are used during mating, as well as a broad plate and exterior spines that aid in swimming.

This Juneteenth we're spotlighting the work of the first Black trained TV meteorologist, June Bacon-Bercey.

Cleaning up disk space, I found this image I made for someone not long after the release of the #HHMIJanelia #Drosophila hemibrain #connectome in 2020. It shows EPG neurons in pink providing inputs to PFL1 neurons in transparent grey. I'm not sure if the image was ever used.

The video shows electron microscopy matched to light microscopy, perfect for #FluorescenceFriday. Takashi Kawase and Hideo Otsuna wrote the renderer, VVD Viewer, and I generated the animation with neuVid.

Janelia Research Campus@hhmijanelia.bsky.social · last yr.

🪰 A team of Janelia researchers & collaborators have created a new set of tools for studying motor control of wing movements in fruit flies, providing an important #openscience resource for future studies of fly flight & courtship 🧠 hhmi.news/3H3ohn8

Happy to officially introduce FilaBuster - a strategy for rapid, light-mediated intermediate filament disassembly. Compatible with multiple IF types, modular in design, and precise enough to induce localized filament disassembly in live cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🎉Congratulations to HHMI’s Beautiful Biology, winner of a 2025 Webby Award in the Science Websites and Mobile Sites category ➡️ hhmi.news/42KRBpI 💻Explore the site ➡️ www.hhmi.org/beautifulbio... 📷Igor Siwanowicz

Wanted to share some key takeaways from this meeting for the broader public. If you were there and I missed things, please add on to this thread!

Rita Strack@ritastrack.bsky.social · last yr.

I am in sunny San Francisco for a meeting on AI in bioimaging at CZI headquarters! Looking forward to 🤯🤩 data and great conversations!

We're looking for 1-2 enthusiastic early career chemists to join our Open Chemistry team at @hhmijanelia.bsky.social. Come help us create amazing dyes and share them with the world. Please share with the best recent/soon-to-be B.S. chemists you know! bit.ly/42w8C6N

Research Technician - Open Chemistry

Primary Work Address: 19700 Helix Drive, Ashburn, VA, 20147 Current HHMI Employees, click here to apply via your Workday account. Summary: Open Chemistry is a collaborative research group whose missio...

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If you are a scientist who is looking for joy in these times, I would strongly suggest signing up for @skypeascientist.bsky.social. I spent part of my afternoon talking to second graders who had AMAZING questions and asked me what advice I wanted from 2nd graders. Wholesome, joyful, science-y fun!

I know there's a 𝒍𝒐𝒕 going on right now, but I couldn’t be prouder to share this long-incubated labor of love: the complete connectome of the male 𝐷𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑎 optic lobe 🧠🪰 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Connectome-driven neural inventory of a complete visual system - Nature

A connectome of the right optic lobe from a male fruitfly is presented together with an extensive collection of genetic drivers matched to a comprehensive neuron-type catalogue.

nature.com

When beauty and wonder seem elusive, try HHMI's Beautiful Biology site, for a reminder of what the scientific study of nature has to offer. Noah Green and the team update the collection every week and write accessible descriptions for everything. www.hhmi.org/beautifulbiology

Excited to be presenting this work at #cosyne2025 this week - as a poster (session 3, no. 3-017) and as part of the “Reimagining RL in the Brain” workshop organised by Alison Comrie and @nathanieldaw.bsky.social. My first in-person cosyne, so looking forward to it!

Laura Grima@lauragrima.bsky.social · 2y ago

The first preprint of my postdoc with @dudman.bsky.social is now online! Here we wanted to understand the algorithms mice use when learning to forage in large environments with many potential resources. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Is anyone using #GodotEngine for #Drosophila #Neuroscience experiments in VR, as an open-source alternative to #Unity3D? Requirements include high frame rates (120+ Hz), support for multiple cameras and for processing of the final frame image (to stitch a panorama), or multiple output displays.

It's fascinating to see #Drosophila #Neuroscience experiments run in virtual reality (VR), with a fruit fly walking on a tiny trackball looking at tiny video displays. Here's a schematic of @hannah-haberkern.bsky.social 's rig, from our 2022 preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2022...

Today is #InternationalWomensDay Progress on #GenderEquality in health care is too slow. Women have distinct & changing health needs at different stages of their lives. Health care should be easy to access, fair & tailored to meet each woman’s unique needs & circumstances. 🔗 bit.ly/3DmZQ2o