www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5MM... A King just wiped one of your folks from his face Well I guess you all just own the place House fly, house fly You’re sitting by the phone in the back on a keg With your see through wings and your strange little legs

Tom Waits - "The Fly" (Lyric Video)

YouTube video by Tom Waits

youtube.com

When you start running, your breathing speeds up before your body needs the oxygen. Turns out flies do the same thing and @camellyc.bsky.social worked out the circuit that makes it happen. Check out our new preprint on how the nervous system coordinates breathing with movement.

Yichen Luo 骆奕辰@camellyc.bsky.social · 2d ago

1/8 Breathing seems automatic. But it's a finely tuned motor behavior that has to be controlled. In this preprint, I map the circuits that match a fly's respiration to the metabolic demands of flight and mitigate the risk of dehydration. 🧵🪰 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This short-term funding bill blocks a corrupt policy that would allow Trump to hold even more federal grants hostage—and it closes House Republicans' loophole to pull funding for other agencies to give to Border Patrol. My full statement.⬇️

Senator Murray on Release of CR Text | United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

appropriations.senate.gov

And here we go: Final day of the #ICN2026 is started by Maude Baldwin with the plenary talk "Functional #evolution of taste and digestive system in #vertebrates" #icn2026vancouver

New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Nearly a decade after starting the project, the first major results from our comparative connectomics work is online! Comparing the head direction circuits of the central complex in bees, ants and flies, recapitulating >300million years of evolution.

New paper: Spinal circuitry modeled for locomotion using spatial transcriptomics and cell-type projections. Local excitation, long-range inhibition, and a longitudinal skew—an asymmetric "Mexican hat"—give rhythm, rotational dynamics, and gait, with no pacemakers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

jonny (leachate composite form)@jo.nny.rip · 3w ago

we've been doing this too but more as performance art to see what we can get the bots to do. so far the answer is "anything" github.com/dwebagents/A... i think my favorite is the PR whose only text was "butter" which got us the butter mode page: dwebagents.github.io/AgentPipe/bu...

Probably the first scientific description of regeneration in crustaceans, by Réaumur 1712 The paper starts like this: Scholars are as wary of the marvellous as common people are ready to believe it. ... 🧵 1/3

Revised preprint on mitochondria in central brain of Drosophila now online: much new analysis + details of largest resource for analyzing neuronal mitochondria generated so far, with ~6M mitochondria, >20k neurons, >5k cell types. Much thanks to all coauthors, enjoy! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Connectomic Analysis of Mitochondria in the Central Brain of Drosophila

Mitochondria are integral to the metabolism and cell biology of a neuron. Electron microscopy images of fly brain volumes, taken for connectomics, can be analyzed for mitochondria as well as the cells...

biorxiv.org

Thank you Natalia Mesa at the @thetransmitter.bsky.social for highlighting our labs preprint on synaptic mechanisms of head direction learning!! 🪰🧭 Work from @markplitt.bsky.social in my lab in collaboration with the Jayaraman lab! www.thetransmitter.org/learning-and...

Unique learning mechanism drives navigation in fruit flies

The neuromodulator octopamine, the insect counterpart to norepinephrine, helps flies get their bearings in an unfamiliar environment.

thetransmitter.org

We're hiring! NBIO is looking for a tenure-track Assistant Professor whose research & teaching will strengthen our department. 🧠 Deadline: 9/30/2026 Apply → apply.interfolio.com/187735 Please share with your network!

John Tuthill@tuthill.bsky.social · last mo.

My department, Neurobiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington (nbio.uw.edu), is hiring a new tenure-track Assistant Professor, application deadline 09/30/26. It's a broad search — molecular to organismal, all of neuroscience/physiology/biophysics welcome. apply.interfolio.com/187735

really enjoyed chatting with @callimcflurry.bsky.social from @thetransmitter.bsky.social about some of the non-Drosophila work happening in the lab! www.thetransmitter.org/neuros-ark/w...

What mosquitos lay bare about proprioception

By comparing the proprioceptive systems of mosquitos and Drosophila, Sweta Agrawal aims to uncover key features of the ability to sense self-movement.

thetransmitter.org

My department, Neurobiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington (nbio.uw.edu), is hiring a new tenure-track Assistant Professor, application deadline 09/30/26. It's a broad search — molecular to organismal, all of neuroscience/physiology/biophysics welcome. apply.interfolio.com/187735

Natural history on canvas: Brueghel knew about bird-eating noctule bats Just published in @pnas.org, OA for all eyes Led by the one-and-only @romero-vidal.bsky.social, with the amazing @elena-tena.bsky.social and Sonia Sánchez-Navarro @ebdonana.bsky.social LINK: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to share this preprint from @ianoldenburg.bsky.social . To evoke movement with holo stim, you need the right pattern at the right time! Interestingly, the preparatory state before spont motion is not the same as the state permissive for evoked motion. Dig in! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The Importance of Synchrony in the Neural Control of Movement

Throughout the mammalian cortex, populations of neurons must work together to enact behaviors. While population recordings in motor cortex have revealed many aspects of when neurons fire during behavi...

biorxiv.org

Better late than never... an update on the recent work from the lab. First of all, the Foundation: @astridd93.bsky.social phenomenal paper on the evolution of layering in the cerebral cortex 🧵1/7 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

An obituary looks back on the life of Avis H. Cohen, who bridged the disciplines of neuroscience, math and engineering to decode lamprey locomotion. By @sarahthau.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/locomotion/r...

Remembering Avis H. Cohen, who bridged disciplines to decode lamprey locomotion

The founding director of the University of Maryland’s Neuroscience and Cognitive Science program brought neuroscience, math and engineering together.

thetransmitter.org

Very excited to share our discovery of an engineering masterpiece from the Australian rainforest! In our latest paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social we report a hunting strategy in a spider, whose web outperforms every known biological catapult system.

1/ Complex behavior demands the sequential coordination of hundreds of muscle groups. The body is mapped topographically in the brain, but does neural activity actually propagate across these maps to organize sequential action? Our new paper in Science: doi.org/10.1126/scie... 🧵

Neural activity in mouse cortex forms rotating spiral waves. The architecture of individual axons matches the wave geometry, centered on somatosensory cortex. Beautiful new pape from our colleagues in the @steinmetzneuro.bsky.social lab. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I am a neurodivergent neuroscientist. My bipolar brain brings struggle but it also helps me think off-the-map ideas. To help others who are similarly different, I co-founded the Neurodiversity Innovation Center for Excellence in Neuroscience (niceinneuro.org) with Leah Blankenship and Lila Kaye.

The Battle over the Constitution Has Spread to American Science. I'm out in the @theatlantic.com today about the new OMB proposed rule. It's just the longtime agenda of the the Supreme Court. US science and cancer cures now all depend on us picking up a fight with the Roberts Court.

The Unitary Executive Takes Over New Territory

The Trump administration’s theory of how the federal government should work is a threat to American science.

theatlantic.com

@thetransmitter.bsky.social asked what scientific paper has impacted me most. Hal Weintraub's discovery that MyoD alone can convert naive cells into muscle cells seemed like magic. I've been chasing that kind of magic ever since: www.thetransmitter.org/this-paper-c...

This paper changed my life: Learning the molecular rules of cell identity

A 1987 Cell paper inspired Ardem Patapoutian to think about the molecular codes that define neuronal subtypes.

thetransmitter.org

Now a reviewed preprint in @elife.bsky.social elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

John Tuthill@tuthill.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Sometimes failed experiments reveal gaps in how we are thinking about a problem, and digging into why an experiment didn't work can lead to discovery. This new preprint by Anne Sustar, in collaboration with Dion Dickman's lab, is one of those gratifying instances.🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A glowing profile of my post-doc advisor. As @yvetteefisher.bsky.social says in the piece, Rachel is truly "...one of these generational scientists who thinks extremely incisively about both the details and the big-picture frameworks." magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/stu...

By Studying Fruit Flies, Rachel Wilson Is Changing How We Understand the Brain

magazine.hms.harvard.edu

A great privilege of science is working with remarkable people. A nice piece highlighting @mindyisminsu.bsky.social. Her grit, esp through the pandemic, was foundational to the #BANC project. hms.harvard.edu/news/making-...

Making Connections, in the Brain and in Science

PhD student Minsu Kim gained confidence, experience in the lab of neurobiologist Wei-Chung Allen Lee

hms.harvard.edu

Meet Eyewire II: a new connectomic resource for the mouse retina. ~1 mm² of retina at nanometer resolution, with synapses and circuits of ca. 100,000 neurons, plus visual responses from the ~400 neurons shown in the video! Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202... Data: eyewire.ai 🧠📈 🧠💻🧪 #VisionScience

Agentic coding is genuinely useful now, and there are some impressive reports of AI agents doing science. But how well and how reliably can they handle tasks scientists actually want to hand off, ones that bottleneck progress? How do we even measure that?? New paper🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2606.07718 1/10

A case study of evaluating AI agents on a neuroscience data-to-discovery pipeline

Agentic AI tools offer a promising path to automating software development bottlenecks in scientific research pipelines, particularly for stages that take domain experts days to months to build, where...

arxiv.org

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

Congrats to all! And a special welcome to @ellenlesser.bsky.social!

Leading Edge Fellows Program@leadingedgeprogram.bsky.social · 2mo ago

We are thrilled to announce the 2026 Zara Weinberg Leading Edge Fellows! 40 remarkable postdocs pursuing transformative research in biological/biomedical sciences. This is the 7th Leading Edge cohort and we are so excited to welcome them! www.leadingedgesymposium.org/fellows/