The brain uses a lot of energy. But it's not using that energy all the time and at the same intensity. It's not just more neuronal activity = more energy. There is also a lot of background process demending energy. 🧪 Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-026-10646-6​

Raced home from vacation so we could submit and preprint postdoc @keisukefukumura.bsky.social's paper! It's an exciting first foray for our lab into the periphery, where we find a unique role for CLOCK in regulating lifespan on high fat diet. 🧪https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.07.20.739608

Fat body CLOCK restrains innate immunity and maintains survival under dietary stress in Drosophila

Both aging and a high-fat diet (HFD) dampen circadian gene transcription rhythms and promote chronic inflammation. How aging and HFD interact to affect peripheral molecular clocks and circadian behavi...

doi.org

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...

THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE POWER ACCOMPLISHES! Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who wrote comments, contacted Congress, and yelled! This is OUR WIN! @standupforscience.net www.politico.com/news/2026/08...

Senate finalizes funding patch that would block Trump’s grant overhaul

Language is included to delay the president’s move to put political appointees in charge of grant approval.

politico.com

This epic paper, which has been a heroic 10 year journey for the lead author, Ricardo Barrientos, is finally out in Cell today! Many thanks to all co-authors, especially Billie Meadowcroft and Andela Saric for their beautiful MD simulations www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Basement membrane turnover controls cell shape

Basement membranes are scaffolds of proteins, like collagen, that give organs shape. During development, basement membranes must adapt to the growing organ. We infer how fast the basement membrane ada...

cell.com

How many subjects do you actually need for reliable task fMRI studies? Much larger samples are often recommended—but that depends on how you analyze the data. New preprint with @neuranna.bsky.social biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Scaling laws for group-constrained, subject-specific task fMRI analyses

Functional MRI provides a powerful way to characterize the architecture of the human brain. Yet individual brains often vary in the exact anatomic locations of functionally specific regions; as a resu...

biorxiv.org

How does the brain represent the value of knowledge? In our paper--out now at Nature Neuroscience--we identify a representation of intrinsic information value within neural population structures in the orbitofrontal cortex in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02377-y #neuroskyence 🧠🧪 (1/8)

Representations of the intrinsic value of information in mouse orbitofrontal cortex - Nature Neuroscience

Mice are motivated to seek information of no extrinsic value. Recording neural activity in orbitofrontal cortex reveals a representation of the value of information that is distinct from the value of ...

nature.com

So excited and glad to get this work out, the culmination of many years of effort and headscratching...just in time for the summer break. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

CNIH3 is a molecular signature of slow AMPA receptors

At excitatory synapses, glutamate activates receptors in the postsynaptic membrane including the AMPA receptor. Usually considered to be the fastest receptor in the brain, AMPA receptors can produce m...

biorxiv.org

Love the name skoupocytosis haha

Watanabe Lab @JHU@watanabelab.bsky.social · 2w ago

New preprint alert from the Watanabe lab!! Have you wondered what microglia are surveying with their motile processes? Have you wondered what happens to proteolytic organelles that are stuck in axons? Check this out! Microglia are the garbage man! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Super interesting! So if alpha waves set the upper limit for speech comprehension, this must be plasticity to modulate their intrinsic properties as people learn new languages? Alpha rhythms in the left auditory cortex set the speed limit for speech comprehension | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Excited to share that my first-ever first-author paper (w/ @atabk.bsky.social @AngeliqueDelarazan @zreagh.bsky.social) is now out in PNAS! Building a story to link two objects boosts associative memory and inference, but not memory for the objects themselves. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Active linking through narratives facilitates associative inference | PNAS

In daily life, we often draw inferences about novel associations from prior experiences. This ability, associative inference, is thought to be a ke...

pnas.org

Celebrating a major postdoc milestone this month: my paper is finally published and available online for all. Now that we've (and others) have truly established this link between molecular identity and vulnerability, I'm STOKED to narrow in on the "why/how."

New paper out today led by @gallinaciega.bsky.social We show that seed-eating songbirds have enlarged a somatosensory nucleus, especially the part associated with the tongue, suggesting that seed-cracking is dependent on a fine sense of touch. #ornithology #neuroethology doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

👁️🧠🧪 Vision takes time. But how does visual information flow through the human brain? Our new PLOS Computational Biology paper uses population receptive field (pRF) modelling to bring the spatial precision of fMRI to MEG, revealing the temporal dynamics of visual areas. 📖 doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Non-invasive mapping of the temporal processing hierarchy in the human visual cortex

Author summary Vision doesn’t happen instantaneously, but unfolds over time. While we understand a lot about how the brain processes visual space, understanding how the brain processes information ove...

doi.org

I am *thrilled* to share this review in @currentbiology.bsky.social out today, by yours truly, @myoo.bsky.social, @michalk.bsky.social, Taro Toyoizumi, @tyrellturing.bsky.social, @taylorwwebb.bsky.social, & @hakwan.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵👇

Looking to the brain to improve energy efficiency of AI

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems have achieved remarkable capabilities, but at an extraordinary energy cost. Training and running large-sca…

sciencedirect.com

One thing I didn’t expect as an editor: sometimes I like reading reviewers’ comments more than the paper itself, especially when it’s outside my areas of expertise. Good reviews are always thought-provoking, motivating me to think about the question differently. Grateful for our reviewers🙏

If you like ethological learning, structural plasticity, and the idea that homeostatic setpoints are malleable, this paper is for you! Congrats to Diane and the whole team on the culmination of a long and fascinating journey #dianebissen.bsky.social, #neuroskyance

@dianebissen.bsky.social · 2w ago

Back to Bluesky to share the most exciting news: my postdoctoral research is now published in Neuron! We used cricket hunting to show how ethological learning persistently rewires juvenile (but not adult!) visual circuits by co-opting homeostatic plasticity. Full story www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

We developed a new approach for mapping absolute membrane voltage, based on dynamic photocycle control in Voltron2. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Here's my favorite example: human iPSC colonies break into electrical domains as they begin to differentiate.

Alpha frequency predicts speech processing rate and experimentally speeding them up enables comprehension of previously unintelligible ultrafast speech. 🧠💬👂 #neuroskyence www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Super excited for y'all to read Diane's masterpiece! If you are curious about how mice become great hunters and what happens in their brains to make it happen, check it out!🔥 (Which reminds me how much I miss patching, again lol)

@dianebissen.bsky.social · 2w ago

Back to Bluesky to share the most exciting news: my postdoctoral research is now published in Neuron! We used cricket hunting to show how ethological learning persistently rewires juvenile (but not adult!) visual circuits by co-opting homeostatic plasticity. Full story www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

This is one of the most beautiful cross sections of cilia I've ever seen in our data, found by @csigulinsky.bsky.social. It is perfectly perpendicular to the plane of imaging which brings up an important point ~ connectomics. You gotta have enough resolution to see the important things. 2nm/px FTW!

Had a lot of fun writing this primer with @elisagalliano.bsky.social! If you've ever been transported back to childhood by the smell of a familiar scent, you might enjoy this. We unpack a new study revealing how neurons generated around birth help encode these lifelong olfactory memories.

PLOS Biology@plosbiology.org · 3w ago

How do smells linked to joyful childhood events trigger vivid adulthood memories? @elisagalliano.bsky.social @chloeg-neuro.bsky.social explore a @plosbiology.org study showing that neurons generated around birth help encode these olfactory memories 🧪 Paper: plos.io/3TmixuJ Primer: plos.io/4wKLyP4

want one

Current Biology@currentbiology.bsky.social · 3w ago

The Manul/Pallas' Cat is a wild felid of arid Asian highlands and has the densest and longest fur of all #cats A new study by Jiaqing Yuan &co finds that it belongs to a distinct lineage despite many traits shared with cats in genus Felis www.cell.com/current-biol... Image: tinyurl.com/yc6banxa

One chemical to rule them all🔥

Mohammed Khallaf@khallaf.bsky.social · 3w ago

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?...

"I still love what I do,” she said. “But it’s time to step aside and make resources available for the up-and-coming junior people who want to do what I do, especially right now" news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Award-winning biologist Connie Cepko set to retire  — Harvard Gazette

After decades of advancing work on vision-threatening disease, she passes the torch to scientific successors.

news.harvard.edu

MIT Professor Susumu Tonegawa, renowned molecular biologist and Nobel laureate, dies at 86 news.mit.edu/2026/mit-pro... #neuroscience

MIT Professor Susumu Tonegawa, renowned molecular biologist and Nobel laureate, dies at 86

Susumu Tonegawa, a renowned MIT professor of biology and neuroscience and a Nobel laureate, has died at the age of 86. His discovery of how the immune system generates many different antibodies earned...

news.mit.edu

PV interneuron-targeted CRISPRa rescue of SCN1A haploinsufficiency in Dravet syndrome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.12.737793v1

Really enjoyed reading this great review paper by @shoheifurutachi.bsky.social and @sonjahofer.bsky.social www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Rethinking Predictive Processing

Predictive coding proposes that the brain constructs internal models of the world to continuously predict sensory input and uses resulting errors to refine these models. Over the past several decades,...

annualreviews.org

The 2026 volume of the Annual Review of Neuroscience is now online 🧠 The most read article is "Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is" by @marcelomattar.bsky.social and @nathanieldaw.bsky.social

The Queen's mate feeds her a sunflower seed. 📷: Northern Cardinals