Ben de Bivort

I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I’m not against AI, I dislike bullshit

I'm not against AI, I dislike people losing jobs, wealth concentration, devaluation of art, facile creation of misinformation, social isolation and energy waste.

Despite the mess, we are grateful to be funded, have exciting science happening, and have an opening for a postdoc!

If you are interested in sensory biology and esp in cilia, thermosensation, or interoception, and would like to join an interactive & supportive group - please email.

Please RT 🙏

I'm not a gut person, I want to *exclude* effects of gut neuropeptides. Are there any gut Gal80 lines available for enteroendocrine cells? I just keep encountering escargot-Gal80, which isn't a good option. Please help me, #Drosophila people who work outside the brain! 🧪🪰

a group of Drosophila erecta fruit flies on a small food patch. flies on white background

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint

We discovered that the fruit fly #drosophila erecta requires food odor to mate and arousal is further enhanced by social group motion.

Cross-species analysis of brain activity reveals a novel gate evolved from within a conserved circuit

shorturl.at/gGYm7

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.

congratulations, that's awesome!

MIT’s McGovern Institute and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences welcome new faculty member Sven Dorkenwald - MIT McGovern Institute The McGovern Institute and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences are pleased to announce the appointment of Sven Dorkenwald as an assistant professor starting in January 2026. A trailblazer i...

Excited to share more widely: I am starting the Dorkenwald Lab at MIT (McGovern Institute + BCS) in January 2026. We study the organizational principles of neuronal circuits using connectomics.

And we are hiring postdocs & tech associates! dorkenwaldlab.com/join

We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT

College Students and Faculty Resist Trump’s “Free Speech” Funding Scheme Nine universities across the country were given a test of loyalty from the Trump administration. Now, students are demanding their schools not sign the president’s 10 point compact agreement.

new @teenvogue.com: students at the 9 colleges invited to Trump's "college compact" have been pushing their universities to reject it.

+ a bit of a scoop: @sunrisemvmt.bsky.social tells us that they're launching a national coalition to support students pushing their schools to fight the Trump admin

Saturating the eQTL map in Drosophila: Genome-wide patterns of cis and trans regulation of transcriptional variation in outbred populations Pallares et al. collect over a thousand RNA-seq and DNA samples from Drosophila melanogaster flies to investigate the genetic basis of gene expression variation. They find eQTLs for 98% of the genes a...

We have put together a comprehensive eQTL map for D. melanogaster using thousands of genetically diverse flies 🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰 We hope this helps -as similar resources have done in yeast and humans- to understand how genetic variation 🧬 regulates complex traits variation 🪰 via transcriptional regulation ⬆️⬇️

I agree. I frequently observe that writing critique bullets is an exercise in justification for a gestalt opinion already formed, rather than a stepwise incremental process that leads to a overall impact score.

although sometimes writing those bullets DOES move the overall impression around.

A haunting video of the crinoids of the ancient seas and the hat snails that haunted them.

The animation is credited at the end, I'd love to know more about how this was made!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdPTYamnqQA

leeerooyy mmmjenkins

The Virginia Senate just told UVA it’s not getting state funding if it accepts the compact since UVA exists to serve Virginia, its residents, & their interests—not be a tool of the federal govt. Scoop from our student newspaper, who’ve been doing vital reporting www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025...

my little frog Frogby in the style/colors of the Portland protest inflatable frog costume, his eyes are red, he has a lighter belly and darker spots on his arms and legs and is smiling

Frogby is a fan of the Portland frogs

Lab’s 1st preprint!

Menstruation is understudied due to societal taboos + a biological challenge: mice (a key system for research + drug discovery) don’t menstruate.

@cagricevrim.bsky.social made menstruating mice + used them to discover early events in menstruation.

He is on the job market!

congratulations!

M.I.T. Rejects a White House Offer for Special Funding Treatment

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

Go MIT ✊🏼

yes indeed, hope I make the cut :D

cool — congratulations! seems like a great fit :)

it's that time of year, it's time to get your flu and covid booster shot unless you're from massachusetts then it's time for your flu and covid borcester shot

Headline from an article in Nature this week that states "Prizes must recognize machine contributions to discovery. The future of science will be written by humans and machines together. Awards should reflect that reality."

Lol the Nobels can't even acknowledge women's contribution to discovery. But sure let's acknowledge The Machines.

Happy to have started as an @hhmi.org Freeman Hrabowski Scholar! Incredibly grateful for this opportunity and am excited for some very cool new directions! We are *HIRING*, especially postdocs! Please reach out if you’re interested in uterine and pregnancy biology. Please repost!

cc @giorgio.gilest.ro

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems... SIMON: What? SHAPIRO: ...Or saying... SIMON: You imagine that? SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

A 🆕 episode of Genetics in Your World is now available! ECS Multimedia Subcommittee co-chair @ecoevogal.bsky.social interviewed Dr. Shraddha Lall of Harvard University on her research covering selection for phenotypic variability in Drosophila.

Listen now: buff.ly/M9uafT5 🎙️

You. Do. Not. Try. To. Prove. Your. Hypothesis.

That is completely backwards.

The proper way to do science is to form a hypothesis, and then do everything you can to try and tear that hypothesis apart.

Any other way is scientifically unsound at the least, and malpractice or outright lies at worst

US anti-fascism expert blocked from flying to Spain at airport Rutgers University professor who published book on antifa was informed at boarding gate that his trip was cancelled

When I was reporting in Sudan several years ago, a driver warned me not to tell government officials when I was leaving because the airport is where they stop and detain writers.

So, yeah, this is a very bad sign. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

At the CSHL meeting, @sarahcertel.bsky.social gives a wonderful memorial about the recently passed Ed Kravitz. A beautiful remembrance for a man who contributed so much to our fly community and to the CSHL mission.