Alex Keyes, PhD

A parabrachial hub for need-state control of enduring pain - Nature Activity in a set of parabranchial neurons in the mouse brain is increased during chronic pain, predicts coping behaviour, and can be modulated by circuits activated by survival threats.

Finally out: our recent work with Nick Betley is a view into how the brain reshapes its behavior in the face of competing survival needs- and also a potential angle on treatment targets for enduring pain.

A brief rundown...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

i have maintained for years that tswift is a mediocre songwriter but a phenomenal business woman. her music has generally been, to me, generic and inoffensive to a corporate ear, and i think this author's comparison to marvel movies is apt.

love to have a representative that refuses to do her job! or be accountable to her constituents!
she won that seat originally by 6 votes. she held it last election by less than 1000. bold to be acting like this with those numbers.

she's the rep for iowa city - she won that seat originally, in 2020, by 6 votes. she held in it 2024 by less than a thousand votes. to say that's a swing seat is understating it, almost.

the spicier the better for me!

this feels like the true inverse of mine, which is red vines licorice dipped in salsa

i have genuinely never been able to convince people to try this. option 2 here was tuna salad (with pickles) served in apple halves, which is something i did when i wanted variety from the grilled cheese

grilled cheese, made with: tillamook cheddar cheese and strawberry jelly on sourdough bread, grilled with butter

i'll be really curious to see what happens with my age cohort (at least, those of us who got chickenpox vaccines and never got chickenpox in the first place)

i'm among the oldest of people vaccinated against chickenpox, at least in the u.s.

Meningeal macrophages exhibit diverse calcium signaling at steady-state and in response to aberrant cortical hyperexcitability in awake mice The meninges, which envelop and protect the brain, host a large number of resident macrophages that play a crucial role in regulating homeostasis and neuroinflammation. Intracellular Ca2+ signaling me...

A new preprint out from the Levy lab, adding knowledge to the exciting world of brain border macrophages and neuroimmunology.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

i should add, my mother has told me to leave because she doesn't think it's safe. i don't really know how safe anywhere really is for trans people, though.

there are people i care about that i don't want to leave here. that said, i've definitely considered leaving and have looked for jobs abroad.

Smiling Mychal with hands raised wears an outer space shirt in a library. It is a still from an episode of Reading Rainbow.

LeVar Burton smiles with hands behind his head as he lies down on a colorful pile of books. ENEMY PIE book rests on his chest.

There have been two hosts in the history of Reading Rainbow. The Legend of Literacy, LeVar Burton! And... me, Mychal Threets, a librarian 🥹🤯

I am a reader, a librarian because LeVar Burton and Reading Rainbow made us believe and see we belong in books, we belong everywhere ✨

youtu.be/e7es7qdWVnU

quick while the government is shut down let’s all switch to metric

and like, as a comment, Katalin Karikó was not funded for her work for a very long time partly because people didn't see the relevance but i think we can all agree her work had a pretty massive impact!

you will end up making a system that will disproportionately fund white men. and people that do this always claim "it's objective!!!" but it's based on data that we know has these biases and i'm a little tired of having to explain the fundamental principle of "garbage in, garbage out".

we know that white men have been disproportionately represented in the sciences, particularly in who gets funded and who gets high impact papers. if your metric of who should get funding is primarily based on whose funded research gets the biggest press (or, say, nobel prizes)

okay not to be really cynical about this but it's not seeming like they accounted for the systemic biases that we already know exist in who gets funded, published, etc
so like. are we measuring actual impact or proportion of white men? if your training data is biased, then your system will be biased

1. making things - i worked on the quilt pieces i've been meaning to for a while, i'll be making mooncakes with my roommate today
2. skating - there's something so meditative about figure skating

ICE detains Des Moines Superintendent Dr. Ian Roberts Iowa's largest school district had "no confirmed information" on why ICE detained Dr. Ian Roberts, the superintendent since 2023.

Breaking news from Des Moines: ICE has detained Dr. Ian Roberts, the superintendent of Iowa's largest school district.
The Des Moines Public Schools said "We have no confirmed information as to why Dr. Roberts is being detained or the next potential steps."
www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/09/26/i...

FEBS Press CX3CL1 plays a significant role in modulating the skeletal muscle microenvironment that influences properties of both individual fibres and non-muscle cells such as satellite cells, immune cells, and...

Fractalkine is a key player in skeletal muscle metabolism and pathophysiology
febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Dear friends,
As have become a habit, I mark each #autumnequinox by sharing a small poem by Xin Qiji. I also start my translation cycle of Chinese and Japanese poems and prose that mark the twenty-four lunisolar micro-seasons. Translation notes blogged here:
#everynightapoem

Frances Oldham Kelsey would like to have a word

context for those unaware: she is why thalidomide was never approved in the u.s. for morning sickness, she was the FDA pharmacologist who had concerns re lack of safety data

Can ChatGPT help science writers?

Some people think ChatGPT has a place writing things like news briefs, stuff written to a specific style and tone and, y'know, kinda boring.

So Science did a study.

ChatGPT failed.

Why? It got stuff wrong. "Also, extensive editing for hyperbole was needed." www.science.org/content/blog...

the "will always produce plausible but false outputs" is not unexpected to me and is a reason i have no desire to use these things. if i were to use it for research, i would have to go double check everything it spits out anyway, and that's slower than me just going and sorting thru papers myself

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits."

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

Ryu et al. find that invasive neural recordings of patients with chronic pain revealed that higher pain levels were associated with increased regularity in spike-like events within the 4- to 15-Hz band. Learn more in #PAIN bit.ly/46HTsPH

Trans rights are not the rights of a tiny minority, trans rights are everyone’s rights to self-determination, control of our bodies, and a society where opportunity and aesthetics are not restricted by sex assigned at birth

You should support and defend trans people because trans people are people

people who want other people to stay in sad little grey boxes forever and never be happy in their bodies or desires are villains and cowards and they may be winning right now but by god they will lose as water smooths stone and roots break it, because that fierce joy is roots and water and life

being trans is awesome and trans people are amazing and gender is a dumb box and anyone who makes their own crowbar to smash it from inside is a hero actually.