Bill Nihilist

An Open-Source Restraint System for Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Rats Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a critical tool for translational neuroscience, but preclinical studies frequently rely on anesthesia, which alters neural activity and limits comparison with human...

Excited to share this in final form @sfnjournals.bsky.social: An Open-Source Restraint System for Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Rats www.eneuro.org/content/13/2... if anyone wants to try doing it, give us a call! Happy to help you get going!

RFK Jr. visits Terry Black's in Austin on 'real food' BBQ tour Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stopped in Austin to launch a “national BBQ tour” promoting real food and targeting ultra-processed diets.

RFK Jr visited the hotel my friend works at and he looks like a slab of brisket about to commit cannibalism

www.statesman.com/news/article...

This is how PIs should be treated after the paper gets accepted:

love when there's an article about how life is sustainable in the superheated waters surrounding a hydrothermal volcanic fissure on the ocean floor and then like six paragraphs in you find out the author's parents are chemosynthetic bacteria 🙄

Explain it like I'm 5? (a 5 year old who has a neuroscience PhD but not in ephys)

Dang dang dang! Congrats Forrest!

When life gives you remoul, make remoulade

Happy Valentine's Day. Moop loves you

New office art from my colleague Dr Jones over in archeology

I have the concept of a plan to develop a strategy

Both chambers of Congress have now passed the FY26 minibus with NIH provisions. The President will sign.

(1) $48.7 billion for NIH
(2) Full IDC recovery
(3) No more multi-year funding
(4) No NIH reorganization, maintaining the current IC structure.

Have you seen this? Seems apropos

www.authorea.com/users/725445...

"Based on the past seven years of data (AUS), we found that even under conservative assumptions, the cumulative salary costs incurred during grant preparation typically exceeded the expected funding returns, resulting in low ROIs."

Understanding and Modeling NIH Research Grant Success Rates and the Impact of “Multiyear Funding” This is a guest post from Jeremy M.

goodscience.substack.com/p/understand...

The scene from Watchmen where Rorshach says "I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me!"

It's weird the only bodycam footage ICE has released is of Will Stancil:

Does no one hold sacrosanct the division between sledding track (down) and hauling path (up) any longer? The righteous glide down smoothly, the wicked feel the bumps of G*d's scorn

I keep going back to this. This is a taunt. They're taunting us. There is no other possible interpretation of what they're doing.

But media simply ignores this deranged behavior, because if they talk about it, one must conclude that DHS is a rogue agency, of villainous paramilitary thugs.

Yep, "a systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments estimates an average effect of zero in general elections"

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

U.S. Oil Blockade of Venezuela Pushes Cuba Toward Collapse Cuba’s economy, dependent on cheap Venezuelan oil for decades, now struggles to function as a result of the U.S. military’s buildup in the Caribbean and the sharp drop in oil shipments from Venezuela...

It's specifically about the oil that won't be going to Cuba.

www.wsj.com/world/americ...

What does "seasonally adjusted" mean then?

A salt addiction sticker

I want people to know I'm a guy who loves fishing and/or has a pituitary disorder

Broadly, I want to argue that we need to diversify our research portfolio. We shouldn't put all our 🥚 into the mouse 🧺. While you can make some convincing arguments that we share a lot of genetic similarities with mice, at the organismal level there are some important differences! 8/8

Oxytocin immunoreactivity. Total OXT-ir across the anterior–posterior extent of the PVN for both voles and mice housed at either 20C, 25C, or 30C. Mice (but not voles) showed decreased total OXT-ir when housed above 20C

and this is no small thing. We saw a fairly large effect of room temperature (32%) in mice. Voles, which evolved to tolerate cooler temperatures, were not affected.

I hope to be able to follow up on this study with a deeper investigation of how the assumptions of conventional care impact mice. 7/

Ambient temperature experimental timeline. Subjects were housed in rooms set to an ambient temperature of either 20C, 25C, or 30C for 3 days. Subjects were sacrificed immediately after completion of temperature exposure.

In our study, we saw effects after just 3 days. Everything we know says that the effects of lifelong cold stress are going to be even greater. Young pups are especially sensitive to developmental programming. 6/

You can't understand all humans by exclusively studying the Minnesota Vikings. They're cold and ravenous and stressed and immensely energetic. For mice, this impacts not just obesity and cardiovascular health, but also cancer and immune function. It stands to reason that the 🧠 is also affected. 5/

Translating Animal Model Research: Does It Matter That Our Rodents Are Cold? | Physiology | American Physiological Society Does it matter that rodents used as preclinical models of human biology are routinely housed below their thermoneutral zone? We compile evidence showing that such rodents are cold-stressed, hypermetab...

Other fields of biology have already begun to grapple with this -and the effects are big! Housing mice at room temp ⬆️ heart rate, blood pressure, and food consumption 40-60% compared to thermoneutral human-like conditions. Neuroscience better catch up. 4/

journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10....

Oxytocin is a very 'pleiotropic' hormone, meaning it affects many aspects of behavior and physiology: stress, metabolism, social behavior, pain, etc. Have previous studies been built on a faulty premise that we could translate findings from cold mice to warm humans? 3/

This may call into question a lot of what we think we know, particularly about oxytocin, but also about broader swaths of neuroscience. The mouse is the workhorse of neuroscience, yet mice face a burden of chronic cold stress in conventional 'room temperature' housing. 2/

<em>Journal of Neuroendocrinology</em> | BSN Journal | Wiley Online Library Neuroscience depends heavily on research done in mice (Mus musculus), yet the field has done little to address the chronic cold stress mice perpetually face during conventional “room temperature” hou...

New 🧪 study 🧪 from my lab that I'm rather chuffed to see published:

We found that under normal room temperature conditions, mice increase oxytocin levels 32% compared to mice living in human-like conditions of thermoneutrality.

1/
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Good news for people who argued vibes > data

Bad news for Americans worried about billionaires buying all social media

TERRIBLE news for my research on how voters use a special brain organ to intuit macroeconomics like how a sea turtle attunes itself to the magnetic field of the earth