lol… yeah m, sorry about that. I told the AV guy that I wanted “some” sound, not ear-shattering!

5. Hifsah Ahmed. Technician. Poster A0528. Wednesday. 2:00 - 3:45 PM.
Single unit recordings of retinal ganglion cells with intact neurovascular function.

Our science-fiction project. We got spikes from RGCs in the optic nerve of an intact eye following perfusion of the carotid artery!

4. Santiago Guardo Maya. Student. Poster A0524. Wednesday. 2:00 - 3:45 PM.
Dissecting intrinsic and circuit-level contributions to temporal adaptation in retinal ganglion cell subtypes.

A deep dive into temporal processing in RGCs comparing white noise to natural statistics.

3. Me. Talk in session 340 (Ballroom J). Tuesday. 2:30 PM
Tusc5 and the role of glucose transport regulation in retinal ganglion cell metabolism and function.

Do you believe that I'm giving a talk on metabolism - with the name of a gene in the title?! Check it out. I think we found something cool.

2. Julia Fadjukov. Postdoc. Talk in Session 313 (Ballroom J). Tuesday. 9:15 AM
Characterization of displaced amacrine cells of the mouse retina using function, morphology and gene expression.

21 types. come find your favorite!

1. Zach Jessen. Postdoc. Poster B0011. Monday. 3:00 - 4:45 PM
Functional imaging of rod-mediated signaling in the ex vivo mouse retina.

Zach is developing a system to image huge areas of the mouse retina with very little light exposure by using light sheet microscopy and far red indicators.

I am excited to be at #arvo2025 with several members of my lab. Our theme this year is new, unpublished projects. I find all of these especially exciting because they are mostly (1) departures from our past work and (2) intellectually driven by trainees.
Chronologically:

Yes it is! A popular science writer sent it to me a couple of days early. She will probably put one sentence in her article after I talked her ear off about it!

Tile floor with semi-regularly spaced black tiles.

You know you are a retinal neuroscientist when you see this shower floor and your first thought is, "I wonder what the voronoi domain regularity index is for those black tiles?"

Here is my favorite paper on this topic from Benjamin Reese's lab: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32026463/

Congrats! I’m really looking forward to the results of this exciting project.

And the 1.5 page paper from 1975 in which he coined it has more elegant prose than most novels!

For those of you who are curious… look up “hyperacuity” and enjoy the rabbit hole of literature that almost all leads back to Westheimer. A chapter of my book is devoted to this field that he almost single-handedly created, and it does not do justice to all the great papers.

Gerald Westheimer is indeed a legend (and Austin Roorda has done a few pretty important things himself over the years 😉). I had the honor of meeting Dr. Westheimer at a virtual forum a couple of years ago and asking him a couple of science questions.

Some more signs...

Sign that reads "trans rights are just good science."

Sign that reads "diversity is not a dirty word"

Sign in support of vision science research

Sign making fun of Elon Musk for bragging about Ozempic being funded by science and likely using it.

A sampling of the great sings I saw at #StandUpForScience
@standupforscience.bsky.social Chicago today. Thanks to all the organizers and participants.

Flyer advertising Visual Neuroscience course for summer 2025. Includes pictures of model organisms: zebrafish, mouse, and octopus.

I know many of us are out in the streets today fighting for the future of science funding in the US. Here's to hope - and something to look forward to this summer - our MBL Visual Neuroscience Course! Please apply! Deadline approaching. Financial Aid is available.
www.mbl.edu/education/ad...

Protest signs for StandUpForScience 2025

Heading to standupforscience2025.org/chicago-il/

A promotional image for the MBL's 2025 Visual Neuroscience course. The course runs from August 1 to August 16, 2025, with applications due March 19. Financial assistance is available. The image also includes the hashtag #ScienceStartsHere and a logo for the MBL.

Hey, visual neuroscientists 👋 Interested in hands-on training in modern techniques and building a lifelong network of colleagues and friends? Look no further! 🧠

Apply for the MBL's Visual Neuroscience course by March 19: bit.ly/4kn48HH

#ScienceStartsHere

So sad. What a waste of all your time and that of all the other reviewers. This is hard work! Any idea what they plan to do? Reschedule? Review a double batch of applications next time?

Yeah, but to lessen the load on the investigator to pay the rest off grants, not the department contribution, which can then be reallocated to anything else the department wants to spend it on.

has always been from my own grants). I wonder if the donors know how their money is being spent. I guess this is in the fine print somewhere when they donate? The wording was ambiguous at best in the letter I received when I was awarded the chair.

Is this normal?

What is your university’s policy about endowed chairs for faculty? I just discovered that mine (at the medical school at least) is essentially institutionalized embezzlement. The moment I received my endowed chair, my home department’s contribution to my salary went from 15% to 0 (the other 85%

And as far as the output of the retina, I would argue that while the primate fovea is a notable exception, in most species, the majority of retinal ganglion cell spikes are driving these reflex pathways that never make it to perception.

Of course, that’s not the whole story because so many of the neurons in the human brain are in the cortex, most of which probably has some access to the cognitive bottleneck. But perhaps adding many or more sophisticated reflexes could be another reason for neuron numbers to increase in evolution.

One thought about the number of neurons: while I agree that there is no good explanation for the “bottleneck” of perception and cognition, many of the neurons might usually (or always) participate in sensory-motor loops that never enter cognition at all. These are colloquially called reflexes.

This is one of the most stimulating pieces I have read in a long time. Thanks Markus and Jieyu for posing the deep questions so beautifully.

It’s hard to identify how I can tell, but I feel like I can tell. I have read thousands of these. The artificial ones have a certain grammatical flourish that sounds cold and lacking humanity (because it is!).

A few of the confirmed faculty who will be running the hands-on workshops: Leon Lagnado (@leonlagnado.bsky.social), Yirong Peng, Juan Anguyera (@juanonyme.bsky.social), Hillel Adesnik (@hilleladesnik.bsky.social).... and more! I can't give all of the names away in the first post. 😉