John Tuthill

legend

peak bloobs right now out in the glacier peak wilderness

Apply now!!! 🔥

The official website of the Nobel Prize - NobelPrize.org The Nobel Prize rewards science, humanism and peace efforts. This is one of the central concepts in the will of Alfred Nobel, and it also permeates the outreach activities that have been developed for...

1/ We’re delighted to hear that our Reviewing Editor, Shimon Sakaguchi, has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine today alongside colleagues Fred Ramsdell and Mary Brunkell: www.nobelprize.org

🪰 A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system—a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the millions of connections between them.
🔗 https://hhmi.news/4o3EJnk

Important article at this point in history: "As much harm as a 40 percent cut to the NIH budget would have on scientific innovation, destroying the peer-evaluation system that decides what science is funded would be far worse." Indeed. It would be like doing away with criminal trial by jury.

thanks for speaking out @markhisted.org

Congrats, Sweta! UBC is lucky to have recruited you and we're so happy to have you back in the PNW neighborhood.

a white cat is sitting on a box with the words where written on it . ALT: a white cat is sitting on a box with the words where written on it .

The fiscal year is over.

So how was the NIH appropriation committed?

A long thread with institute by institute results about where the money went.

still a nerd. also, i think the first article i ever wrote for publication was about your catering business for the phoenix.

we made one! id make it open access but the royalties are paying for my country club membership

oh hi ja'dell! thanks

Fear and loathing on study section: Reviewing grant proposals while the system is burning As grants are canceled, delayed and subject to general uncertainty, participating in study sections can feel futile. But it’s more important than ever.

This is the original story that i wrote about the topic for The Transmitter.
www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...

Odds of winning NIH grants plummet as new funding policy and spending delays bite Funding multiyear grants up front will sharply cut number of investigators receiving awards

also i got several emails pointing out that i failed to mention the impact of the NIH's new "forward-funding" scheme. i think this discussion didn't make it in for one of the reasons they are using it - it's not straightforward to explain and understand.

www.science.org/content/arti...

thanks to @javierapfeld.bsky.social whose thread on microRNAs i had just read when the asked about the huntington's clinical trial bsky.app/profile/javi...

last week i spoke with the NPR show @onthemedia.bsky.social about what it feels like serving on an NIH grant review panel as the Trump administration works to defund and destroy US universities and biomedical research

www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm...

📻👂On this week’s show: scientist @tuthill.bsky.social on what is being lost at the NIH, @joshuakeating.bsky.social on Trump’s ever expanding use of the word “terrorist.” And the always essential @matthewdtaylor.bsky.social on the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk. 👂📻 www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm...

Whether you think limiting student visas to 4 years is a good or bad thing, please comment. Be heard.

@chrisjdallmann.bsky.social pointed out that his paper was in review so long that it made it on twice! (preprint and final pub) totally worth it in my opinion

1/ Starting next year, @hhmi.org will require all authors to share their research as preprints under a CC BY 4.0 license as part of its new Immediate Access to Research policy.
buff.ly/NrHlEKD

What if NIH had been 40% smaller? Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research

This paper does a great job with a "It's a Wonderful Life" scenario about NIH, supposing the consequences of the bottom 40% of the funding NIH grants never existed.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

tl:dr The world would lose a lot, but directly and indirectly

Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time One of the most devastating diseases finally has a treatment that can slow its progression and transform lives, tearful doctors tell BBC.

New cures feel sudden, but the seeds were planted decades ago by basic scientists.

Which seeds will turn into cures? Unpredictable looking forward, a straight line looking back. 🧪🧬 🧵

Ed Kravitz passed away yesterday.
He was a remarkable scientist and mentor- brilliant, curious, creative, and kind. I am grateful to have learned from him. His legacy will endure through his science and through the many people he inspired.

We will miss you, Ed.

thanks for attending, ish. she passed!

The final version of our paper on how ants and possibly other insects use a crazy mechanism involving extensive transcriptional interference to regulate odorant receptor expression is now open access in my favorite journal, @currentbiology.bsky.social

authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Thesis defense for Jess Jones happening tomorrow! DM me if you'd like the zoom link.

https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/MABe-mouse-behavior-detection

And we are live!

Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️

Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions!

www.kaggle.com/competitions...

Selective presynaptic inhibition of leg proprioception in behaving Drosophila Nature - A study in Drosophila has identified a neural circuit that selectively suppress movement-encoding proprioceptors during self-generated movements such as walking and grooming.

open access link: rdcu.be/eGU1a

Sensory input to primate spinal cord is presynaptically inhibited during voluntary movement - Nature Neuroscience Nature Neuroscience - Sensory input to primate spinal cord is presynaptically inhibited during voluntary movement

this was the question that got me into limb sensorimotor control in the first place, specifically papers from burrows, fetz, etc about how presynaptic inhibition could predict and modify sensory feedback during voluntary movement
www.nature.com/articles/nn1...
www.jneurosci.org/content/15/8...

indefatigable because many of the experiments were extremely challenging and so was the review process: this one has been on @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social since october 23