Maxime Beau

Winning a Nobel Prize Interrupted His Off-the-Grid Vacation Fred Ramsdell found out about his Nobel Prize nearly 12 hours after it was announced because he was on vacation in the Rockies.

Fred Ramsdell was parked at a campground in Montana on Monday when his wife suddenly started shouting. He first thought that maybe she had seen a grizzly bear. Instead, she had regained cell service and had seen a flood of text messages with the same news. “You just won the Nobel Prize!” she yelled.

Ultra-high-density Neuropixels probes improve detection and identification in neuronal recordings To understand the neural basis of behavior, it is essential to sensitively and accurately measure neural activity at single-neuron and single-spike re…

Neuropixels Ultra!

By @steinmetzneuro.bsky.social, who led a big collaboration

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

100%

Congratulations!!

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv

What do representations tell us about a system? Image of a mouse with a scope showing a vector of activity patterns, and a neural network with a vector of unit activity patterns Common analyses of neural representations: Encoding models (relating activity to task features) drawing of an arrow from a trace saying [on_____on____] to a neuron and spike train. Comparing models via neural predictivity: comparing two neural networks by their R^2 to mouse brain activity. RSA: assessing brain-brain or model-brain correspondence using representational dissimilarity matrices

In neuroscience, we often try to understand systems by analyzing their representations — using tools like regression or RSA. But are these analyses biased towards discovering a subset of what a system represents? If you're interested in this question, check out our new commentary! Thread:

attractors are the new receptive fields

GitHub - Julie-Fabre/bombcell: Automated quality control, curation and neuron classification of spike-sorted electrophysiology data Automated quality control, curation and neuron classification of spike-sorted electrophysiology data - Julie-Fabre/bombcell

🚀 We are excited to share that bombcell is now available in Python! 🐍 Automatically sort your units into good/MUA/noise/non-somatic using quality metrics and interpretable & adjustable classification thresholds.
pip install and play around with our toy dataset:
🔗 github.com/Julie-Fabre/...

Here’s the programme: parisneuro.ovh/program/

I really recommend sending your students to the Paris Spring School, many imaging and ephys techniques are covered in pretty good depth and the atmosphere is consistently fantastic every year! And in such a setting! parisneuro.ovh

we're crowd-sourcing a searchable repository of tangible benefits stemming from federally-funded research. Come enjoy the great stories; or send in an idea; or volunteer to join the team.

publicusaresearchbenefits.com

please share and re-share so we get more great stories in there!

Bombcell icon

🔊New resource: Bombcell, automated quality control for extracellular electrophysiology
💡This is an #opensource, user-friendly toolbox that streamlines quality control for spike sorting outputs.
👩‍🔬Develop by Julie M. J. Fabre
🔗Link: open-neuroscience.com/en/post/bomb...
#OpenScience #Neuroscience

Thrilled to share our state-of-the-art method for in vivo cell-type classification and brain region localization, NEMO, which is now now a spotlight at @iclr-conf.bsky.social !

We use NEMO to characterize the electrophysiological diversity of cell-types across the entire mouse brain. 🐭 🧪 🧠

UCL early career researchers selected as 2025 Schmidt Science Fellows Two UCL researchers have been named as Schmidt Science Fellows, an award only given to 32 exceptional early career researchers worldwide.

Two UCL researchers, including Dr Julie Fabre (@uclqsion.bsky.social) have been named as Schmidt Science Fellows, an award given to 32 exceptional early career researchers worldwide.
Congratulations to both Dr @juliefabre.bsky.social & Dr Almarri on this incredible achievement! 👏

A neural mechanism for learning from delayed postingestive feedback - Nature Illness signals from the gut reactivate and strengthen flavour representations in the amygdala to support learning from delayed postingestive feedback.

How do we associate the flavors we experience during a meal 🍽️😋 with postingestive effects like food poisoning 🤢🤮 that arise much later?

Our answer in @nature.com this week: Illness signals from the gut reactivate and strengthen flavor representations in the amygdala.

📄: nature.com/articles/s41...

Many of us use 2p scopes to image 3D volumes of brain. But then we analyze the data plane by plane, resulting in duplicated neurons, missed neurons, and low s/n. Let's go 3D!

Suite3D: Volumetric cell detection for two-photon microscopy
by @haydari.bsky.social & team.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

GitHub - Julie-Fabre/bombcell: Automated quality control, curation and neuron classification of spike-sorted electrophysiology data Automated quality control, curation and neuron classification of spike-sorted electrophysiology data - Julie-Fabre/bombcell

First off, Bombcell is a MATLAB package (python version coming) developed by @juliefabre.bsky.social. It uses several metrics, like waveform shape, spike amplitudes and drift, to determine whether a detected unit is noise, multi-unit activity, axonal or a single neuron.
github.com/Julie-Fabre/...

It was an honour, thank you @rezashadmehr.bsky.social for organizing this great seminar series!

Talk link: m.youtube.com/watch?v=zy0v...

Congrats!!

Individual variability of neural computations underlying flexible decisions - Nature Behavioural experiments to study decision-making in response to context-dependent accumulation of evidence provide testable models that are consistent with the heterogeneity in neural signatures among...

1/7 Our paper on individual variability in decision-making is finally out in @nature.com! Inspired by the classic work by Mante and Sussillo, we trained many rats to solve context-dependent decision-making, and we found that different brains use different neural mechanisms to solve the same task!

YouTube video by Anthropic Controlling powerful AI

control is a complimentary approach to alignment.

its really sensible, practical and can be done now, even before systems are superintelligent.

youtu.be/6Unxqr50Kqg?...

The International Brain Laboratory reproducibility platform paper is now published at eLife. An amazing effort by many different labs and individuals to understand and improve the reproducibility of electrophysiological measurements in mice. 🧠

🚨 New paper alert! 🚨
We’ve just launched openretina, an open-source framework for collaborative retina modeling across datasets and species.
A 🧵👇 (1/9)

Standing up for science in Seattle - some lab members (Zhiwen, Nancy, Fabiola, and Jeremy) plus lab-friend Harsha @harshag.bsky.social. If only it seemed like there was the remotest chance anyone in the administration cared about our voices.

Marseille is ready to #StandUpForScience! #standupforscience2025

can you explain this 3 year gap in your resume?

yeah the paper was under review

For general thoughts on short-term breakdown in democracy - and also longer-term fixes, sign up for long-form essays. Always free. samwang.substack.com

I am recruiting graduate students for my lab @mcgillu.bsky.social for admission in Fall 2025! Get in touch if you're interested in how brain circuits implement distributed computation, including dopamine-based distributed RL and probabilistic representations.

A Neuropixels Opto probe with 3 blue emitters and 3 red emitters lighting up in succession, with corresponding neural activity in different layers of the cortex.

Neuropixels and Optogenetics are delighted to announce the birth of

Neuropixels Opto

Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics

Today in bioRxiv

960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors

By Lakunina, @karolinazsocha.bsky.social, Ladd, et al

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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