1/7 🧠 My journey into development begins with this work and question: how does the brain's spatial navigation system develop? We found that the neural networks for spatial navigation (tori and rings) are preconfigured and only later anchor gradually to the world with experience! 🧵
Congrats!!!
Hess’ 1949 (trans. 1957) book on the diencephalon: an excellent synthesis of data, survey of the literature, functional atlas, and methods manual. The disappearance of monographs in scientific publishing is unfortunate.
This one focuses on modern art, not interdisciplinary connections, but it’s a classic (and, I think, graphically excellent).
First whole-brain recording of social sound processing in a vertebrate. Surprises start in the hindbrain; thalamus gates conspecific calls; male and female brains diverge downstream. Work by @joerghenninger.bsky.social, @mh123.bsky.social sky.social and team. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
When a fly lands on your arm, how does your nervous system decide where to swat?
By reconstructing tactile axons in a Drosophila connectome, we found a leg somatotopic map and downstream circuits that sample the map to initiate targeted grooming
Led by Leila Elabbady, PhD
doi.org/10.64898/202...
Using our bee-tracking drone, we discovered that honey bees 🐝 have highly precise and individual routes. Now published at @currentbiology.bsky.social : doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...
A remarkable discovery: motor sequences in zebra finch song are generated intrinsically within HVC. Beautiful!
Paper is out by @harikalidindi.bsky.social : feedback control model of neural population activity
www.cell.com/cell-reports...
🔬🧠 Releasing the 1.0 version of #Suite2p and THE PAPER w/ @marius10p.bsky.social! Now with GPU acceleration. Want to use Suite2p but don’t have 100,000 neuron recordings? We show you how to get those with a standard 2p microscope #neuroscience #imaging #neuroAI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Some scientists used to think that birds are just kind of stupid. In the 1960s, the neuroanatomist Harvey Karten’s research into avian neural circuits changed how the field viewed bird intelligence. www.quantamagazine.org/intelligence...
Our paper is out in Science Advances!
What makes primate hands so dexterous?
We show that evolutionarily distinct spinal and cortical pathways work together to balance stability and flexibility, supporting remarkable primate hand control.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
New paper alert! 🚨
We found that the brain's compass is remarkably stable at two scales
1️⃣ the system maintains its internal organization for weeks
2️⃣ It "remembers" its orientation for weeks, even after a single visit
This may be key to how the brain aligns its other maps.
Paper: rdcu.be/e3waP
From Chand: “of potential interest”. Our lab’s first dataset! Tian and friends used Neuropixels to record from 7,500 units across DLPFC and PMd to show how contextual decision making (specifically, XOR computation) occurs and how this differs by location in DLPFC and between areas.
This is a catastrophic unforced error.
It was quite something to hear @ohsunews.bsky.social President Shereef Elnahal equate the shambolic lies of fringe groups (“others”) with the heartfelt & credible testimony of the scientists & veterinarians in his employ.
“Teammates” don’t support rivals.
“A sanctuary is not a strategy. It is a capitulation to fear and the political pressure that ignores scientific reality”
Well said @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social
Kenneth Catania spoke with @thetransmitter.bsky.social about how the specialized snout of the star-nosed mole allows for high-speed foraging and underscores the importance of studying behavior alongside anatomy.
By Lauren Schneider
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/neuros-ark/n...
We have updated this preprint. I think the deeper dive that @mkashefi.bsky.social has done on the 'shift' condition-independent signal is particularly interesting. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Beautiful work - congrats!!!
Where does learning through imitation happen in the brain?
In juvenile zebra finches, we pinpoint a synaptic locus of song learning in a cortico-basal ganglia circuit and leverage this localization to measure the timescale of consolidation and make birds learn faster! #neuroskyence (1/14)
Very excited to share a new preprint - my first paper in the @mikeeconomo.bsky.social lab where we asked when and why the motor cortex is recruited for movement control:🧠👇https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.13.699314v1
The lab comedians wanted some natural light. @eric-kirk.bsky.social
The Neural Control and Computation Lab is seeking a skilled part-time software engineer in Toronto to lead the development of ATHENA (Automatically Tracking Hands Expertly with No Annotations), our open-source, Python-based toolbox for 3D markerless tracking!
www.yorku.ca/health/resea...
Congrats @danielavallentin.bsky.social happy to see this out in @currentbiology.bsky.social
Thanks, Juan!
Excited to share @rbrianroome.bsky.social ‘s beautiful paper on development of the dorsal horn of the mouse spinal cord @science.org
This is how the anatomical organization and cell types that process pain, touch, body position and more are laid down.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
We had a lot of fun working on this project (led by Itzel Ishida, not on bluesky). Some interesting highlights from the paper -
Here's another, showing raw voltage throughout the dendritic tree, the virtual reality location of the animal, the mouse-eye view, and the voltage at the neuron's soma.
What is the computational role of dendritic excitations? Byung Hun Lee and team mapped voltage dynamics throughout the dendritic trees of CA1 pyramidal neurons in mice navigating in virtual reality. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Ruskin on generative AI.
