Michael Beierlein

Over the last few years, they won against Roma (twice), Celtic, Zagreb, Besiktas, Lazio, Man City, Man United, Atletico Madrid, and now Inter. This ain't no Appalachian State. This is a really good team.

Today, I would like to honor the memory of Roger Y. Tsien, born on February 1, 1952. His legacy lives with all who use his technologies, including calcium sensors, fluorescent proteins, the acetoxymethyl (AM) ester, & many more! #FluorescenceFriday
www.nature.com/articles/nme...

Lyon fans held up this banner during a poignant minute's silence before their game vs. PAOK 🖤

Seven fans of the Greek club were killed in a minibus crash en route to the Europa League tie.

Excited to be on the organization meeting for the 6th annual NCM conference on Neural Circuits in Health & Disease. Terrific line up of speakers!

Listening to a discussion about AI in university education with Amol Rajan & Prof Duncan Iveston on Radio 4 Today. Too short to get into the nuance of course, but an observation that copilot can do a literate review for you very quickly perfectly illustrates one of my main concerns with AI…1/1

1. If the goal is to stop us from doing science, then doing science is more important than ever now.
2. We have radical uncertainty about the future. There is no sense in giving up in advance.
3. We have agency over the future. If you don't like what's happening, work to change what is happening.

Tracking the details of an experiment in successively cited Methods sections

Excited to share our new study showing how subcortical inputs are routed through ventromedial (VM) thalamus to layer 1 interneurons in the medial PFC, all done by my graduate student Sanne Casello:
sannemcasello.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

YouTube video by Meredith Hiking and Camping in Great Sand Dunes National Park | sand & snow

Went on a short backpacking trip as I was finishing up my thesis last December. Compiled some of the footage into a YouTube video :)

We were at the great sand dunes in Colorado- so much snow! and sand! and wind! ❄️⏳⌛️

We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n

when doing neuroscience projects I often advocate for computational modelling, followed by data analysis to test model's predictions.

however a few times now I have had pushback from collaborators/reivewers suggesting it would be better to do the data analysis first, then the modelling.

thoughts?

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Apply to the Neurobiology course at MBL! It is supercool. Apps due Feb 4.

Please spread the word🔊My lab is looking to hire two international postdocs. If you want to do comp neuro, combine machine learning and awesome math to understand neural circuit activity, then come work with us! Bonn is such a cool place for neuroscience now, you don't want to miss out.

The Neural Systems & Behavior Course (Marine Biol. Lab) is an amazing opportunity to learn about many different approaches to studying nervous system control of many behaviors. Learn from experts, expand your science network, go to "science summer camp"!

We've got a great lineup of speakers for our Thalamocortical Interactions GRS! Only a few spots remaining for poster presenters - apply soon!

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...

2025 has been the year of change for me. I said goodbye to people and things I hold dear, moved back to the other side of the globe, got a new job, rekindled some old relationships, and despite the lingering sadness in me, I have, surprisingly, found peace in this new way of life.

Every week, Nature publishes yet another breathless puff piece about some AI startup, based only unpublished claims from the company and interviewing only those who work there.

How can the leading scientific journal publish piece after piece that would make Kevin Roose blush?

I think it's that...

Anyone else have a coauthor who is so much fun to write with that you just find yourself grinning in some combination of satisfaction and pride as you edit a manuscript?

If not, get yourself one.

@erictopol.bsky.social posted this diagram earlier today. When I pointed out the obvious AI slop and copious errors, he blocked me. But you can also find it on his substack. Topol poses as a serious medical person, but disseminating such graphical nonsense is disqualifying. Unfollow.

This smells distinctly like collider bias and/or selection bias and/or regression to the mean... You simply can't select teen prodigies, and world class athletes rom databases, and go run regressions without serious consideration of the selection process!

A ChatGPT diagram of a skull with some weird labels. The lower jaw is both the mandible and the occipital bone. Also, the nasal cavity is between two teeth!

Given all the recent buzz about how great ChatGPT has gotten, including its prowess with images, I figured I'd check in on its anatomical skills. Nope.

Policies and Procedures

Verboten for dissertations and candidacy exam proposals, unless clearly indicated. For courses, completely at the discretion of the instructor gsbs.uth.edu/academics/po...

I've spent all day struggling to write a single page of a popular science article. I bang away at a word processor; give up; start diagramming on paper. Take some notes; draft a few sentences in pen; return to the computer...and very slowly I figure out what I was trying to say in the first place.

screenshot of a homework worksheet that includes the sentence: "Methyl groups, a type of chemical group, are present in the environment and may enter cells and attach to the DNA as a person ages, as shown in the diagram below"

absolutely losing it at my 14yo's biology homework

Fully funded PhD position between our lab in Göttingen and @tobiasackels.bsky.social in Bonn! Dual-color imaging 🔬🐁 in freely moving mice, behavioral analysis, olfactory 👃 and spatial coding in #hippocampus... It's a cool project in two fantastic labs. Reach out if interested! 🤙 #neuroskyence

Download our large database of postdoc fellowships in all fields of research.

Database freely available to all; 281 fellowships.

Download here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

Boxing up the NSF at Eisenhower Av for the forced relocation. Boxes have “Details Matter” signage.

NSF

- Forced reorg

- POs down ~ 40% (DRP, most rotators not renewed, retirements)

- Forced move (and we have to pack and clean) to a building with no furniture, little to no conference space for panels, inadequate 🛜, …)

I personally love the boxes they gave us for packing.
“Details matter” 🙃

How I contributed to rejecting one of my favorite papers of all time I believe we should talk about the mistakes we make.

How I contributed to rejecting one of my favorite papers of all times, Yes, I teach it to students daily, and refer to it in lots of papers. Sorry. open.substack.com/pub/kording/...

Two posts from Bluesky. The first one shows a figure from a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports full of totally incoherent AI fabricated gibberish words. The other a comment on a recently published paper by eLife discussing the paper and its peer reviews which were published along with the paper.

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?