Mitch Morningstar

Supreme Court allows NIH to stop making nearly $800M in research grants for now But the court, in its emergency docket order, also left in place by a 5-4 order a lower court ruling that threw out NIH memos that enforced the administration's policies.

The ideological cancellation of $800 million of scientific research grants because they supposedly focused on DEI was just backed by the Supreme Court. This is horrific on so many levels.

Excited to share a new preprint from the Barkley-Levenson Lab! 🤠

Registration is open for the 43rd Annual MWSOT Meeting! Deadlines for early bird registration and oral presentation consideration are Sunday, August 3.

congrats Mel! 🥳

Unsupervised Phenotyping Reveals Disrupted Neural Firing Characteristics in the Anterior Thalamus and Surrounding Brain Regions Following Third-Trimester Equivalent Alcohol Exposure in Mice https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.02.657410v1

New preprint in which we utilize UMAP to functionally cluster thalamic neurons to determine what, if any, firing rate and waveform properties are disrupted by third-trimester alcohol exposure

The flood of encomiums and morality tales about Elon's turn in Washington cldn't be more predictable, vapid & sickening. If you want a story, get me the story about the crisis comms team directing this. He ran anti-constitutional blitzkrieg thru the federal government, did massive harm, violated ...

“The political environment in Russia made it hard to do science because everything was unpredictable. […] That type of uncertainty is incompatible with science, which requires the ability to plan what type of experiments and research you will do a year into the future.”

The Minecraft movie is this generations Rocky Horror

A dual-pathway architecture for stress to disrupt agency and promote habit - Nature Adaptive decision-making often requires an understanding of our agency in a situation; however, chronic stress can disrupt agency and promote inflexible, habitual behaviour by turning off a brain path...

🚨📃New Wassum Lab Paper📃🚨

Out today, @jackiegio.bsky.social discovered brain pathways that support agency and habit and how chronic stress disrupts them to rob of us our agency and cause us to form rigid habits 🧵👇

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Free full text: rdcu.be/eaxEv

The woman who created COBOL, the old (but not obsolete!) computer language that much of the Treasury's code is apparently written in, was a Navy captain. It's not like having high-ranking women in the service is some new thing.

YouTube video by National Security Agency Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People (Part One, 1982)

Shit man, some big accounts are sharing this and @hanoumatoi.bsky.social just reminded me that while she was a captain when she gave one of my favorite lectures, Grace Hopper did attain the rank of Rear Admiral.

Anyway, here's part 1 of the lecture.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=si9i...

Response from a Pennsylvania GOP congress member I emailed urging the continued funding of the NIH.

Democrats: How can we go viral?

(a pastor goes mega-viral for calling Trump a bigot to his face)

Democrats: What if Tim Kaine made a BLT on Instagram Live

Cognitive neuroscience: How the brain navigates abstract task spaces Humans and other animals learn the abstract structure of a task and then use this structure to rapidly generalize to new situations. A recent study reveals how the brain builds and uses abstract task ...

Cognitive neuroscience: How the brain navigates abstract task spaces
www.cell.com/current-biol...
#neuroscience

Thank you! I’ve really liked using Spyder so far. It’s come a long way from what I remember it being.

For those who have navigated switching from MATLAB to Python for data analyses, what IDEs have been able to replicate MATLAB’s environment the best?

Happy to share a bit of work from my time at UNM thus far onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...
We looked at the networks responsible for contextual memories and how they may be impacted by fetal alcohol syndrome disorder

Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis? Capitalism is driving the destruction of our planet. We have to think outside – and against – the framework of our current political system

Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis? www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

diagrams of Behavioral assays tested

1/✨ New paper in #eNeuro! We looked at how dominance behaviors vary across mouse strains—turns out, it’s not one-size-fits-all!
Comparing CD1 & C57 male mice, we found strain-specific dominance behaviors that could change how we study social hierarchy in the lab…🧵
Paper here: tinyurl.com/bdeuf6s9

Bluesky appropriate

A Prefrontal Cortex Map based on Single Neuron Activity The intrinsic organization underlying the central cognitive role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is poorly understood. The work to date has been dominated by cytoarchitecture as a canvas for studies on...

Saw this as a poster at the Frontal Cortex GRC. Amazing work!

Short version: brain areas have very little to do with functional organization. It's all about connectivity, not cytoarchitecture.

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

Somehow a whole month has passed by since moving to Albuquerque

Bluesky sees record signups day after Musk says X will go paid-only The day isn't even over yet Bluesky has already seen its biggest influx of new users in a single-day

More than 53,500 users joined Bluesky yesterday, setting a record for new signups on the site in a single-day

5% of Bluesky's entire user base joined the platform just 24 hrs after Musk said he would charge all Twitter / X users a fee to use the service via @mattbinder mashable.com/article/blue...

Pickle for sure, they had to add both ranch and cheese to make it okay.

Dedicating my first Bluesky post to the pickle pizza at the Indiana State Fair. An abomination in its own right, never to be forgotten and never to be missed.

I am seeing a toad :/