farzaan

Do flies feel pain?

Spooky new preprint from our lab on the cells and circuits that mediate nociceptive behaviors in adult Drosophila, led by graduate student (and newly minted PhD!) @jonesjes.bsky.social.

🪰⚡👻🎃

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

🦟 The mosquito is the most deadly animal in the world. The Mosquito Cell Atlas is an incredible new resource to help us understand more about their ability to transmit pathogens to humans.

Data is available on the UC Santa Cruz @genomebrowser.bsky.social at mosquito.cells.ucsc.edu

A single-nucleus transcriptomic atlas of the adult Aedes aegypti mosquito A comprehensive single-nucleus RNA-seq atlas of >367,000 nuclei from male and female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes reveals sexual dimorphism in sensory systems and brain cell types and widespread co-expres...

Excited to announce the final version of the Mosquito Cell Atlas is out now in @cellpress.bsky.social!! 🦟🩸

There is SO much left to find & investigate in this dataset (& the rich biology of the Aedes aegypti mosquito)! We hope this helps scientists in many fields!
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

I have been very excited to hear Jerseyite stories of mischief night but none of them knew what it was, not sure if I'm being double bamboozled

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

a graphic showing the pantone numbers for the two core colors of the toronto blue jays. they are skydome blue (pantone 293) and Stieb Navy (pantone 282)

a hat and canvas tote with the pantone number for Dodger Blue (294 C)

I regret to inform everyone that my pedantic brain couldn’t let me live until I knew whether or not dodger blue and blue jays blue are the same blue. They are ONE PANTONE NUMBER APART.

The Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, NY, has been in financial trouble for a while. I'm biased because I currently have my life-size giant snail and clam on display, but they're a bunch of great people doing great work.

Read how you can help here: www.priweb.org/mortgage-cam...

shoutout 16 inning games on the pacific coast for my 2am break

It occurs to me the last time the Jays won the World Series is still more recent than the last time a Canadian NHL team won the Stanley Cup.

A graphic a green patterned background, featuring an image of Jaylen Brown and his mother. Jaylen is holding a proclamation. Text on the graphic reads: Happy Jaylen Brown Day.

I am proud to proclaim today Jaylen Brown Day in @boston.gov! ☘️

This month is my turn to bust science myths in our institute's mini-videos series. This month's topic: fruit flies and evolution! 🪰🧬

@mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social

It was fun writing this essay, about bottom-up neuroscience and how we might simulate entire brains, using data collected via new technologies (expansion microscopy, optogenetics, whole brain voltage imaging, and more), with @kordinglab.bsky.social!

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs

- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
- Social Sciences by 50–70%
- History by 60%
- Biology by 75%
- The German department will lose all PhD seats
- Sociology from six PhD students to zero

The Virginia Senate just told UVA it’s not getting state funding if it accepts the compact since UVA exists to serve Virginia, its residents, & their interests—not be a tool of the federal govt. Scoop from our student newspaper, who’ve been doing vital reporting www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025...

It’s nice rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates. I don’t get this excess stress of the MLB playoffs in my life.

Reaffirming the value of model organisms in training scientific minds - Nature Cell Biology As biomedical research prioritizes human models and translational promise, classic model organisms are increasingly dismissed. Here we argue that they have a lasting value, both in enabling discovery and in cultivating scientific thinking, by training researchers in systems reasoning, integrative thinking and independent inquiry.

PREACH!

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

The image shows a circumhorizon arc (or circumhorizontal arc), an optical phenomenon resembling a fiery rainbow. It forms in a clear sky with cirrus clouds made of flat, hexagonal ice crystals aligned horizontally. These crystals refract sunlight, creating a colorful arc parallel to the horizon. Vibrant colors shine brightly against the blue sky, captured near North Fork Mountain, West Virginia.

🧵
A nice circumhorizontal arc (informally known as a fire rainbow, which is a misnomer) over West Virginia captured by Christa Harbig!

It is an optical phenomenon belonging to the family of ice halos, so it is neither fire nor a rainbow.

➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap21083...

🔭 🧪 #science

1/3

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Look at her go!
#invertebrates 🌿

need

How FlyWire is redefining Drosophila research, one year in Nine Drosophila researchers share how the connectome transformed the field and what additional new tools they would like to see.

To celebrate the first anniversary of the release of FlyWire, we asked nine neuroscientists to share how they are using connectome data in their research and what they hope is in store for the future of fly connectomics.

By @franciscorr25.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

bit.ly/3Wx5nt3

Oooh the Nobel Prize is out today, so it's time for my yearly round of ignoring that news and reading about many of the women who were snubbed of the prize in the past and who the Nobel Prize committee refuses to apologise for. 🧪🔭

#goals

🪰 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

Brunkow, meanwhile, got the news of her prize from an AP photographer who came to her Seattle home in the early hours of the morning. She said she had ignored the earlier call from the Nobel Committee. “My phone rang and I saw a number from Sweden and thought: ‘That’s just, that’s spam of some sort.’” “When I told Mary she won, she said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’” said her husband, Ross Colquhoun. Ramsdell couldn’t be reached immediately by the AP or his employer, who thought he might be away on a backpacking trip.

spam calls are preventing nobel laurates from finding out that they won

s in spelling bee, something is shifting I can feel it

Ectopic sodium channel expression decreases excitability of Drosophila Kenyon cells Abstract figure legend: We tested the effects of expressing the bacterial voltage-gated sodium channel NaChBac in the Kenyon cells of the Drosophila memory centre, the mushroom body. NaChBac expressi...

Excited to share our latest work - expressing the bacterial sodium channel in fly Kenyon cells surprisingly *decreases* their excitability, thanks partly to decreased endogenous sodium channels. This prevents learning and decreases odor-evoked calcium influx doi.org/10.1113/JP28...

A show of bipartisan support for NIH. Basically flat except for ARPA-H.

The President’s budget proposal basically ignored (as it should have been).

Your Slow and Sad Descent Into Bird-Watching You suddenly find that you’re able to distinguish the pa-chip-chip-chip of an American goldfinch. Before you know it, you’re mimicking bird calls.

One minute, you're just living your life, and the next, you're mimicking bird calls. Here’s how it happens.

Dear Fly Community, In May 2025, the NIH terminated all grant funding to Harvard University, including the NHGRI grant that supported FlyBase. This grant also funded FlyBase teams at Indiana University (IU) and the University of Cambridge (UK), and as a result, their subawards were also canceled. The Cambridge team has secured support for one to two years through generous donations from the European fly community, emergency funding from the Wellcome Trust, and support from the University of Cambridge. At IU, funding has been secured for one year thanks to reserve funds from Thom Kaufman and a supplement from ORIP/NIH to the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (BDSC). Unfortunately, the situation at Harvard is far more critical. Harvard University had supported FlyBase staff since May but recently denied a request for extended bridge funding. As a result, all eight employees (four full-time and four part-time) were abruptly laid off, with termination dates ranging from August to mid-October depending on their positions. In addition, our curator at the University of New Mexico will leave her position at the end of August. This decision came as a shock, and we are urgently pursuing all possible funding options. To put the need into perspective: although FlyBase is free to use, it is not free to make. It takes large teams of people and millions of dollars a year to create FlyBase to support fly research (the last NHGRI grant supported us with more than 2 million USD per annum). To help sustain FlyBase operations, we have been reaching out to you to ask for your support. We have set up a donation site in Cambridge, UK, to which European labs have and can continue to contribute, and a new donation site at IU to which labs in the US and the rest of the world can contribute. We urge researchers to work with their grant administrators to contribute to FlyBase via these sites if at all possible, as more of the money will go to FlyBase. However, we appreciate that some fu…

https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase Our immediate goals are: 1. To maintain core curation activities and keep the FlyBase website online 2. To complete integration with the Alliance of Genome Resources (The Alliance). Integration with the Alliance is essential for FlyBase’s long-term sustainability. For nearly a decade, NHGRI/NIH has supported the unification of Model Organism Databases (MODs) into the Alliance, which we aim to achieve by 2028. Therefore, securing bridge funding to sustain FlyBase over the next three years is crucial for successful integration and the long-term access to FlyBase data. At present, our remaining funds will allow us to keep the FlyBase website online for approximately one more year. Beyond that, its future is uncertain unless new funding is secured. We will, of course, continue pursuing additional grant opportunities as they arise. Given the uncertainty of future NIH or alternative funding sources, we are relying on the Fly community for support. Your contributions will directly help us retain the staff needed to complete this transition and to secure ongoing fly data curation into the Alliance beyond 2028. We at FlyBase are incredibly grateful for the outpouring of support from the community during this challenging time. Your encouragement has strengthened our resolve and underscores how vital this resource remains to Drosophila research worldwide. Sincerely, The FlyBase Team

The community of Drosophila researchers is amazing, mutually supportive and collaborative. Right now a key resource for our community, @flybase.bsky.social , is threatened by the cancellation of its NIH grant and is seeking community help in raising short term funds 1/n 🧪 please share