There are Science papers and then there are *I just dropped and shattered my mug of coffee Usual Suspects style* Science papers www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🙀

Ick no let him rot.

WAT
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

White, black, and red woodpecker, upside down, hanging to branch covered in purple buds.

Washington DC wildlife:

Male downy woodpecker foraging in a redbud tree this afternoon on Rodman Street. 🪶

Woahhhhh gotta find em here in ashburn!!!

Vision in flower foraging butterflies: from functional organization of the retina to encoding in the brain Summary: This Review discusses how processing in the retina and lamina in Papilio xuthus is the first element for its tetrachromatic color vision and chromatic motion vision, whereas higher-order neur...

🚨 The tetrachromatic color vision and motion vision of a swallowtail butterfly is explored in this wonderful review by Michiyo Kinoshita & Kentaro Arikawa 🦋🦋🦋

journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

One of Ireland's less common butterflies, the green hairstreak, in a rewilding part of the farm yesterday.

Rewilding isn't just about getting more trees and forests back, but increasing diversity and abundance of *all* our natural species and ecosystems.

Flexible, abstract rhythm perception in bumble bees Flexible, abstract rhythm perception underpins human music, dance, and speech, but thus far, it has only been demonstrated in a few birds and mammals. In this work, we show that bumble bees also form ...

What do The Bee Gees and bumblebees have in common? Both bees have rhythm!🕺🪩🐝 check out this new paper where authors show that bumblebees can discriminate rhythms across sensory modalities! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

mythical creature

#Cat
#Caturday

Wine-Throated Hummingbird

a bumblebee-sized hummingbird in Central America

📷: Luis Burbano

#birds

Extremely cool.
We haven’t known very much about how localized neuromodulator signaling is.
This data — made possible by new molecular sensor tools — is revealing that it’s quite local, just a few cell-widths in extent.
#neuroscience 🧪

The nontraditional model organism renaissance Each month, The Transmitter explores creative approaches neuroscientists are taking to solve problems that arise in their research. In this installment, we see how researchers work backward from speci...

Explore “Brainstorming,” @thetransmitter.bsky.social’s new LinkedIn newsletter that looks at how neuroscientists are solving research challenges. The first edition features nontraditional model organisms that are well suited for studying certain behaviors or neurological conditions.

bit.ly/4v6x506

View of Jefferson Memorial, framed by cherry blossoms.

Cherry blossoms are back, this morning at the Tidal Basin. 🌸🌸🌸

Spent the weekend rebuilding/upgrading an 8 year old ThinkPad into my new daily driver using used and scavenged parts. I guess that’s a vice now 😂

𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀
For those in favor or against, it seems like a good one to discuss in the Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon!
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Ducks in profile swimming, calm water, overcast sky.

Common merganser couple swimming this morning in the Central Park Reservoir in NYC. 🪶 🦆

Tolerance toward foreigners in ants requires chronic exposure for establishment but only sporadic exposure for maintenance Bailly et al. show that ants learn to tolerate genetically distinct non-nestmates through prolonged exposure. Once established, this tolerance persists with occasional re-encounters with ants of the s...

Ants are experts at telling nestmates from foreigners via subtle differences in odor profiles. In this new paper, we explore the conditions under which ants develop and maintain tolerance to foreigners. Turns out the ant recognition system is surprisingly plastic.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

New psychology research reveals the cognitive cost of smartphone notifications A recent study in Computers in Human Behavior provides evidence that a single smartphone pop-up derails mental focus for seven seconds. Researchers found that fragmented digital habits cause more cogn...

When I disabled all the notifications on my smart phone, I felt such an enormous sense of relief. It took me a while to figure out why. It was because I wasn't being constantly interrupted
New psychology research reveals the cognitive cost of smartphone notifications www.psypost.org/new-psycholo...

This is an uncomfortable truth that even many conservationists don't want to accept. The biggest driver of biodiversity loss is habitat loss and the biggest driver of habitat loss is the conversion of wildlands into ag lands, primarily for meat production.

Unnecessary. Use that money for conservation instead. 😒😒😒😒

Structure and function in the predictive brain - Biology & Philosophy Predictive processing is an ambitious neurocomputational framework, offering an unified explanation of all cognitive processes in terms of a single computational operation, namely prediction error min...

Since I forgot to post it, here's a paper I wrote on predictive processing, structure-function mappings in the brain, and why their relationship is more complicated than you might have thought #philmind #philsci #philsky #philpsy #neurosky #neuroskyence
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

An algorithm underlying directional hearing in fish Veith et al. show how a fish—Danionella cerebrum—can reliably startle away from sound. It uses the relative phase between particle motion and pressure to infer the direction of sound. This sensorimoto...

How do fish localize sound without interaural cues? @johve.bsky.social et al. found a behavioral algorithm for directional hearing that predicts behavior from a pressure/motion phase comparison and accounts for how this relationship varies with distance. www.cell.com/current-biol...

The nuptial dance of male mayflies helps avoid mistaken interception by other males Male mayflies (Ephemeroptera) engage in oscillating nuptial flight patterns in which they climb vertically before passively parachuting downward. Males hold station above an area often in large number...

To find mates, ♂️ mayflies chase ♀️. But how do they avoid intercepting close-by ♂️? By analyzing flight patterns, Samuel Fabian from Huai-Ti Lin's lab shows that ♂️ mostly fly along the vertical axis and chase horizontally passing ♀️.
@jexpbiol.bsky.social
journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

The NIH has lost its scientific integrity. So we left “We can no longer lend our credibility to an organization that has lost its integrity,” write four scientists and administrators who recently resigned from the NIH.

Read why NIH colleagues resigned.
Brave writing from Sylvia Chou, Alexa Romberg, Paul Grothaus and Vani Pariyadath. 🧪
#science #standupforscience #integrity

www.statnews.com/2026/01/10/n...

Science Says So: How Do Caterpillars Get Their Wings? YouTube video by Marine Biological Laboratory

Nipam Patel exploring the common myth that caterpillars 'turn to goo" inside the chrysalis, with some beautiful visuals!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCka...

Bees flexibly adjust decision strategies to information content in a foraging task Bumblebees flexibly adjust their learning strategies to the sensory challenge, balancing costs and benefits of multicue learning.

Foraging 🐝 encounter diverse sets of flower-specific visual cues. A new behavioral study from @insect-vision.bsky.social shows that bumblebees rely on color first and learn additional cues, e.g., shape or patterns, only if flowers are hard to discriminate.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This has been discussed over and over again at ULethbridge, yet we continue to prioritize GPA for grad student funding above all else, leading to a bias for our own students thanks to self inflicted grade inflation.

The Field Station Perspective series logo. The logo shows four images arranged in four quarters of a circle. The top right quarter shows a cartoon of a seal with icy mountains behind. The quadrant is coloured in shades of blue and white. The bottom right quadrant shows a beetle (black), the quadrant is yellow. The bottom left quadrant shows a salmon leaping above a wave; the quadrant is coloured shades of teal. The top left quadrant shows an emu running across savannah with the sun behind in the sky; the quadrant is in shades of red.

Field stations have long contributed to ground-breaking research published in JEB, yet the role of these vital research infrastructure sites is often underappreciated. Find out more about these valuable institutes in our new Perspective series

journals.biologists.com/jeb/collecti...

Thus far, that is what we know. There is some connectome work being done, might reveal more details about eye>optic lobe> central brain.