On the cover of our current issue: the 'cool' snow fly❄️❄️❄️
whose genome reveals several fascinating cold adaptations.

www.cell.com/current-biol...

In this new paper, postdoc Brandie Morris Verdone shows that mice generate active eye movements to redirect gaze during goal-directed orienting, revealing conserved principles of eye–head coordination across vertebrates. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Had to much fun working on this project with Kelsey and the Hoekstra lab. A project born after Hopi gave a talk at Janelia may years ago

Very cool!

REM-sleep twitching in adults and the maintenance of specialized sensorimotor systems Blumberg et al. present video evidence of twitching during adult sleep in a diverse sample of animals. Adult twitching appears to selectively involve appendages used for active sensing, mirroring thei...

New paper (with lots of cute animal videos!)

Ever watch your dog "run" while asleep and wonder what’s going on in their brain? In Current Bio we suggest that those twitches aren't just leaky dreams—they’re a vital maintenance system for the most precise movements

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Thrilled to share the recent preprint /
& thesis project of @pearlsald.bsky.social:

We had rats actively pursue a moving bait & found a dedicated subset of retrosplenial cortex cells encoding target location (but not boundaries or objects) relative to the head.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Ground-truth encoding of self-motion in the primate cerebellar nodulus and uvula - Nature Communications How the brain meets these competing demands–and where such a veridical “ground-truth” representation is computed–remains unknown. Here authors show that the cerebellar nodulus/uvula–a region essential...

In most vestibular structures, sensory input is suppressed during self-generated movement. Here, postdoc Robyn Mildren shows an exception in the cerebellar nodulus/uvula, which faithfully encodes head motion in space across behavioral contexts. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper from Brandon Pratt, @chrisjdallmann.bsky.social, and colleagues on how hair plate proprioceptors sense joint limits and contribute to sensorimotor control of walking.

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

Congrats, Andrew!!!

Congrats, Amy and team - looks fantastic!!!

Computational framework to predict and shape human–machine interactions in closed-loop, co-adaptive neural interfaces - Nature Machine Intelligence Madduri et al. introduce a computational framework grounded in control and game theory to model co-adaptation between users and decoders in neural interfaces. This framework enables a principled desig...

If you're interested in emerging ideas in neural interfaces, I humbly suggest my lab's latest: www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Neural interfaces create dynamic interactions between the brain & devices. This means mean we need new engineering approaches beyond typical ML to "decode" a static brain

This is a core peril of connectome-body models: behavioral fidelity ≠ biological fidelity.

Virtual animals are powerful, but ONLY if brain-body interfaces are grounded in biology. A model that walks like a fly might just be a worm in disguise. 👀

Fruit fly, or gadfly? Compelling, in either case!

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social

We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked

What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective

We call it the digital sphinx

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

There is still some time to apply for a 3-years PhD position in my lab. If you want to learn how to conduct brain recordings in freely moving bees.

Tapped delay lines for sound localization in the MSO?

Congrats!!!

Let me post a spicy take here: most people don't read or cite other model organisms' work. Because of this, they keep rediscovering things and, most importantly, re-writing the timeline in favor of fewer and fewer models. That, plus an artificial limit of citations per paper equals this 🧪

In my field, we’ve probably forgotten more knowledge acquired from cats than we’ve regained from rodents. It’s a shame!

On War and Peace in Animals and Man

This essay by Tinbergen on “War and Peace in Animals and Man” was too far afield to make it into the discussion of our recent pre-print on the execution of a natural behavior, but has been on my mind a lot lately. Anyone else?

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

Cosyne 2026 - Cosyne Tutorial: Comparative Analysis of Neural Population Codes YouTube video by Cosyne Talks

Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc.

The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...

Flies beat their wings more than 200 times per second. How do proprioceptors rapidly sense and fine tune the wingstroke?

@ellenlesser.bsky.social combined genetic tools with the connnectome to create an atlas of Drosophila wing proprioceptors. @elife.bsky.social

elifesciences.org/articles/107...

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...

Hopeless in Tehran Essays on neuroscience

Today I received a note from a grad student who lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future.

rezashadmehr.blogspot.com/2026/03/hope...

Very cool! Congrats, Fabricio, Ariel, and team!

Check out the newest work from our, from Fabricio Nicola @fabricionicola.bsky.social on mouse jumping and spinal cell types.

Excellent collab with @vulcnethologist.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Mammals have hundreds of joints and muscles. Controlling them individually would be nearly impossible.

How does the nervous system organize such complexity into coherent actions?

Our new study explores this question through a natural behavior: jumping.

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.