a drawing of a person loading a virtual hug ALT: a drawing of a person loading a virtual hug

I’m so sorry😔

New preprint!

Prefrontal brain-to-brain synchrony during human group hunting: Evidence from fNIRS hyperscanning

Heroic work from @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social and team

fNIRS & minecraft combined to reveal PFC synchrony during human group hunting

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

Excited to share our latest in @currentbiology.bsky.social (they who publish the coolest papers!)

Memories are encoded by sparse neuronal ensembles (engrams). But most evidence comes from "simple" associative learning tasks. What about more integrative memories like spatial navigation?

It's funky axons time 🔬 🧪

A large white waterfowl with orange feet stands in front of a door. On the door is a cardboard sign secured with tape that reads, "DO NOT LET THE DUCK IN." Adding insult to injury, I think the duck might be a goose.

Whatever you do,

"The effort comes in response to longstanding criticism that Harvard’s faculty leans overwhelmingly liberal."

Golly, I wonder why faculties tend to be overwhelmingly liberal? Are liberals more drawn to teaching? Have conservatives been engaged in a long war on science and knowledge? WHO KNOWS?

Indeed, but useful to know it’s not a technical constraint haha

Oops got paywalled, but I see your point!

Is that as good as you can get for LFP?

Reading about how MEG can resolve signals at 10 ms and is thus ~10 times faster than fMRI, my inner electrophysiologist is having a hard time accepting that 10 ms should be considered as fast🤣

Original image from 2011 of what I just had seen under the microscope when I ran into @oliverrocks.bsky.social’s office to show him. Turned out he’d observed this too, had no idea what it was either, but was just as stunned and curious as I was.

This is how it all started...

/1

@adrianaprada.bsky.social you still got the line?

Does anyone in the Boston area have Emx1-Cre mice?? Jax stopped selling them! Asking for a friend.

But the axon projects to specific regions, so the topology would be more constrained compared to DNA, which is kinda equivalent to packing threads into a ball regardless of directions?

Wait, you’re telling me there could be an 1km long axon in my head?🤯

The end of Viktor Orbán’s autocratic regime is a victory not just for Hungary, but for people who value democracy around the world. Congratulations to Tisza, to incoming leader Péter Magyar, and to Hungarians everywhere.

For ~100 years, neuroscience assumed electrical stimulation excites neurons. Deliver current, cells depolarize, done.
That assumption is wrong.

Science is good. We should fund it.

Just reviewed a crazy perspective article and I mourn the two hours of my life that I’m never getting back. I recommended rejection but I’m sure predatory journals like that will find a way to publish it somehow🙃

A photo of a computer screen. The top part shows a blurry microscopy image, with a bright spot in the center surrounded by a red bounding box. The bottom half shows a graph of a cholinergic interneuron, spiking in a rhythmic, bursting fashion.

Someone order a cholinergic interneuron? Look at that beauty!

Sure, in vivo voltage imaging is a bugger, but when it works... 😍

Turns out the real treasure was the stupid shit we did along the way.

A human hand holds a plastic object that is a sort of prism or rectangular plastic object the size of a USB thumb drive. It has blue and red lines that meet in the middle, but sort of cross at each end, producing an extended "X". CREDIT: EMULATE

Let's learn about some medical research that just left Earth on Artemis II, bound for the silver sphere in the sky.

It's AVATAR, but it doesn't involve blue aliens.

It stands for "A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response" & it looks like this USB drive-sized device.

Another paper from our awesome lab out today @nature.com. Led by 🌟 PD Jihye Yeon with fantastic collaborators. We show how an ionotropic receptor (related to insect sensory IRs) in a single pharyngeal enteric neuron senses ingested salts and protects the worm from high salt stress.
rdcu.be/fbd4a

Our new paper on brain networks engaged during imagining is out now in Neuron!

Here is a download link (free for 50 days):
authors.elsevier.com/c/1msNE3BtfH...

Congratulations to Nate Anderson for leading this work @rementurus.bsky.social

🧵

This is Boston today!💙🗽🔥💪

Happy polio vaccine announcement anniversary. "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" remains one of the hardest remarks of all time. Kind of quote every child should be taught

Wow!

Congrats! Can I just say I love the word “peptidergically”😄

What are the systems in neuroscience that we really have something that we can call “explanation” at all relevant levels, other than reflexive feed-forward like circuits.

Here are a few that I would argue are getting there. Obviously not complete explanations but genuinely satisfying.

A Chinese bulbul sitting on the branch

Caught a Chinese bulbul here! Probably a young male but not sure.