mRNA vaccines continue to show major promise.

In a small Phase 1 trial led by Dr. Balachandran, some patients with pancreatic cancer (one of the deadliest cancers) reached 6-year survival.

This is why sustained investment in science & research matters.

tinyurl.com/f4n4anhk

Excited to share a new review by @kocherlab.bsky.social and me:

Nature-inspired neuroscience

We discuss diverse sensory systems and behaviors across the animal kingdom and argue for their integration into neuroscience. New tools in diverse systems are making this possible ✨

tinyurl.com/y5y9du27

Clever vermin? Collective intelligence in rats and roaches Abstract. Collective intelligence (CI) is the capacity of groups to outperform individuals in tasks such as decision-making, coordination and problem-solvi

Things I thought I’d never say - here’s a new manuscript of cockroach and rat collective intelligence. We argue group-level intelligence can emerge from very different mechanisms—from simple local rules to socially mediated cooperation and learning:

royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Just published in @science.org 🚀

By controlling how cells align, we show that living nematic tissues can be programmed to generate forces and fold into predictable 3D shapes.

A new platform for tissue engineering and the design of smart active materials! 🫆

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

A huge congratulations to Katja, who defended her PhD last week 🎉 As one of the lab's founding members, she played a pivotal role in shaping the lab from its earliest days, and her hard work, passion, and scientific curiosity have set the bar high. We look forward to her next scientific adventures 🚀

Rockefeller scientists, including @danielkronauer.bsky.social, Vanessa Ruta, Winrich Freiwald, Priya Rajasethupathy, and @erichjarvis.bsky.social, are learning what drives social behavior, and also trying to explain what happens when those roots falter.

🔗: https://bit.ly/47J2Q5h

🚨REPOST PLEASE! 🙏🏻
Calling all South African 🇿🇦 zoology students! You have ONE more week to apply to our Collective Behaviour Field Course
📍Two weeks at the Kalahari Research Centre
🗓️ June 2026
💸 Fully funded

Application details are at www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/cbfc
DM for any questions

Meet the PI / Episode 3 / Anna Stöckl Spotify video

🎙️ New Meet the P.I. podcast episode with Anna Stöckl @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social is out!

From vision to interdisciplinary science, navigating new fields, dealing with rejection, and finding your own path ✨

🎧 Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/1DGh...
📺 YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iemB...

Braitenberg 100 – a landmark symposium in computational neuroscience – will gather the field’s foremost experts from around the world. Join us in Tübingen, Germany, starting June 29! Registration: braitenberg100-theoretical-neuroscience.de

🧵 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...

How does an animal choose between exploring for a better food source and taking advantage of a known one? Our recent work in Current Biology demonstrates how recent feeding and metabolic state dynamically influence fly local search. bit.ly/3PfrIv3 #Science #Neurosky #Foraging #Drosophila

Heads up animal behavior researchers!

Amazing opportunity: 3 3-year independent postdoctoral fellowships based in Panama at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Deadline July 15.
Come collaborate with @livingingroups @MPI_animalbehav...

Another amazing story by @edvardmoser.bsky.social and @m-bmoser.bsky.social on the developmental emergence of spatial navigation : I am so thrilled to see a new, and surprising example of instinctive circuit function 🤣
We still have so much to learn on behavior circuit development: congrats! 👏🧠

Logik der Vielen - Das Prinzip Schwarm Ob Vogel- oder Fischschwarm: Tausende Tiere bewegen sich, ohne zusammenzustoßen, ohne Befehle - und doch perfekt koordiniert. Was können wir von solchen Schwärmen lernen?

Have you seen the latest documentary on CASCB research? Director Franziska Mayr-Keber produced an insightful film for public national channel 3sat featuring the work of Hannah Williams, Iain Couzin and August Paula. Dive in: www.3sat.de/gesellschaft...
@icouzin.bsky.social @augustpaula.bsky.social

The Pokémon Company Is Actively Recruiting PhD Holders With Backgrounds in Ecology to Work in Tokyo - IGN The Pokémon Company is actively recruiting PhD holders with backgrounds in ecology to work in Tokyo. This is perhaps the closest chance Pokémon fans have to channel their inner Professor Oak in real l...

This could be your dream job!
PhD in ecology, and English and Japanese language skills required... working for POKEMON!!!

www.ign.com/articles/the...

Biological Laboratory | LEGO® Ideas This is a two-floor realistic Biological Laboratory building. In this design, I try to tell stories about biologists, introduce biology concepts to general publ…

I just made an account and voted for this biology laboratory made of LEGO to "promote biological research and inspire more people into the world of biology". They need 10K votes. Reposting and/or voting below would be helpful. 🤗
beta.ideas.lego.com/product-idea...

After 5 years of developing, a new preprint from the lab - introducing our workflow for comparative insect connectomics, aimed at democratizing connectomics. @erc.europa.eu @lundvision.bsky.social @biologylu.bsky.social Read it here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Cognitive primitives of the insect brain Understanding the mechanistic basis of human cognition is likely to benefit from investigating how it emerged through evolution. We propose that identifying and investigating fundamental brain functio...

Little smart critters..🪰🐝🐜
Cognitive primitives of the insect brain: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Vectorized instructive signals in cortical dendrites - Nature Mice learning a neurofeedback brain–computer interface task show neuron-specific teaching signals in cortical dendrites, consistent with a vectorized solution for credit assignment in the brain.

This paper on how the brain may do gradient descent is very cool: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The first paper from the lab is now out in Science Advances: Multimodal social context modulates larval behavior in Drosophila
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
We find that fly larvae keep their distance to conspecifics in the absence of food, enjoy reading! @cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de

Studying social transmission using STbayes Post provided by Michael Chimento. When studying animal culture, it’s important to establish whether novel behaviours or information have spread through social contact, or are rather innovated or p…

New blog post!!🚨

Michael Chimento gives an overview of the new R package STbayes, designed for creating, fitting and understanding Bayesian models of social transmission 🌍 🧪

Read the blog here 👇

Thrilled to start 2026 with our latest preprint, in which we dive into a dedicated forward-walking circuit in the fly brain: doi.org/10.64898/202.... This effort was spearheaded by the fantastic @chrisjdallmann.bsky.social with help from a bunch of talented people in the lab.

Cracking the neural code for emotional states Rather than act as a simple switchboard for innate behaviors, the hypothalamus encodes an animal's internal state, which influences behavior.

Long thought to be a simple switchboard, the hypothalamus may be the neural substrate of emotion states.

By @natmesanash.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

Made summer travel plans yet? How about a trip to Greece? This conference looks fantastic!

conferences.weizmann.ac.il/NBNB2026/spe...

Schematic of how ER-EPG plasticity enables the bump of activity in EPGs to accurately track visual cues. As a fly makes a counter-clockwise turn (top to bottom) it will view visual cues (e.g. the sun) from a new angle and the EPG activity bump (red) will swing clockwise around the network by integrating self motion signals with these visual inputs. When the fly faces a different angle, distinct visual ER neurons are active. Plasticity forms a trough of weak synapses (large circles - strong synapses, small circles - weak synapses) that allow ER neurons with distinct visual tuning to move the EPG bump via disinhibition.

*First preprint from our lab* !!!!!
How does the brain learn to anchor its internal sense of direction to the outside world? 🧭
led by Mark Plitt @markplitt.bsky.social & Dan Turner-Evans, w/ Vivek Jayaraman:
“Octopamine instructs head direction plasticity” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Thread ⬇️

Plastic landmark anchoring in zebrafish compass neurons Nature - Using two-photon microscopy with a panoramic virtual reality setup, how head direction cells in larval zebrafish integrate visual landmarks and optic flow to track orientation is revealed.

1/6: New publication from the lab: “Plastic landmark anchoring in zebrafish compass neurons” by Ryosuke Tanaka (@ryosuketanaka.bsky.social) and Ruben is available here:
rdcu.be/eX1L4

Neuronal calcium spikes enable vector inversion in the Drosophila brain In the fly central complex, PFNa neurons switch from firing classical sodium spikes when depolarized to firing non-canonical T-type calcium spikes when hyperpolarized. This bidirectional spiking allow...

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

We had a lot of fun working on this project (led by Itzel Ishida, not on bluesky). Some interesting highlights from the paper -

Cover image with sleeping baboon

Our paper is published today in Current Biology and is featured on the cover!

We report a neat, and somewhat counter-intuitive, finding: higher-ranking baboons get less and more interrupted night-time rest.

1/n: A new collaborative preprint from the lab to start the year: "A multi-ring shifter network computes head direction in zebrafish" together with Siyuan Mei, Martin Stemmler and Andreas Herz from the LMU, Munich.

Connectome simulations identify a central pattern generator circuit for fly walking YouTube video by Bing Wen Brunton

Video abstract for our preprint, “Connectome simulations identify a central pattern generator circuit for fly walking”, bit.ly/4pubCuN

Animated by T Sloan @quorumetrix.bsky.social, narrated by @sarahpugly.bsky.social, music by J McNamara, collab w @bingbrunton.bsky.social.

youtu.be/twAZlL6olS4