Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

Haha. Mainly because I couldn't resist the beautiful link to PCR

For better or worse, science is a communal process and moves forward by consensus. Current situation - as you point out - is that most neuroscientists don't have technical maths training. But maybe that's unrealistic in such a broad field?

Should we all need to learn how to do PCR as well as PCA?

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

Feels like this paper on protein-templated DNA synthesis by a natural enzyme warrants some comment.
So here's a 🧵. /1
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

IMPACT OF PARENTHOOD ON UNIVERSITY EMPLOYMENT. Line graph shows how the probability of holding a research position changes from four years before to seven years after having children.

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s

Read the full story: go.nature.com/4v4rxmQ

no free lunch?

Today we mourn the passing of our beloved central dogma. It served Crick well. But it is time to let go. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Peak retired academic moment.
1. One of those emails: Are you the R Watt who wrote xxxxxx?
2. Nope, but it sounds vaguely interesting. Wonder what they found.
3. Google - read it and discover that I did write it.

When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.

Was a delight to have Cahir present his groups work on mechanisms of ER dynamics in axons and nerves. Some extreme and fascinating neuronal cell biology.

Agree though it was otherwise a very sad day for us at Ulster Uni.

As for the entire UK HE sector, the funding situation is now a crisis

Don't think I saw this before : what a beautiful idea

That's true. Jokes aside I really like the idea.

Reminiscent of internal chalk talk grant pitch workshops I've seen some depts run

Reviewer 2
Q1. How is this different to reviewer 2 et al 2015?
Q2. Pretty sure my buddy presented results last week that undermine the entire basis for this project
Q3. Not enough details provided

Going from neural activity to blood flow just became easier! Two brainwide populations, each with its neurovascular coupling. (But going backwards... is now a tad more complicated.)

By @agnesland.bsky.social & team.
Thanks @intlbrainlab.bsky.social @wellcometrust.bsky.social @simonsfoundation.org

The supply of blood to brain tissue is thought to depend on the overall neural activity in that tissue, and this dependence is thought to differ across brain regions and across brain states. However, studies supporting these views have measured neural activity as a bulk quantity and related it to blood supply following disparate events in different regions. Here we measure fluctuations in neuronal activity and blood volume across the mouse brain, and find that their relationship is consistent across brain states and brain regions but differs in two opposing brainwide neural populations. Functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) revealed that whisking, a marker of arousal, is associated with brainwide fluctuations in blood volume. Simultaneous fUSI and Neuropixels recordings showed that neurons that increase activity with whisking have distinct haemodynamic response functions compared with those that decrease activity. Their summed contributions predicted blood volume across states.Brainwide Neuropixels recordings revealed that these opposing populations coexist in the entire brain. Their differing contributions to blood volume largely explain the apparent differences in blood volume fluctuations across regions. The mouse brain thus contains two neural populations with opposite relations to brain state and distinct relationships to blood supply, which together account for brainwide fluctuations in blood volume.

How does blood flow relate to brain activity? We discovered that it reflects two neural populations affected oppositely by arousal. Together, they explain neurovascular coupling in all brain regions and brain states!

Out today in Nature: rdcu.be/fdC2A

@uclbrainscience.bsky.social

Senior professors - if you want to help your junior colleagues in these times, I am begging you, review our papers. I have done 25 manuscript reviews in the last 6 years. But my own manuscript is stalled out waiting for reviewers. Relatedly, I won't be doing any more reviews until tenure. 🧪

haha that's reasonable! Probability is weird.

But people undoubtedly have intuitive notions of uncertainty... how to map that to intuitive maths is hard

what's your thoughts on the natural intuitiveness of bayesianism? Over standard frequentism

Now, you might say, "What about all the knowledge we'd lose if we push all the abusive geniuses out of academia?!"

But I'd counter and say, "Well, what about the knowledge we've already lost from the budding scholars whose careers they've derailed with their abuse?"

Dorsal Raphe Revisited: A Systems Neuroscience Lens on Psychedelic Drug Action - Alex C. Kwan, 2026 Psychedelics rose to prominence in the 1960s, around the same time when neurobiologists identified the midbrain raphe as the brain’s primary source of serotonin...

For those interested in the history of psychedelic research…

I wrote a narrative piece describing studies of psychedelic effects on serotonergic neurons in the dorsal raphe, from late 1960s to 1980s:

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Romain Brette reveals fundamental flaws in commonly assumed neuroscience concepts His new book, “The Brain, In Theory,” offers alternatives to many of the computer science frameworks currently driving theoretical neuroscience.

@braininspired.bsky.social talks with @romainbrette.bsky.social about his new book, “The Brain, In Theory,” which offers alternatives to many of the computer science frameworks currently driving theoretical neuroscience.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

We’ve got an exciting new thing to share! We have causal evidence (using TMR) that memory reactivation during sleep promotes abstract understanding of underlying structure, allowing transfer learning in a new domain with zero superficial feature overlap with the learned one.

Our latest publication grapples with how the brain could implement gradient descent by sending learning targets top-down, gating plasticity with dendritic inhibition, and updating synaptic weights with biologically observed learning rules like BTSP.

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

New preprint! 🧠
How do RNNs learn abstract rules from sequences, independent of specific stimuli?

By Vezha Boboeva, with Alberto Pezzotta & George Dimitriadis

"From sequences to schemas: low-rank recurrent dynamics underlie abstract relational representations"
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

what on earth is that SMELL?

the professor said circa 2009 as he reached over me for a biscuit at tea break, inhaling the musty scent of my poorly dried jeans due to my living in an overcrowded Edinburgh flat in a 150 yo former tenement building

(a comment on poor living standards of PhD students)

The complete morphology of a single LC-NE neuron.

First off, these cells are gigantic. This one, for example, has >72 cm of axon! To our knowledge, it’s the longest neuron ever fully reconstructed. I leave it to the reader as an exercise to estimate the length of a human LC neuron. 5

suggests this is at heart an anti-government protest, unusual only in the illegality of methods

We also invited high level programming languages that abstract away a lot of low level memory management, types etc to make things easier for humans. Surely some aspects of current programming could similarly be automated by AI?

We’re recruiting!

Exciting opportunities in our lab supported by a
@wellcometrust.bsky.social Discovery Award.

• Postdoctoral researchers
• Research assistant/PhD students

Join us to study how neural circuits drive decision-making.

Deadline 26/04

Learn more and Apply here: rezavallab.org