The neural mechanisms supporting the rise and fall of maternal aggression - Nature In mice, female aggression is governed by an amygdala–to–medial hypothalamus circuit that is strengthened during pregnancy and is dynamically amplified by oxytocin during lactation.

What has changed in mama bear brain (well, actually mice) to make her risk her life to attack a potential threat and protect her young? Oxytocin is the key! Happy to share our new study led by two awesome postdocs: Takashi Yamaguchi and Rongzhen Yan.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sharif University in Tehran was just bombed

Founded in 1965, it is one the most elite science and engineering institutions in the world. Alumni include the mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win the Fields Medal

Here is the list of other alumni

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

thanks Ishmail!!

thank you so much 🤗

Cortical regulation of collective social dynamics during environmental challenge Nature Neuroscience - Raam, Li, Gu and colleagues identify neural mechanisms underlying group huddling in mice during cold exposure. They find that the prefrontal cortex encodes decisions to huddle...

get past the paywall here: rdcu.be/e8LrV

I've been obsessed with understanding group dynamics for a very (very) long time. this feels like the tiniest beginning of an answer. so grateful for the wonderful team of collaborators I got to work with, and to everyone who listened to me talk incessantly about this for 5+ yrs.

We tend to think of the brain as something that operates within an individual, but our findings suggest that to really understand how the brain controls behavior, we need to look beyond the individual and consider the whole group.

Cortical regulation of collective social dynamics during environmental challenge - Nature Neuroscience Raam, Li, Gu and colleagues identify neural mechanisms underlying group huddling in mice during cold exposure. They find that the prefrontal cortex encodes decisions to huddle and that silencing neura...

Excited to share my postdoc work is out in @natneuro.nature.com today!

We examined how the brain enables social groups to collectively coordinate their behavior in the face of environmental challenge ❄️🐭🐭🐭🐭❄️ :

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

We tend to think of the brain as something that operates within an individual, but our findings suggest that to really understand how the brain controls behavior, we need to look beyond the individual and consider the whole group.

same... sending you and your family my best.

We often think of survival as an individual act. But when facing hardship together, social groups may function more like a unified system than a collection of separate individuals.

We are excited to share our latest work @natneuro.nature.com studying collective social dynamics.

See: rdcu.be/e8LrV

Iran’s people were facing a horrible shortage of water before the war began. If we are destroying desalination plants and setting fire to Teheran we are committing unfathomable crimes.

Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#blueprint 1/7

woohooooo congrats Raj!!!

missing out on all the SfN fun this year, but for the very best reason 🥰🫶🏼

I am excited to share my PhD work on head-direction cells recorded in the wild, now published in @science.org, where we recorded neurons in bats flying outdoors on an island.

doi.org/10.1126/sci...

With @ray-neuro.bsky.social, Shir Maimon, Liora Las, Nachum Ulanovsky and many others

During these uncertain times, I’m very happy to see that my institution, @scripps.edu has an open tenure-track Assistant Professor position. Any field in Chemistry or Biology is welcome. I’d especially love to see fellow neuroscientists apply. Please repost!

apply.interfolio.com/174756

A parabrachial hub for need-state control of enduring pain - Nature Activity in a set of parabranchial neurons in the mouse brain is increased during chronic pain, predicts coping behaviour, and can be modulated by circuits activated by survival threats.

Finally out: our recent work with Nick Betley is a view into how the brain reshapes its behavior in the face of competing survival needs- and also a potential angle on treatment targets for enduring pain.

A brief rundown...

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

https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/MABe-mouse-behavior-detection

And we are live!

Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️

Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions!

www.kaggle.com/competitions...

✨ The Art of Open Science ✨

This beautiful crossstitch was created by Leah Blankenship, an undergraduate student at the @uoregon.bsky.social! This meticulously embroidered art uses data from our Allen Brain Reference Atlases.

#OpenScienceWeek

Can't wait to read this preprint from Misha Ahrens and team. Calcium imaging in larval zebrafish, in every cell in the body! Amazing.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Important initiative 👇

1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research.

This is wrong.

And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.

RFK Jr. in interview with Scripps News: ‘Trusting the experts is not science’ HHS Secretary RFK Jr. sat down with Scripps News for a wide-ranging interview, discussing mRNA vaccine funding policy changes and a recent shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said."

It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy.

I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

Aidan Bedford
"Interspecies interaction between humpback whale and bottlenose dolphins."

so great to see it out!! congrats!!!

A flexible hippocampal population code for experience relative to reward - Nature Neuroscience Sosa et al. find that hippocampal neural activity in mice encodes both environmental location and experience relative to rewards, spanning distances far from reward, through parallel and flexible popu...

It's officially published!! In my main postdoc work with @markplitt.bsky.social and @lgiocomo.bsky.social, we found that the hippocampus simultaneously encodes an animal's spatial position and its experience relative to reward in parallel population codes. 🧵

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

What they aren’t showing on Fox News

agree, bare minimum. it's insulting they require it from you after terminating your grant.

The pivot penalty in research - Nature An analysis of millions of scientific papers and patents reveals a ‘pivot penalty’ when researchers shift direction, with the impact of studies decreasing rapidly the further they move from their prev...

Fascinating new paper shows that when researchers “pivot” to new areas of work the outcome is less impactful.

#ScienceOfScience

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