Macrophages in the liver as sensors for the earth magnetic field with signals sent to the brain via the vagal nerve 😮
I'm struggling to understand how this would actually work as a compass signal but it would be very cool.
Also, this pigeon portrait makes for an adorable cover! 🕊️
Researchers have identified superparamagnetic macrophages in the livers of rock pigeons to be crucial for magnetic sensing. The finding uncovers an unexpected role for immune cells in sensory perception and may fundamentally change our understanding of animal navigation.
https://scim.ag/4nTQ3nq
Hannah Haberkern
Science Magazine
The #ThermoFisher #antibody scandal is an ugly reminder, I think, of how few people (including those at TF, it seems) are trained to properly validate antibodies before use. Some advice on antibody validation in the posting 👇
totalinternalreflectionblog.com/2022/09/18/h...
Great new paper from @dudman.bsky.social and @fluketc.bsky.social. It’s going to immediately change how we train our animals and make us think hard 🤔https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeb0813
Standard animal learning studies minimize individual reward magnitudes to maximize the repetitions of reinforced behaviors. We investigated how reward magnitude influences initial learning across five...
Antibodies are essential and ubiquitous tools in biology, but their unguarded usage can easily lead to error. Here’s how to validate their specificity, and ensure that they’re hitting the rig…
totalinternalreflectionblog.com
Marcus Stephenson-Jones
Total Internal Reflection🇬🇧🇺🇸🇺🇦
Now published - the #BANC! A full central nervous system (CNS) connectome of a limbed animal at single-synapse resolution, enabling us to follow sensory-motor arcs and understand how the CNS controls the body. rdcu.be/fncjS. #neuroscience. Video by @quorumetrix.bsky.social 1/18
This is fucking insanity
www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...
Zandawala lab is looking to recruit a postdoc to work on neuromodulation of feeding in Drosophila and other arthropods at KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium).
Details for the position can be found here: www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...
Please share!
Story time friends...
Ring attractor networks rely on fine-tuned symmetric connectivity.
The fly head direction network has ring attractor dynamics but heterogeneous connectivity.
How is this possible? 1/🧵
Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Video
The National Institutes of Health and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are targeting collaborations between U.S. scientists and foreign researchers, Science reports.
We are recruiting a postdoctoral scientist to join the recently opened Zandawala Lab at KU Leuven. The position is funded by an Odysseus grant from FWO (Research Foundation – Flanders). For more infor...
New preprint with @lingqiz.bsky.social: Neurodata Without Boredom: Benchmarking Agentic AI for Data Reuse arxiv.org/abs/2605.12808
1/10
The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes:
🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting
🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)
Video
Kristin Branson
Wei-Chung Allen Lee
Jason Rasgon
Meet Zandawala
New article: We studied how volumes of different brain regions vary between workers, males & alate females in 2 species of Australian ants. First paper from Saroja Ellendula's PhD thesis! Article is available here: bit.ly/4fVwCIN @neuroethology.org @austentsoc.bsky.social @animbehav.bsky.social
A small contribution to an important topic, in Nature Reviews Biodiversity. I highlight @howbrainsevolve.bsky.social and Harvey's work in 2000 and illustrate it's pivotal role in our understanding into the principles of brain evolution.
Have a read - it's short!
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Brad Hulse
Reese Richardson
Nature Reviews Biodiversity - The principles underpinning the evolution of the brain
