My department, Neurobiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington (nbio.uw.edu), is hiring a new tenure-track Assistant Professor, application deadline 09/30/26. It's a broad search — molecular to organismal, all of neuroscience/physiology/biophysics welcome. apply.interfolio.com/187735

Neural activity in mouse cortex forms rotating spiral waves. The architecture of individual axons matches the wave geometry, centered on somatosensory cortex. Beautiful new pape from our colleagues in the @steinmetzneuro.bsky.social lab. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

also proud of the double entendre i managed to work in...

Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees. Amazing work by the bees who were put in these puzzling situations by @akshayebhambore.bsky.social in the lab of @olliloukola.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

As usual, @bingbrunton.bsky.social and I helped to rally the troops and write the paper.

This was a big team effort led by @blobology.bsky.social, @ispizua.bsky.social, & @elliottabe.bsky.social. Made possible by fast multi-camera acquisition/annotation software (@jinyao-y.bsky.social), custom calibration (@othayoth.bsky.social), and new hardware (Steven Sawtelle, @jvoigts.bsky.social).

Courting male flies also change their whole-body posture while singing, crouching lower and pitching their body upward toward the female, a dimension of social strutting only resolvable with multi-animal 3D tracking.

One thing we learned from analyzing 3D joint angles is that flies don't exactly ‘walk’ at all. Their center-of-mass dynamics resemble running mechanics across all speeds, specifically a coordination pattern called 'grounded running', where spring-mass dynamics operate without an aerial phase.

The rainbow rig: 7 synced cameras at 800 fps with telecentric lenses and custom strobe LEDs to optimize resolution and depth of field. We tracked 50 keypoints/fly in 3D, fit to a biomechanical body model via inverse kinematics. Result: hours of 3D fly data for analysis and neuromechanical modeling.

New preprint: Whole-body 3D kinematics of freely behaving 𝐷𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑎 New tech from @blobology.bsky.social & others at @hhmijanelia.bsky.social, which @ispizua.bsky.social and @elliottabe.bsky.social used to gain insight into 3D structure of locomotion & courtship www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

So Peter gave me most of the equipment I needed to get my lab started: a 2p laser, 2 microscopes, 2 ephys rigs, a dozen amplifiers, and drawers full of optical equipment and electronics. We moved it all down the hall, including a massive (18") air table that required a bridge rigging crew to move.

We received the sad news that my emeritus colleague Peter Detwiler passed away at his home in Prague last week. nbio.uw.edu/people/entry... Peter was an amazing scientist, builder, and artist, who was always very modest about his accomplishments. And he was very kind. A quick example...

Revision of @sarahpugly.bsky.social's 🪰 walking CPG preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Major updates: → motor rhythms replicate across 4 connectomes (incl. 2 new full-CNS datasets) → robust across all 6 legs → new analyses of the CPG motif show it's an outlier in the VNC → improved code docs

Bioluminescent mushrooms (Omphalotus nidiformis) from Conjola National Park, Australia. Glowing could be to attract spore-dispersing insects, but this paper suggests that it's an "incidental by-product of metabolism". link.springer.com/article/10.5... pics from my mother in law

This paper resolves questions I first worked on during my post-doc (www.cell.com/cell/fulltex.... 10 years ago, I screened genetic lines and did paired recordings to find 3 cell types. Now we have a global view of how each local circuit (~300 cells) spatially parses touch signals from the leg.

New @currentbiology.bsky.social paper from Dr. Leila Elabbady on neural circuits that transform a touch stimulus into spatially targeted grooming. Leila discovered a leg somatotopic map and used it to infer tactile receptive fields in the fly VNC connectome. authors.elsevier.com/a/1mvu83QW8S...

Scenes from my first visit to Berlin. Hopping the fence on the way to lunch with PhD students and post-docs, playground time with @jan-ache.bsky.social, and a tour of Michael's elephant lab.

New paper from Brandon Pratt, @chrisjdallmann.bsky.social, and colleagues on how hair plate proprioceptors sense joint limits and contribute to sensorimotor control of walking. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congrats to post-doc Yichen Luo (@camellyc.bsky.social) for receiving a K99 award from NIH! Yichen is investigating the neural control of respiration.

You may have seen Eon Systems' viral "fly brain upload": a connectome-controlled virtual fly that walks, grooms, and feeds. (if not, here is a good article about it: www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...) It seems impressive. But how do we know the behavior is coming from the fly brain?

🧵 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...

yes, and apparently so is my next door neighbor, Horacio de la Iglesia. just walked over to wish him congratulations.

This matters because tuning receptor composition (e.g., desensitization kinetics) may be how muscles specialize for different functions. The molecular identity of a synapse may be tailored to the biomechanics of the muscle it drives.

Together we mapped glutamate receptor expression across leg, flight, and abdominal muscles. The variability was striking — even adjacent muscles within a single limb segment express different glutamate receptor subunits.

We realized: all the classic NMJ work had been done in larvae. Maybe adults were just...different? We reached out to a fly NMJ expert I trust, Dion Dickman at USC, and his lab had exactly the tools and knowledge we needed to dig deeper. And they were excited to help.

Sometimes failed experiments reveal gaps in how we are thinking about a problem, and digging into why an experiment didn't work can lead to discovery. This new preprint by Anne Sustar, in collaboration with Dion Dickman's lab, is one of those gratifying instances.🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Flies beat their wings more than 200 times per second. How do proprioceptors rapidly sense and fine tune the wingstroke? @ellenlesser.bsky.social combined genetic tools with the connnectome to create an atlas of Drosophila wing proprioceptors. @elife.bsky.social elifesciences.org/articles/107...

When a fly lands on your arm, how does your nervous system decide where to swat? By reconstructing tactile axons in a Drosophila connectome, we found a leg somatotopic map and downstream circuits that sample the map to initiate targeted grooming Led by Leila Elabbady, PhD doi.org/10.64898/202...

Just wrapped up 10 days of filming tiny critters in Montana with an incredibly skilled crew from the UK As a kid, BBC nature documentaries made me interested in biology. In an era of biodiversity loss and shrinking science budgets, I think nature docs are still an important tool to help people care