Christian Wilms @ChrisWilms23@qoto.org

Trust me on this. You absolutely want to spend 10 minutes reading about this random pedestrian bridge in Minnesota.

https://tylervigen.com/the-mystery-of-the-bloomfield-bridge

#bridge #bridges #highways #civilenginerring #history #Minnesota

Hi there!
Here is a short #introduction about me and things I have been doing lately!

Living in the UK, after a decade in Germany, originally being from South America.

for a while I have been an #openscience advocate and practitioner, focusing on #openhardware and tools for research.

I currently work at the University of Sussex in the UK, as a scientific officer and a lecturer in Open Science.

Some places that might be worth a visit (but some might be outdated)

https://open-neuroscience.com (a community led repository for open source tools in Neuroscience - which I started back in 20143

https://openhardware.space - online training resource for best practices on developing open hardware

https://amchagas.github.io (outdated personal page)

https://prometheus-science.com (my side hustle, a company offering services around open source hardware and open science

Introducing Neuropixels Ultra, a new probe with >10x site density: an implantable voltage camera capturing complete planar images of neurons' electrical fields in vivo! ⬆️ spike sorting yield, ⬆️ detection of small fields, and ⬆️ cell type identification.🧵
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.23.554527

Many trans people have made important contributions to society. For example, Ben Barres was a ground-breaking neuroscientist who also used his experiences as a trans man to highlight sexism in science.

You can read more about Barres story by visiting this article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07109-2

Alt text: Picture of Ben wearing a lab coat and glasses, sitting in a front of a microscope. Text as in post.

#ThrowbackThursday #TransHistory #Trans

The restroom sign we need to see more of in the world.

Do you care about other non-Musk social networks such as Bluesky?

Please boost so we can see what people are thinking.

@ChrisWilms23 thanks for the @! @susanleemburg Indeed, we're making the Buskazi lab version for the community (and our own @t1m used it with neuropixels and regular probes) . So far, a bit over 60 labs have received drives from us and the feedback we got was mainly positive.

@BorisBarbour

Moving to the UK, as a scientist:

Startup package, what’s that?
Entry-level faculty salary lower than your postdoc salary a decade ago, what do you mean?
Child care as expensive as elsewhere where salaries are twice the amount, that can’t possibly be, right?
Buying a house costs several times the cost of a house where you lived before, come on that can’t be that bad?
Ah yes, please pay many thousands of pounds upfront so that we can sign you up with the NHS… no we can’t finance that or let you pay it over multiple months.
We hope you can still apply to the ERC, the local funding bodies are overstretched but surely it will work out?

In other words, please subsidise us from your savings and international collaborations.

This is not a red carpet but a tar pit with snakes, flying arrows and a giant rolling stone catching up to your footsteps.

#uk #academia

We hope to start with neuropixels2.0 soon (multishanks ftw!)

So far I've seen this surprisingly low-tech DIY-ish version https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8177890/

This one that looks nice, but seems almost a bit delicate for rats (ours are enthusiastically destructive): https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.03.551752v1

And I believe there are the Atlas Neurotech headstages (but only for neuropixels 1.0?)

Neuropixels 2.0 probes are now on sale!

Multi-shank, miniaturized, higher density than 1.0.

To order: https://neuropixels.org/post/neuropixels-2-0-multishank-10mm-available-for-sale

Our paper about the probes: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abf4588

Quick factcheck on zoom changing T&Cs to allow them to use your calls to train algorithms. Result: yup.

A fatal flaw in the "be really hard on yourself as the mechanism to achieve" plan is that even when you achieve you absolutely cannot believe it, because you've really overtrained being hard on yourself. You see a systematic undervaluing that robs you of true information about your work.

So, one of the hallmarks of maladaptive high achievement I look for, as a psychologist studying productivity, is inability to really celebrate.

The program for #ESISyNC 2023 is now online 🥳

✅ 2 days with:
11 speakers | panel discussion | poster session | lunch & coffee breaks | dinner & party

📆 Sept 14 + 15, Frankfurt, Germany

This year's topic: Linking hypotheses: where neuroscience, computation, and cognition meet

➡️ Register now: https://www.esi-frankfurt.de/newevent/

#event #neuroscience #computation #cognition #brainresearch #science #conference #frankfurt

Canon is selling a camera with a 1" SPAD sensor-- an array of Single Photon Avalanche Diodes. it's basically a matrix of single photon detectors. So each pixel can detect individual photons. The gain is huge, but the dark noise is non-zero, so it's not perfect. Nicely, each pixel can operate at a high bandwidth (~ GHz) so it can enable some interesting applications (though usually there are on-chip limits like binning that prevent users from having low-level access to that bandwidth).

$25,000. It's exciting to see this sensor technology to make it into products, but I haven't been able to locate any impressive numbers or example data. For example, BSI sCMOS products can match the minimum illumination spec (0.001 lux) and exceed the SNR: https://www.photonics.com/Buyers_Guide/ProdSpec/Sensors_Detectors/HWK4123/psp8497

I hope companies keep pushing in this direction-- it opens up some very interesting parameter space for scientific measurements.

Product page: https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/ms-500

New posting! This one is a #HowTo guide on how NOT to start a research group in #academia - in other words, all the things that I wish I'd done differently or that I wish I'd been more aware of when I started back in 2015. I hope that helps anyone else out there taking their first steps in this direction! (And any comments/additions very welcome). 👇

https://totalinternalreflectionblog.com/2023/07/30/shutting-up-shop-a-short-guide-on-how-not-to-start-a-research-group/

We are now in the middle of "Oops"