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Neuroscience textbooks can be prohibitively expensive for some undergraduate students. A new open-access alternative seeks to change that. Francisco J. Rivera Rosario sat down for a Q&A with Liz Kirby to discuss open-access neuroscience in the classroom.

thetransmitter.org/books/open-

Looks like I will have some funding to hire a computational tech for ~6 months, starting super duper soon! Can be done remotely. Looking for good computational & programming skills with a strong interest in or knowledge of systems neuroscience/hippocampus. PLS SHARE + RT!

I was interviewed on the podcast The One You Feed with Eric Zimmer. We discuss #morality, #addiction, and the general structure of #DecisionMaking.

check it out!

oneyoufeed.net/changing-how-we

Bryan W. Jones @BWJones spoke with The Transmitter's Angie Voyles Askham @avaskham about how the beauty of the retina drew him into vision research and why photography reminds him of the value of that work.

thetransmitter.org/craft-and-c

🥳 BIG NEWS for the lab! 🥳 I'm excited to join the Göttingen neuroscience community and the excellence cluster
@MBExC_de as a tenure-track group leader at the European Neuroscience Institute (ENI-G), where we will continue neural circuit research in a great research environment!
mbexc.de/the-mbexc-welcomes-ju

Every time I heard that the vertebrate retina does not receive any feedback from the central brain I expressed scepticism, and was told repeatedly that no, feedback fibers running backwards along the optic nerve were never found.

Now*, Sylvia Schröder et al. reports that:

"Arousal modulates retinal output", Schröder et al. 2020 cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896

Recordings with neuropixels probes on the optic tract of the mouse showed changes in retinal ganglion cell (RGC) activity (the output neurons of the retina whose axons make up the optical tract) in concordance with the arousal state of the mouse. They also measured activity of RGC axon boutons in the superior colliculus.

What a fantastic piece of work.

* for long values of "now".

#neuroscience #neuropixels #vision #retina #mouse

Also it's "now" more clear that these effects are histamine-mediated.

Some more awesome work by the Rivlin lab: science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv

Had never received such a high number of summer student internship applications that read more or less the same: same tone, same paragraph ordering and size, same highlights of my research, same interests. And some critical words in quotes.

I can't think of any explanation other than ChatGPT. What a blight.

#academia

Didier Raoult now published a 'preprint' claiming I am 'close' to Gates Foundation - citing a France Soir article as the reference. He also suggests that my poor facial recognition skills are linked to autism, with 'serious psychosocial consequences'. What a sad man. hal.science/hal-04795904/

Don't say #science or #academia are useless, I just spent three hours showing magnetic or #astronomy wonders to about 250 children in two events, organised by the University of Bologna, so that their parents could enjoy wild shopping or aperitives in the city centre for some time, and it's a service to society I was happy to provide!
The kids seemed happy too.
#astrodon

It's taken 22 years, but public transport and archaeology meet in Thessaloniki this weekend with the opening of its new metro system, which will reduce traffic congestion by as many as 60,000 vehicles.
There are 13 'archaeostations' where ancient finds are displayed or are part of the infrastructure.

#Transport #Archaeology #Thessaloniki #Greece #PublicTransit

theguardian.com/world/2024/nov

Persistence of spike protein at the skull-meninges-brain axis may contribute to the neurological sequelae of COVID-19

Some unrest and abuse about this paper- Parts of the pre-print have been abused previously. What does it show?

cell.com/cell-host-microbe/ful
1/10

@Hickl I wonder to what extent such tools can be used to track the stagnation of a scientific field...

Predicting the results of experiments is challenging, especially in fields like neuroscience. This recent study shows that fine-tuned LLMs, like BrainGPT, can predict neuroscience results more accurately than human experts on benchmarks. 🧪

nature.com/articles/s41562-024

Boost this toot if you're planning on sticking around Mastodon & the Fediverse whether or not it's more popular than Bluesky.

Very useful resources, I definitely have some reading to do...

No video at hand right now, but I'll compile one eventually as a visual sanity check for our method of separating high- from low-velocity head turns.

The main change since the preprint is that we introduced Fourier-based quantification of information and redundancy (thanks to the anonymous reviewer for pushing us in this direction).

Preprint here: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

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The "high-correlation-mode" within or between types of ganglion cells we examined probably reflects the computation of a visual feature related to fine spatial contrast in natural scenes.

How these robust spatial-contrast signals are used by cortical or subcortical areas is an open question. Pure speculation here, but "coarse-to-fine" processing during fixations may require nonlinear and fast parasol cell responses that predict the upcoming (higher-spatial-frequency) midget cell responses.

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The latest piece of my PhD work is now published! Check it out at nature.com/articles/s41586-024

We explain how correlated responses in the retinal output may arise when nonlinear receptive fields are stimulated with natural scenes. We think that these concerted responses violate the decorrelation prediction of efficient coding in a cell-type-specific manner in both marmosets and mice.

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