Philipp Schlegel @uni_matrix@qoto.org

From my bsky feed - two consecutive posts. Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

Obviously the UK surrendered its technology sovereignty quite some time ago. But it's amusing that this light piece – it's all too self evident – comes from Tim Wu, whose signature includes "former special assistant to President Biden and author of «The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity»".

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/nov/23/has-britain-become-an-economic-colony

#UK #TechSovereignty

📰 "Rewiring an olfactory circuit by altering cell-surface combinatorial code"
https://doi.org/doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09769-3
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41261128/
#Drosophila

If you haven't already seen Switch Angel weaving trance music out of a few letters and numbers, you're in for a real treat. The Strudel Discord is a place of complete joy, where every few hours someone arrives going "I've just seen this amazing video and now I want to learn how to do this!"

https://youtu.be/iu5rnQkfO6M?si=H9IlwClA1LdHg7Ad

#strudel #trance #acid

Kind of shocked @biorxiv_neursci only has 212 followers. This is like the most useful bot for #neuroscience in the Fedivers.

Perhaps speaks for the size of the neuroscience community here – small, very small.

it is so interesting seeing the UK flailing to "capture the magic" of American science and technology innovation. the magic is very simple: 2x-5x compensation.

no amount of "schemes" will make the UK a scientific powerhouse unless one of those schemes involves multiplying all the pay scales by at least 2.

arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.

This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.

Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.

https://blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/attention-authors-updated-practice-for-review-articles-and-position-papers-in-arxiv-cs-category/

🔬💡 Nature has compiled examples of basic #research that seemed impractical but led to major breakthroughs, including Thomas Brock's 1960s #Yellowstone hot springs bacteria work that enabled PCR technology for #DNA analysis.

The compilation traces discoveries from Isidor Rabi's 1930s atomic nucleus research to MRI development, Friedrich Reinitzer's 1888 carrot root studies to LCD screens, Francisco Mojica's microbial research to #CRISPR gene editing, and Gila monster venom studies to #diabetes medications like #Ozempic.

👉 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03474-x

#science #technology #tech #medicine #discovery #innovation #history #education #breakthrough

First neurons didn’t appear overnight. We trace their roots to ancient secretory cells - showing how lifestyle & behavior shaped the evolution of first synapses.🧠🌊 #Evolution #Neuroscience Our latest in @natrevneuro.nature.com Link: rdcu.be/eMX3E @jeffcolgren.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social

The evolutionary origins of sy...

Years ago, I came across an article mentioning "Virtual Reality for Fruit Flies" - which seemed wild to me at the time. Reaching out to the author changed my life in many ways.

I am not promising something similar for the the job offer here, but you would be working with a lot of really smart and interesting colleagues and me on Virtual Reality systems for Fruit Flies and Fish.

Please share this #FediHire post and send me DMs if you have questions. This computational job would be on site in the northern Virginia area in the US (close to DC).

https://hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External/job/Janelia-Research-Campus/Scientific-Computing-Associate---VR-Technologies-for-Social-Neuroscience_R-3911

The much awaited connectome of the male central nervous system of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster:

"Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous system", Berg et al. 2025 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.09.680999v1

"contains 166,696 neurons spanning the brain and ventral nerve cord, fully proofread and comprehensively annotated including fruitless and doublesex expression and 11,691 cell types."

A collaboration between #HHMIJanelia, #MRCLMB and many others.

#neuroscience #connectomics #Drosophila

Are you working on Free & Open Source technologies that benefit other people too? Consider to apply for funding in our open calls.

You can ask for between 5k - 50k euro
Anyone can apply: individuals, SMEs, institutions, collectives, etc.
There is little administrative overhead: no reporting-the project is the proof of work. And the application form is simple & straightforward.
The next deadline for the rolling open call is October 1
https://nlnet.nl/news/2025/20250801-call.html
#FOSS #NGI #NGI0 #fossfunding

Excited to share our latest work - expressing the bacterial sodium channel NaChBac in fly Kenyon cells surprisingly *decreases* their excitability, thanks partly to decreased endogenous sodium channels. This prevents learning and decreases odor-evoked calcium influx https://doi.org/10.1113/JP288790

The current administration in the US has, through various funding agencies such as the NSF and NIH, has recently suspended virtually all federal grants to my home university, UCLA (including my own personal grant, although that is far from the most serious impact of this decision), on the grounds that UCLA was “failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias”. One can certainly debate whether these grounds were justified, or whether they merit the extremely draconian damage to the very research environment that this decision is claiming to protect, but if nothing else this unprecedented decision does not appear to have followed the usual standards of due process for actions of this nature; for instance, there appears to have been no good faith effort by the administration to receive a response from UCLA to its allegations before implementing its decision.

The suspension of my personal grant has a non-trivial impact on myself (in particular, my summer salary, which I had already deferred in order to allow the previously released NSF funds to support several of my graduate students over this period, is now in limbo), and now gives me almost no resources to support my graduate students going forward; but this is only a fraction of a percent of the entire amount being suspended. A far greater concern is the impact on the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/, which despite receiving preliminary approval earlier this year for a new five-year round of funding (albeit at significantly reduced levels) from the NSF, now only has enough emergency funding for a few months of further operation at best if the suspension is not lifted. (1/4)

Two open positions in my lab to develop scientific software with python and javascript.

Software: CATMAID

Documentation:
https://catmaid.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Source code:
https://github.com/catmaid/CATMAID/

Example:
https://l1em.catmaid.virtualflybrain.org/?pid=1&zp=108250&yp=82962&xp=54211&tool=tracingtool&sid0=1&s0=3&help=true

If you have experience with #SQL (#postgresql), #python and its many libraries (particularly #django), #rust, and #javascript, write to me and let's discuss.

Examples of open issues: https://github.com/catmaid/CATMAID/issues

Today we’re quietly (and finally!) opening up Railfinder to the public! This is our beta version and - hopefully - the first step towards that one booking site for trains across Europe that we all dream of.

Lots of work has gone into this and equally lots still to do before reach that vision, but if you’d like to try what we’ve built you can now just go to https://www.railfinder.eu and have a go!

Any and all feedback more than welcome 🙏

Use Signal. We promise, no AI clutter, and no surveillance ads, whatever the rest of the industry does. <3

Davi Bock on the fly connectome, its uses, its impact beyond – and his life.
https://www.uvm.edu/magazine/news/thoughts-fly
#neuroscience #neuroscientists #biographies #connectomics

Fuck.
Elsewhere in their profession, some scientists are starting to look away. “We know quite a number of entomologists who have experience dating back to the 70s, 80s or 90s,” Hallwachs says. “One of our very good friends – he now does not have the emotional courage to hang up a sheet to collect moths at night. It is too devastating to see how few there are.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/03/climate-species-collapse-ecology-insects-nature-reserves-aoe