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 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

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.”

theguardian.com/environment/20

What's been lost...
Entomologists from Krefeld, Germany, collected flying insects for two weeks in August 1994 (left) and—at the same site, with an identical trap— in August 2016 (right). Similar data from 63 German protected areas overall gave a shocking result: a 76 percent drop in insect biomass between 1989 and 2016.
It has worsened significantly in the past 9 years.
Photographed at Entomological Society of Krefeld

For the first time, researchers at #UniLeipzig and other institutions have gained comprehensive insights into the entire nervous system of the fruit fly. The findings were recently published in Nature, marking the first study to describe in detail the neurons that span the entire nervous system of the adult fruit fly: uni-leipzig.de/en/newsdetail/a

Photo: Tomke Stürner/Uni Cambridge and LMB Cambridge

2-year Postdoc Position: Evolution and Organization of Ant Olfactory Systems

– in Carlotta Martelli's lab at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany.

mrtlllab.uni-mainz.de/wp-conte

"The ideal candidate should have a strong background in bioinformatics, ideally with practical or theoretical experience in single-cell transcriptomics or comparative genomics. A keen interest in neurobiology is essential. Additional skills in evolutionary biology, insect handling, and programming (preferably in Python) would be advantageous, but are not mandatory."

Position still open!

#ants #PhDJobs #postdocJob #neuroscience #entomology #olfaction #bioinformatics

How do #NeuralNetworks generate diverse and variable outputs? This study of the larval #fruitfly locomotor system shows that relatively simple sets of #inhibitory circuit motifs can generate a surprising degree of diversity & variability in motor programs @PLOSBiology plos.io/3GpT3pR

Visual pathway origins: an electron microscopic volume for connectomic analysis of the human foveal retina biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

Visual pathway origins: an electron microscopic volume for connectomic analysis of the human foveal retina

With over 1014 synapses, the human brain presents a seemingly insurmountable challenge to a nano-scale circuit-level understanding of its diverse neural systems. The foveal retina however presents a feasible site for a complete connectome of a key human CNS structure. Foveal cells and circuits are miniaturized and compressed to densely sample the visual image at highest resolution to initiate form, color and motion perception. Here we use computational methods first applied to the fly brain to provide a draft connectome of all neurons in a foveal volume. We found synaptic connections distinct to humans linking short-wavelength sensitive cones to color vision pathways. Moreover, by reconstructing excitatory synaptic pathways arising from cone photoreceptors we found that 96% of foveal ganglion cells contribute to only three major pathways to the brain. This new resource reveals unique features of a human neural system and opens a door to its complete connectome. ### Competing Interest Statement K.L., N.K., D.I., T.N., R.L., S.P., A.H., J.A.B., J.S. and T.M. declare financial interests in Zetta AI. S.G. is owner of Aware LLC and developed the NeuroMaps.app. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.

bioRxiv

Maggots. We really don't give then enough credit. They can do so much with so little:

"Sensation of electric fields in the Drosophila melanogaster larva", Tadres et al. 2025 (Matthieu Louis' lab).
cell.com/current-biology/fullt

#neuroscience #Drosophila #ElectricSensing #DrosophilaLarva #Diptera

1 Join us for a 4-year PhD in Newcastle on a fun project (literally)!
 
Building on our recent publication about Drosophila playing on a carousel (doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.01.), we will explore:
1)        the genetic underpinnings of play,
2)        the neuronal circuits involved in play, and its adaptive benefit,
3)        how environmental context impacts play behaviour.

This is what we mean when we say the regime is censuring science.

“CDC staff should not be co-authors on manuscripts/abstracts with WHO staff,” nor publish papers on work "funded by WHO.”

huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/cdc

If we're headed into a world of minimal federal support for academic research, can I propose that we no longer view training for non-academic research as a major goal of PhD programs? 1/2

Lagged signal propagation through a dynamic graph

#openrndr #particles #graph

One of the most interesting illustrations I've seen in a while: from H. Knyazeva, S. Kurdyumov "Fundamentals of Synergetics". A stunning case of the hysteresis (history dependence) of the inference.
What are the consequences for bio- and cultural evolution?

Our story about flies on carousels is out in @CurrentBiology ! After formally engaging the fantastic Clara H. Ferreira and integrating helpful feedback from our reviewers, we now present a more concise story with detailed behavioural quantification and cooler videos: doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.01.

Fascinating new research: across 26 countries, #radicalright politicians stand out as spreaders of misinformation. They are systematically poisoning the well of discourse. Hardly surprising, still somewhat shocking to see this backed up by data.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.11

I'm changing jobs in the next few months, and while plans are in motion, I'm curious to hear any leads folks may have. Connectomics, bioimage analysis, ML for scientific discovery. I've ~20 years of dev experience, CS BS, ML/HPC MS, neuro PhD. Mostly interested in research, staff science, or small teams/startups/founders.

Main constraint is family bound to Leipzig, so mostly looking for remote.

It is so funny to hear people in the UK talk about "creating a Silicon Valley" or "turning the UK into a hub of innovation". There are many reasons that this has not happened and will not happen, but one of the simplest reasons is that the UK cannot attract top talent when salaries in this sector are between 20% and 60% those of the US, *including* benefits such as social healthcare.

It is very interesting to think about what these people must be smoking when they say such things...

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