Philipp Schlegel @uni_matrix@qoto.org

Loren Looger, legendary protein wrangler, who always generously shared their genetically encoded calcium indicators and more while still in development and unpublished, is asking for labs to co-write grants with him:

"Dear science world, I need help, please. If you like the tools and data we generate, and our shareware attitude, can you please co-apply for funding with us? It turns out that I'm terrible at writing grants, and we need $$ or else we can't make more GCaMPs, RCaMPs, SnFRs (we've branched out to neuromodulators and neuropeptides), FPs, viruses, tags, etc. We'll also make whatever you want, but we need $$ to do it. DM or email me, sooner is better. Sorry to be desperate, but we want to keep doing this, and I'm not sure we can."

https://profiles.ucsd.edu/loren.looger

#neuroscience #GCaMP #RCaMP #SnFR #ProteinEngineering #GECIs

This is a statue located in Berlin, entitled "Politicians Discussing Global Warming."

Signal is a nonprofit. But what does this mean in practice? Today we do something most tech co’s avoid: talk money. What does it cost for Signal to play in a lane dominated by billion $ corporations, while rejecting the surveillance business model?

https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/

Work in progress, but beautiful anyway; EPG neurons in the PB of a tropical bee - moving closer towards comparative connectomics. @ERC_Research

#Verkehrswende #Rücksicht #VisionZero #Autokorrektur

Sign-up to present in our symposium (16-17) "Neuropeptide signalling in insects: diverse and pleiotropic actions" @ice2024kyoto_jp in Kyoto, Japan. We have an exciting line-up of speakers. https://ice2024.org/list-of-accepted-symposia/

Really excited to share the lab's first Drosophila paper and it's a big one. Check out our preprint https://shorturl.at/gqrvO where we present the complete neural connectome of an animal circadian clock . 🧵 (1/8) #Drosophila #neuroscience #connectome

Laboratory Manager - Card Lab

Columbia University

See the full job description on jobRxiv: https://jobrxiv.org/job/laboratory-manager-card-lab-2/?feed_id=57274

#ScienceJobs #hiring #research
New York #UnitedStatesUS #Manager #ResearchAssistant #ResearchTechnician #Researcher
https://jobrxiv.org/job/laboratory-manager-card-lab-2/?feed_id=57274

The #UK #NHS:

"In 2022, nurses were being paid a fifth less in real terms than they were in 2010. There are more than 110,000 unfilled vacancies within NHS England, in part because better paid, less stressful work is available outside the health service. (I know of a ward that lost its clinical support workers because a coffee chain nearby was offering better pay.)"

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/aug/24/voters-are-unhappier-with-the-nhs-than-theyve-been-for-30-years-as-a-gp-i-feel-the-same

New pape from my lab on how the exquisite biomechanical structure of joints, tendons, other doohickeys determine mechanosensory feature selectivity and establish a topographic map of joint angle among proprioceptive sensory neurons in the fly leg. The product of an expansive and fun collaboration across several labs.

https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1hZ6d3BtfH5Mdj

A typical European car is parked 92% of the time. It spends 1/5th of its driving time looking for parking. Its 5 seats only move 1.5 people. 86% of its fuel never reaches the wheels, & most of the energy that does, moves the car, not people.

Sound efficient?

HT @circulareconomy

Anyone still using Biorender and getting tired of their pricing model?
--> there are NUMEROUS free #pictogram collections by now for #scientists to use for #GraphicalAbstracts #SummarySlides #scicomm

🧪
https://reactome.org/icon-lib/
https://bioicons.com
⚕️
https://smart.servier.com
https://healthicons.org
More:
https://fontawesome.com
https://thenounproject.com
https://svgrepo.com
Pretty:
http://gerdarntz.org/isotype.html

Here is my #introduction. I am a biologist interested in #neuroscience and the #evolution of cells and nervous systems. My research group studies #ciliated marine larvae from a whole-organism perspective, combining behaviour, #connectomics, #imaging, #CRISPR, #modelling and other approaches. We love marine #larvae, their #neurons, #cilia, and #neuropeptides.

You know, Nixon called Watergate a witch-hunt, too.

Holy _shit_ this paper, and the insight behind it.

You know how every receiver is also a transmitter, _well_: every text predictor is also text compressor, and vice-versa.

You can outperform massive neural networks running millions of parameters, with a novel applications of _gzip_.

https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.426/

JOB AD, please share: The Groschner lab at the Francis Crick Institute is looking for a #postdoc to study temporal signal processing in the #Drosophila #brain.

https://crick.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job/London/Postdoctoral-Fellow---L-Groschner-lab_R1226-1

Locomotion requires flexible coordination of limbs with many degrees of freedom. How are premotor neural circuits organized to solve this problem? In our new preprint, led by Ellen Lesser and Tony Azevedo, we used connectomics to analyze the wiring logic of motor control networks in the fly.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.30.542725v1

This fig shows the complete premotor (rows) → motor (columns) connectivity matrices.

#neuroscience

We are looking for a postdoc to to help us reveal how neural activity is structured in brainwide patterns to support behavior in mice. The postdoc will study the activity of large populations of neurons in the mouse brain using combined techniques such as #Neuropixels recordings and optogenetics, or rabies tracing and two-photon microscopy. It's an exciting opportunity for research at the interface of computational and experimental #neuroscience. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/cortexlab/positions. Deadline is 29 July.

Every time I fill in a reimbursement form for what amounts to pennies, articulate a justification or a dispensation for a purchase, write half a dozen emails for something that costs £70 (not counting the time of those involved), or write a "PDR" for a lab member who is leaving in a couple months, or do another compulsory training course on a topic I could have written a scholarly paper about it myself, I think of #MaxPerutz's statement above.

The academic scientific enterprise could be organised so much more effectively. Start by evaluating scientists by what they have done, not what they will do; the rest unfolds from that and leads to enormous savings in time (for scientists) and money (far less admin costs).

Government, funding bodies, are you listening? Are you ready to let go, and evaluate scientists on past work, and save hundreds of millions in the process? Or better yet, reallocate them to science itself for an even bigger impact?

#academia