Andrew Plested

So excited and glad to get this work out, the culmination of many years of effort and headscratching...just in time for the summer break. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Well done, Harry!

[1984] Heineken Advert - The Water in Majorca Don't Taste Like What It Oughta.

What word still always looks wrong to you after your entire life of reading it? For me it’s GUARANTEE Why is that U there? I mean, I know why it’s there, but it just reads wrong! Cf. guano, that’s fine. #WordSky

I spent nearly 3 hours yesterday stranded in the wind and rain at Herzogenrath, with hundreds of bedraggled people, who like me were kicked off the RE4 to find only a fantasy of a bus replacement service. So today’s 27 minute delay on an overcrowded Berlin-bound ICE feels like NOTHING.

Changing trains at Calatrava’s magnificent station at Liege-Guillemins

Fantastic fountain in the centre of Leuven! Celebrating 550 years of the university from 1975. Don’t let #AI turn off the tap!

The replies are golden.

When in Rome.

Les quatre premiers grands télescopes de l’observatoire CTAO inaugurés aux Canaries irfu.cea.fr/Phocea/Vie_d... 🔭🧪

I needed to know what day the semester ends at my own university; it only took me a web search and 8 separate clicks to find

Wherein a couple of tech bros get excited that Claude can propose exactly the same things that researchers did a few years ago

Golden advice here: it is best to not hire anyone if you are unsure. I have advertised my PhD positions multiple rounds when I was not convinced and I am so glad I did!

In 2002, success rate at the ERC starting grant was 14%. This already felt too low to both panel and applicants, but was constrained by government funding. Well, 5 years later, it is now projected to be 5%. This is not sustainable.

Exciting new work on the neural correlates of conscious and suppressed visual input (binocular rivalry) from Doris Tsao’s group: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Big step closer to identifying conscious perception in the brain, by Doris Tsao and collaborators. 15 times a second your neurons flicker between conscious and unconscious activity. Consciousness is found in time, not in space. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Recordings from macaque cortex: "during a constant stimulus and percept, the brain rapidly alternates ... between conscious and suppressed micro-epochs. During conscious micro-epochs, a pure signal of conscious perception was present, allowing accurate reconstruction of the conscious image"

This announcement is many months overdue, but I'm just as excited to finally share it. I'll be joining UT Southwestern as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell Biology and the O'Donnell Brain Institute! The Benedetti Lab opens in December 2026! 🧠🔬

Bowie and Iggy upon discovering how much a Berlin döner costs in 2026 Image by Ivan Kral / Wikipedia

Very excited about this preprint! We present a new method to flexibly align your 2P imaging plane with curved biological structures. Great work of PhD student Shinjini Ghosh, with Fritjof Helmchen, @nvladimus.bsky.social, and many others! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Lise Meitner was the 2nd woman to earn a physics PhD at the Univ of Vienna and Germany’s first female physics professor. She fled Nazi Germany, helped explain nuclear fission, and has an element named for her. 49 Nobel nominations, she never won. Her male colleague did. #SheShed #VivaHerAlliance

First lecture of the semester done!Only 699 to go. #LastManStanding

Hey @gruber.foo I'm looking at you... in a disappointed, kinda sad way. Fascism wins when people shrug and just go along with it.

In two 1926 articles, Edgar Douglas Adrian revealed that neurons communicate through trains of spikes. @carandinilab.net describes the remarkable discovery and how it shifted focus from the medium (the nerve) to the message (the neural code). #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/history-of-n...

Very cool work led by Matthias Broser from @humboldtuni.bsky.social Institute of Biology. Neorhodopsin has a bright future! Congrats to all!

Here is the REAL winner of the Nikon Small World in Motion after the AI Monstrosity was removed www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/20...

A big thank you to everyone who contributed to making the IN-CODE Symposium in Freiburg such a memorable event. It was a pleasure to bring together this wonderful community working on inhibition—from synapses and microcircuits to behaviour. #INCODEsymposium

Always get a kick out of seeing this, between Peterborough & Grantham!

🚆 New rail line: Istanbul–Kapıkule railway Istanbul, Turkey · Opened Oct 9, 2026 The Çerkezköy–Kapıkule section of the Istanbul–Kapıkule high-speed railway opened to passengers on… Open Lines: thetransportpolitic.com/openlines Project: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul–Kapıkule… 📷 en.wikipedia.org

A 2-year Postdoctoral position in Electrophysiology and Molecular Pharmacology of Calcium Channels Where ? Team of Philippe Lory at the Functional Genomics Institute (IGF), Montpellier – France Interested ? Reach out at : philippe.lory@igf.cnrs.fr To apply : emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...

Margaret Hamilton has died. Absolute legend, it was my honour to meet her and have a conversation with her just a few years ago, super nice and still sharp. Ave atque vale Margaret. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

So sad to hear that the iconic, trailblazing, Apollo 11 moon landing software engineering lead, Margaret Hamilton, is no longer with us. Love this image of her, standing next to a print out of the software that landed Buzz Aldrin and Neil Amstrong on the moon! 👩‍🔬🔭🛰️🧪 ℹ️: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

🧠⚡️🌈🧫🦠💡🔬

It’s second hand, so might be a wind up, but anyway…. Returning from US, colleagues of a friend report in glowing terms that, after obtaining data during the day, a collaborator then sets AI to analyse it overnight, which describes the results in a PODCAST for the morning commute EVERY DAY. 🫠🤡🤦‍♀️🤬

This happened to us recently. The great thing is, these days, the work is already on @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social and people who appreciate it (colleagues, applicants) can contact us and science is moving on. Journals have to be careful. Outsourcing rejection to AI won’t end well for them.

One of the ugliest trains in the world? This afternoon, I'm catching a Trenord ETR.421 unit out of Milan - with a garish colour scheme and a bizarre shape! What were they thinking? 😂

Text from my daughter.

🏁 That's a wrap! The @biohub.org Cell Tracking machine learning challenge on @kaggle.com is over: 4,478 participants, 3,947 teams, 120 countries, 95,438 submissions, tracking every cell of zebrafish embryos. 🧪🔬🧵 kaggle.com/competition... #microscopy

Congratulations @deisseroth.bsky.social, #Peter Hegemann and #Georg Nagel! This is an amazing day for #optogenetics and #opsin research. All day I am simply happy and full of good memories - and so gratefull as well!

"After experiencing a transportation network that is affordable, interconnected and reliable enough to make car ownership optional, it’s difficult not to wonder why Canadians continue to accept so much less." www.therecord.com/news/waterlo...

Thank you to everyone sharing in this moment! I’m so grateful to all my trainees & collaborators… dlab.stanford.edu/group-members (pic: Peter and I together in 2017) Reading for all those asking: for technical details: dlab.stanford.edu for everyone: deisseroth.org/projections

Talk about a bright idea! 💡 Congrats to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel on the #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine for foundational discoveries in optogenetics. All three openly share their remarkable tools through Addgene. Explore the tools: