Bob Pellegrino

20% of people have impaired smell. Almost no cookbooks account for that. #LongCOVID #anosmia Rediscovering Flavor, a new type of cookbook, changes that — science, practical guidance, and recipes co-created with smell loss patients. Preorder open now. 🧪 📖 🍽️

NEW BOLDING LAB PREPRINT www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI https://theonion.com/guy-who-sucks-at-being-a-person-sees-huge-potential-in-1850488022/

One of the better discussions on how LLMs work and can be used to understand cognition.

Prime cat content brought to you by Current Biology! www.cell.com/current-biol...

I have been meaning to write a post about a preprint that I'm pretty excited about: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... In neuroscience we often assume that we can learn something general about “the brain” using different species. But is this true? Do monkeys even see the world the way we do?

Yeah I still keep up with the philly news

I wrote a new post on what we need to keep human and what to hand over to AI, with forays into experiments in education, consulting, and the the latest controversy over literary prizes. www.oneusefulthing.org/p/choosing-t...

Hiring a postdoc to do something nobody has done: record oscillatory signals from the human olfactory epithelium in awake humans. PhD in neuroscience, biomedical engineering, or adjacent. Real electrophysiology experience: single-unit, intracranial, or peripheral. Olfactory background optional.

Can we predict what a molecule smells like from its structure? A new exchange in @ChemSenses debates this question. 🧪 @kingfunk.bsky.social

Howdy Y'all, I'm running a sensory lab now 👀 The lab focuses on smells (duh), textures (🤔), and their interactions using big data approaches to relate the physical to the perceptual. Lab manager posting linked here. Interested in a PhD? Just message me!

Call for chapter proposals - The OUP Handbook of Smell edited by Jessica Freiherr, Andreas Keller, Kathrin Ohla, Laiquan Zou, & Benjamin Young and published by Oxford University Press (under contract). Full details here: philevents.org/event/show/1... Please share widely.

Postdoc position in systems neuroscience! Excited to recruit a postdoc for my lab at the University of Bonn. 🔬 In vivo physiology (Neuropixels, 2P/miniscope) 🐭 Head-fixed & freely moving behaviour 💡 Optogenetics/chemogenetics ⏳ Start: ASAP | Application deadline: 28.02.2026 More info below ⬇️

🚨Scientists 🚨: Tired of come-ons from journals & conferences that may or may not be predatory? A new tool called Aletheia-Probe could help. 🧪 By @silverjacket.bsky.social @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A long, absolutely must-read article from Cory Doctorow: www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

High-Fidelity Tuning of Olfactory Mixture Distances in the Perceptual Space of Smell Through a Community Effort https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.13.694160v1

And the latest from @dreamchallenges.bsky.social

Superior cf what? Full of ultraprocessed constituents. The relentless and inappropriate marketing of David protein bars Here's a roundup of facts about protein intake and unnecessary preoccupation erictopol.substack.com/p/our-preocc...

New preprint!

 tl;dr — We ran around late at night to record wild rats in NYC and figured out how to quantify their behavior and environment. 🧵 w/ Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, Emily Mackevicius www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Sometimes I forget that Todd Rundgren doesn't want to work but just wants to bang on the drum all day.

Distinguishing performance gains from learning when using generative AI Comment by Lixiang Yan, Samuel Greiff, Jason M. Lodge & Dragan Gašević go.nature.com/3FJqTq3

Large language models (LLMs) can mirror human thinking in vision and language, but can they smell and taste? New study with @rbrainengineer.bsky.social show stochastic LLMs rate creative flavor pairings like humans, prioritizing novelty over taste. #AI #creativity #foodscience

ACOG is deeply disappointed by HHS’s move to drop COVID-19 vaccine recommendations in pregnancy. The science is clear: COVID-19 remains dangerous in pregnancy and vaccination protects both patients and newborns. The vaccine is safe and protects families. Read our full statement: buff.ly/OGue7sO

Regular smell and taste testing could aid early detection of impairments that negatively impact health, safety, and quality of life, and could also reveal underlying disease. But how do we get there? This new whitepaper is out today:

One of the few bands I’ve been listening to since the 90s and still putting out great stuff

With a contemporary smartphone, capturing, transmitting, and replicating sounds and visuals is a breeze, yet replicating scents remains elusive. If you want to change this, consider joining the 2025 DREAM Olfaction Challenge at www.synapse.org/Synapse:syn6.... @oldbap.bsky.social

Most people haven’t heard of this test, which is available in the US. It accurately predicts Alzheimer’s (not just if there’s a risk, but when). It is modulated by exercise and likely other lifestyle factors. Here’s (almost) everything we know about it erictopol.substack.com/p/the-breakt...

Excited to share the sequel to our 2022 paper! In this follow-up, we show that the stable head direction (HD) signals we reported in blind mice rely on stereo olfaction—that is, the comparison of odor info. between the two nostrils. Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵highlights below

Very proud of this paper, which spans three decades of work. (1/17) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Welcome to the Bluesky account for Stand Up for Science 2025! Keep an eye on this space for updates, event information, and ways to get involved. We can't wait to see everyone #standupforscience2025 on March 7th, both in DC and locations nationwide! #scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

New video tracking suite for social behavior + large dataset to benchmark other tracking suites.

Today's @usatoday.com front page First US death from measles in 10 years First child to die from measles in 22 years in the US All of this fully preventable

One more day to get your paper in.

Learning the language of life with A.I. @science.org In today's essay, I review the phenomenal progress in foundation models of DNA, RNA, proteins, ligands, cells, their interactions, the Virtual Lab, and the aspiration for the Virtual Cell www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Interested in understanding how things work? In particular the tools you use to study the brain? Join us at TENSS 2025 where we brainstorm ideas, build and debug microscopes, electrophysiology and behavior rigs amidst the picturesque Transylvanian hills! tenss.ro Apply by: February 16th!

Alexander Fjaeldstad and I have a new chapter in the book Smell, Taste, Eat: The Role of the Chemical Senses in Eating Behaviour, edited by @LorenzoDStafford. Lots of great insights here. From our chapter, it’s clear that smell loss and its impact on ingestion remain vastly underexplored."

We have a fresh new paper! The PhD project of the talented Mark Conway. A learning-induced change in the sensitivity of olfactory receptor neurons enables consistent perception of an odor. #olfaction #neuroscience www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

www.nature.com/collections/... @achems.bsky.social @olfalabs.bsky.social

www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

Sniffing out the mysteries of olfaction with Dmitry Rinberg. By Lina Zeldovich www.thetransmitter.org/olfaction/sn...