Nathan Insel

Expired mystery

New neuroscience job at Wilfrid Laurier University. You may not know the name, but science has been growing fast. It is also down the street from Canada's top tech university (Waterloo) and a world class physics institute (Perimeter). I feel happy and lucky to be here careers.wlu.ca/job/Waterloo...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

On the Nobel Prize winner, Camillo Golgi (from Cani and Mazzarello, 2016)

More biomed in Canada

New strategy for grant and paper rejections

Notable paper on sleep aid lemborexant (putting aside caveats of mouse models of Alzheimer's). I have collected 2 1/2 years of data on myself and can confirm even small (2 mg) doses add sleep hours. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My university is accepting applications for the Visiting Researcher - Scholars at Risk Program, established to support scholars who are facing threats to their life, liberty or academic career, &/or have been forced to leave their academic position because of such threats. www.wlu.ca/academics/re...

I appreciate the debates about machine intelligence, and how LLMs are forcing us to review our constructs. But I also think it's fun to think of LLMs as a mirror we've put in front of animals that don't have a concept of mirrors (image from @theonion.com)

My 12 yo after I told him that "datum" is singular for data: "Once my generation gets into the Miriam-Webster office, there are going to be a lot of changes"

www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧠👩🏻‍🔬🧪🧵 #neuroskyence 1/

This hurts my brain. But I've also had a long term dependence on ATP

Cool paper digging into circuitry of the median raphe

Fans are often surprised to learn that the most deadly species in the Star Trek universe is the hippopotamus.

www.cell.com/current-biol...

1. Imagine we land a space probe on one of Jupiters’ moons, take up a sample of material, and find it is full of organic molecules. How can we tell whether those molecules are just randomly assembled goo or the outcome of some evolutionary process taking place there? 🧪

Social bond dynamics and the evolution of helping https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.11.561838v1

Lateral entorhinal cortex subpopulations represent experiential epochs surrounding reward https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.09.561557v1

MIT’s New Desalination System Produces Freshwater That Is “Cheaper Than Tap Water” scitechdaily.com/mits-new-des...

Light affects the prefrontal cortex via intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.22.556752v1

Best part of the Lumen festival in Waterloo was the photonics. I wouldn't call the installations controversial, but some were definitely polarizing. (Yes, I am licensed for terrible dad jokes.)

Naive question: can long covid be passed inter-generationally, through gametes? Mitochondrial dysfunction (if that's accurate) sounds like it could be insidious, no?

When not posting on bluesky you can find me working on my book _Marine Murines: How the Water Mouse Keeps its Water House_. So far I only have the title and some AI art of underwater mutant rodents.

Neural and behavioral organization of rapid eye movement sleep in zebrafish https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.28.555077v1

Was at the hardware store today looking for special tape to seal air ducts. Really happy when, in the HVAC aisle, I found something called "duct tape". Took me several seconds before I realized what had just happened.

Many are convinced that drosophila have limited abstract thought. Here we show that by leaving corn flakes and a small piece of fruit in the sink stopper, flies develop a system of shared governance and, with time, enter a golden age of art and literature.