Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Michael Goard

Laura Helmuth @laurahelmuth.bsky.social · 5h

Six of the nine Nobel Prize winners this year work in the U.S.
Three of the six were born outside the U.S., which is the pattern most years. No country has benefited more from welcoming immigrants from around the world.
www.nobelprize.org

The official website of the Nobel Prize - NobelPrize.org

The Nobel Prize rewards science, humanism and peace efforts. This is one of the central concepts in the will of Alfred Nobel, and it also permeates the outreach activities that have been developed for...

www.nobelprize.org

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Michael Goard @michaelgoard.bsky.social · 20h

That's the one with cornflakes and whiskey, right? Good stuff!

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Reposted by Michael Goard

UC Santa Barbara @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social · 1d

Exciting news: #UCSB physicists John Martinis and Michel Devoret have been awarded the 2025 #NobelPrize in Physics. They were lauded for work that, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, "revealed quantum physics in action."

Full story: https://ow.ly/TH7K50X7ULp

UCSB physics professors John Martinis and Michel Devoret win 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics

ow.ly

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Reposted by Michael Goard

The Ann S. Bowers Women's Brain Health Initiative @bowers-wbhi.bsky.social · 12d

With the power of the people behind it, the California legislature just passed the Menopause Care Equity Act. This is history in the making—finally addressing a health gap that touches millions of women. Now, it’s down to one signature. @governor.ca.gov, the pen is in your hand. 🖊️

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Michael Goard @michaelgoard.bsky.social · 21d

The sad thing was that it almost always worked.

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Women in Neuroscience UK @womeninneurouk.bsky.social · 21d

🧠✨ Women in Neuroscience History: The Pioneers Who Changed Everything

Incredible stories of 11 women who revolutionized brain science, often against impossible odds. Meet trailblazers of sleep research, memory science, neuroplasticity, and neurosurgery — from Maria Manasseina to May-Britt Moser 🧠

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Reposted by Michael Goard

Emilie Macé @mace-lab.bsky.social · 26d

Thrilled to share that our work is now published in Science! ✨

We found a preference for visual objects in the mouse spatial navigation system where they dynamically refine head-direction coding. In short, objects boost our inner compass! 🧭

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🧵1/

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Reposted by Michael Goard

Adrien Peyrache @apeyrache.bsky.social · Sep 8

Following up: searching for the distribution of estrogen receptors in the brain, I realized the Allen Brain Atlas is male only. How is it possible that something this fundamental is still missing?

Adrien Peyrache @apeyrache.bsky.social · Sep 5

It's 2025, and there's apparently no female mouse atlas.
Please, tell me I'm wrong.

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Reposted by Michael Goard

Damien Fair @drdamienfair.bsky.social · Aug 10

I still get chills

Meet Mike
*30+ years severe depression
*first hospitalized @ 13y
*20 meds
*3 rounds of ECT
*2 near-fatal suicide attempts

Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE

see videos, read paper, follow thread
doi.org/10.31234/osf...

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Reposted by Michael Goard

Stories of WiN @storiesofwin.bsky.social · Aug 6

Our latest profile just dropped! Dr. Emily Jacobs (‪@emilyjacobs.bsky.social‬) studies how hormonal fluctuations influence the brain. Follow the link below to listen to the full interview!

www.storiesofwin.org/profiles/202...

#WomenInNeuroscience #StoriesOfWiN

Dr. Emily Jacobs — Stories of WiN

studies how hormonal fluctuations influence the brain

www.storiesofwin.org

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Reposted by Michael Goard

Liberty Hamilton @libertysays.bsky.social · Aug 4

Excited to announce that my lab has moved to UC Berkeley Dept of Neuroscience and Dept of Statistics! I will be continuing to collaborate with colleagues and students in TX at UT Austin and Baylor College of Medicine, and will start new collabs in the Bay. Will be taking new grad students this fall!

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Michael Goard @michaelgoard.bsky.social · Aug 2

It seems like neuroscience PI pairs have consistently outboxed their weight class, not sure why we discourage it so much.

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Michael Goard @michaelgoard.bsky.social · Jul 31

www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End

America’s run as the premiere techno-superpower may be over.

www.theatlantic.com

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Michael Goard @michaelgoard.bsky.social · Jul 23

A student in my lab recently received an NOA for an F31 (submitted August '24), so they are still going through, perhaps a bit more slowly than usual. I suspect a 9% score would very likely be funded - fingers crossed and congrats to your student either way.

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Jason Climer @jrclimer.bsky.social · Jul 23

I’m excited to share my final co-first author paper from my postdoc in Dan Dombeck's lab!

We explored how behavior, senses, and neurons influence how much information in the brain changes over time.

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

#science #research #neuroscience #hippocampus #placecells

Hippocampal representations drift in stable multisensory environments - Nature

Tracking of individual place cells in mouse CA1 shows that representational drift is not influenced by changes in environment or behaviour, and is lower for more excitable place cells.

www.nature.com

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Michael Goard @michaelgoard.bsky.social · Jul 19

She loved it. Grade-wise it was a bit too easy for her (she’s on 5.11/5.12 these days), but the routes were really interesting and having the river valley below is incredible

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Michael Goard @michaelgoard.bsky.social · Jul 19

Took a break from worrying about funding to do some climbing in Squamish! (Elowen’s first multi-pitch)

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Reposted by Michael Goard

Matteo Carandini @carandinilab.net · Jul 18

A new study led by @timothysit.bsky.social reveals that different layers of mouse V1 integrate visual and non-visual signals differently.

Activity is dominated by vision (or spontaneous fluctuations) in L2/3 and by movement in L5. This leads to different geometries.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Michael Goard @michaelgoard.bsky.social · Jul 15

We also tried some other GC8 variants I can tell you about if you are interested, though I believe the Thy1-GC8 you asked about never finished development.

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Michael Goard @michaelgoard.bsky.social · Jul 15

Yes, we used the TIGRE2-GCaMP8s line (037719), crossed with CaMKIIa-Cre. Although the GC8s sensor is great, we found the Tg mice had high neuorpil and low somatic expression in L2/3, not ideal for cortical imaging (never tried hippocampus) - we went back to GC6 as our workhorse Tg line.

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Spencer LaVere Smith @spencerlaveresmith.bsky.social · Jul 10

Can your AI beat a mouse?

Mice still outperform our best computing machines in some ways. One way is robust visual processing.

10 years ago I decided to work on HARD behavior driven by COMPLEX visual processing. And that risk is paying off now. #neuroAI 1/n

An illustration of a mouse on a ball looking at a field of grass displayed on monitors.

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Reposted by Michael Goard

Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · Jun 30

The FY26 budget will devastate our innovation driven economy. A summary in 3 parts...

Part 1 - The White House vision for dismantling science, as described in one simple plot, means slashing budgets of NIH, NASA, NSF & going back 25 years (or more).

joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/the-white-...

NIH, NSF and NASA budgets decreases substantially in FY26.

https://joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/the-white-house-vision-for-dismantling

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Michael Goard @michaelgoard.bsky.social · Jun 25

Very happy to see a Transmitter (@thetransmitter.bsky.social) piece on our recent work on estrous cycle modulation of hippocampal structure and function. Thanks to Sydney Wyatt (@sydneywyatt.bsky.social) for covering the work and its context:

www.thetransmitter.org/neuroendocri...

Spatial learning circuitry fluctuates in step with estrous cycle in mice

Cyclic shifts in estradiol levels coincide with changes in dendritic spine density and the activity of place cells in the CA1 region of the hippocampus, a new study shows.

www.thetransmitter.org

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Pacific Optica @pacificoptica.bsky.social · Jun 16

Riddle: When is an "optical invariant" is not so invariant? How can you get a larger field-of-view for free? No change in resolution or scan speed. No more stitching needed! For #MicroscopyMonday here's a new preprint to check out. 1/9

A two-photon view of the living brain in action. Single snapshot. Large field-of-view.

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Reposted by Michael Goard

Zero-Noise Lab @zeronoiselab.bsky.social · Jun 10

Now out in @natcomms.nature.com‬: Mice and monkeys spontaneously shift through comparable cognitive states - and it's written all over their faces! (1/7)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Inferring internal states across mice and monkeys using facial features - Nature Communications

Here, the authors created a virtual reality task for monkeys and mice to explore if internal states like attention are similar across species. Their facial expressions during the task were similar, su...

www.nature.com

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