iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Casey Schneider-Mizell

Sven Dorkenwald @sdorkenw.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Applications are now open for the San Juan Winter School 2027 on Connectomics and Brain Simulation! Join us to learn how to analyze and simulate connectomes. sjcabs.com

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Janelia FlyEM @janelia-flyem.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

We're thrilled with the publication of the Male CNS Connectome! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Also check out this (growing) collection of companion papers: www.cell.com/consortium/m...

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Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Under pressure, the DOD just released the text of its secret 10-year agreement with the NIH. Here are the biggest revelations from the document 🧵

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 11/08/2026

I know this isn’t a new thought, but so many people at the NIH do such vital and transformative work under the most difficult and uncertain conditions, it makes me so angry that this feckless coward coopts the respect those people have earned to lie again and again and again.

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Colette Delawalla, PhD @cdelawalla.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Rand Paul--who doesn't believe in evolution--holding a hearing of Dr. Fauci--a retired, life-long public servant-- while we are *actively* in the midst of SEVERAL disease outbreaks due to unnecessary public health cuts and corporate lobbying shows exactly how unserious Republicans are.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 28/07/2026

Not coincidentally in a period where VC and billionaires are poaching researchers to do connectomics in private, for (in my view) tenuous connections to building AI products.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 17/07/2026

I am impressed that I can describe a half-remembered neuroscience paper to Claude, getting a few details wrong and with no authors mentioned, and so far it is 2/2 at both finding the right paper and correcting my recollection.

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Brad Hulse @bradkhulse.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

👇👇👇 And don’t miss the appendix, especially if you’re a fellow bumpologist. They saved some cool ideas for the end. It’s a great read.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 23/06/2026

Interneuron aficionados — is there any published record of supernumerary axons in wild type cortical interneurons in vivo? They aren't as rare as I would have imagined...

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 23/06/2026

I'm enjoying the heck out of the World Cup this year, in no small part because every game is happening during my waking hours. But a surprise bonus is how nice it is that every stadium has been stripped of its stupid corporate sponsor name for a few weeks.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 23/06/2026

The glass fish as model organism seems really cool, but the exclusivity is bizarre to me for so many reasons and a downer to see the promised model of overlapping 15 year topics with take an ironically non-transparent left turn.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 12/06/2026

My hot take is that not only should we have additional congressional districts, but there should also be psuedodistricts based on things other than geography. Age ranges, gender, income ranges. Each person should have several representatives who each represent different facets of people.

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John Tuthill @tuthill.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Heartbreaking to hear Sean Eddy (@cryptogenomicon.bsky.social) talk about how arbitrary cuts to his lab's NIH funding have decimated his lab Sean's lab has built computational tools that enable so much important biology research also quotes by @jeremymberg.bsky.social www.npr.org/2026/05/11/n...

npr.org

Some researchers say restored federal funding is too little, too late

The Trump administration restored some of the billions of dollars previously frozen or withheld from research institutions and agencies. Some researchers say it's too late to save their work.

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Ann Leckie @annleckie.com · 03/04/2026

Seeing discussion elsewhere about whether The Rich should be able to access public services for free even tho they're rich, and like, why are we so focused on whether people "deserve" things?

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 06/03/2026

Airlines should be required to show you a big warning banner when you select flights on Daylight Savings transition days.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 04/03/2026

Looking forward to heading off to Cosyne next week, and excited to be part of a two day workshop about connectomics, with day one being about species comparison and day two about using data for constraining models. alleninstitute.github.io/connectomics...

alleninstitute.github.io

Workshop – Synapses at Scale - COSYNE 2026

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Michael D. Green, PhD @michaeldgreen.phd · 26/02/2026

Below is the response to my question. The funny part of his response is that my research needed a control arm. My study actually did have a control arm (about 80% of the sample never reported discrimination). So the answer itself makes me even more confused.

Michael Green 50:10
My name is Michael Green. I recently finished my PhD in Population Health Sciences at Duke University, and I'm a recipient of an F99/K00, award from the National Institute on Aging. That program is designed to support early career scientists with their PhD and into a postdoc. I'm a black man in his late 20s who come from a family where a lot of people stopped going to their doctor for preventative care because they felt like they weren't being listened to. By the time they came back, it was often too late. My grant focused on studying how patient reported discrimination in healthcare settings is associated with cardiovascular and cognitive health outcomes. It was peer reviewed score competitively and awarded in August of 2024. In July 2025 NIH told me my grant needed to be renegotiated to remove what they called DEl activities. They gave me a week to rewrite 70 pages of work. I asked for specifics on what was flagged, and I received none. So I moved the word black from my grant and references to evidence on why black adults report feeling mistreated in healthcare settings. I didn't change my scientific approach at all, just the language. I didn't have a learning moment from the process, because I still don't know what a DEl activity is.
The context of my grant, no one told me. It's now late February. I'm unemployed. I have no health insurance. I haven't received a paycheck since I graduated in December 2025, and out of the 69 recipients of this award at NIA, I'm the only one who has ever had to change the title of their grant beyond punctuation and spelling.
Brinda Adhikari 51:42
Okay, so Jay, what would you say to Michael Green in that situation?
Jay Bhattacharya 51:47
I'd say that he didn't take advantage of the opportunity to rethink his grant. Like, we gave him the opportunity, and he didn't take advantage of it, right? So he again, I didn't know this grant specifically, but, like, I'll tell you, like, based on the title, what I hear is a gra…

Jay Bhattacharya 51:47
I'd say that he didn't take advantage of the opportunity to rethink his grant. Like, we gave him the opportunity, and he didn't take advantage of it, right? So he again, I didn't know this grant specifically, but, like, I'll tell you, like, based on the title, what I hear is a grant where it has as a premise, something that, in principle, couldn't have a control group.
And so does bad science. So I, you know, I do again-
Brinda Adhikari 52:09
So what would have made us better?
Jay Bhattacharya 52:11
Just okay for let me just finish Brinda. So I think if, if I say that, I provisionally, because, again, I've not read his grant so, but based on that 90 second snippet, he had the opportunity to be more specific about his hypotheses, make them actually scientific, give them give make arguments for control groups. We gave him that opportunity, and he didn't take it. That's what I'd say.
Brinda Adhikari 52:35
Let me ask you, you know, is it worthwhile? Because I know that one of the things you have talked a lot about is improving health outcomes. Do you believe that there is scientific merit to studying the role that discrimination plays in health outcomes?
Jay Bhattacharya 52:56
What do you mean by discrimination?
Brinda Adhikari 52:58
That if a- that when a patient goes to a doctor, and the doctor has, you know, is, is treating black patients differently than other patients, that that can lead to poor health outcomes, and that's worthwhile to study.
Jay Bhattacharya 53:11
So Brinda, so you, you said earlier that there that minorities may have different health, you know, biology or other things, doctors ought to take that into account, right?
Tom W. Johnson -- WSITY 53:23
Yeah, wait,
Brinda Adhikari 53:24
Wait, wait, I guess what I'm saying is, Are are you denying that-
Jay Bhattacharya 53:29
I'm not denying, don't put words in my mouth Brinda
Brinda Adhikari 53:31
I'm asking. I'm just asking a question. Are you denying that black Americans face dis…

Jay Bhattacharya 53:29
I'm not denying, don't put words in my mouth Brinda
Brinda Adhikari 53:31|
I'm asking. I'm just asking a question. Are you denying that black Americans face discrimination at higher rates when they're in a medical system.
Jay Bhattacharya 53:41
What do you mean by discrimination?
Dr. Mark Abdelmalek -- WSITY 53:44
So for example, that, let's say, you know, they they, somebody goes in and they have pain.
Jay Bhattacharya 53:49
Mark, are you saying that doctors are racist? Is the hypothesis that doctors are racist?
Dr. Mark Abdelmalek -- WSITY 53:52
I'm not saying that doctors are racist. I'm saying that-
Jay Bhattacharya 53:54
We're saying is the hypothesis that you're putting forward the doctors are racist? Be specific about the hypothisis.
Dr. Mark Abdelmalek -- WSITY 53:59
Yeah let's be specific. His hypothesis, if you the study-Jay Bhattacharya 54:02
I mean, we don't know his hypothesis-
Dr. Mark Abdelmalek -- WSITY 54:04
Well, just in general, the hypothesis is, we just want to understand what factors are associated with poor health outcomes. For example, is that a legitimate hypothesis?
Jay Bhattacharya 54:16
That's vague, but yeah, I want to know why people have bad health outcomes. We should definitely that's something we interested in studying, but Dr. Mark Abdelmalek -- WSITY 54:22
that's a research question.
Jay Bhattacharya 54:23
That's a that's a vague research question. I want something specific. Okay, here's some specific, conceptual right?
Dr. Mark Abdelmalek -- WSITY 54:29
Here's something specific. Okay, you go to the doctor, and we've heard this that, you know, black women aren't really given the same attention as, you know, say, non black women in terms of pain scores. Or, you know, sometimes

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Reposted by Casey Schneider-Mizell

Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

In what world is it even helpful to treat this guy like he's not a vicious, churning, petty, malignant, Internet-rotted psychopath

Brinda Adhikari 51:42

Okay, so Jay, what would you say to Michael Green in that situation?

Jay Bhattacharya 51:47

I’d say that he didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to rethink his grant. Like, we gave him the opportunity, and he didn’t take advantage of it, right? So he again, I didn’t know this grant specifically, but, like, I’ll tell you, like, based on the title, what I hear is a grant where it has as a premise, something that, in principle, couldn’t have a control group. And so does bad science. So I, you know, I do again-

Brinda Adhikari 52:09

So what would have made us better?

Jay Bhattacharya 52:11

Just okay for let me just finish Brinda. So I think if, if I say that, I provisionally, because, again, I’ve not read his grant so, but based on that 90 second snippet, he had the opportunity to be more specific about his hypotheses, make them actually scientific, give them give make arguments for control groups. We gave him that opportunity, and he didn’t take it. That’s what I’d say.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 23/02/2026

This seems important when thinking about all of the people (especially academics) who stayed in Epstein's orbit. Not that all would agree in the details per se, but that they were not repulsed by deeply held misogyny, expressed in so many different ways

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 20/02/2026

From @bdpedigo.bsky.social: a super efficient, highly reliable, and very generalizable method for mesh structure classification, applied here to spine detection across basically every synapse onto a cell in the MICRoNS dataset.

Mesh analysis pipeline showing feature extraction and spine classification.

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Reposted by Casey Schneider-Mizell

Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 04/02/2026

There are lessons from WaPo’s destruction for science too. Public funding (via NIH, NSF &c) built in the US a science superpower in large part b/c of democratic values: agencies are accountable to the public through Congress, not controlled by whims of a billionaire. Autocratic control…

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 01/02/2026

I would love to organize a conference bringing together neuroscientists, video game developers, and VFX artists. Visualization, spatial methods, understanding of body mechanics, they all have different perspectives on some similar problems.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 25/01/2026

The last year has been a real lesson in what Orwell meant. So much energy goes into obfuscating and downplaying basic facts, since to say them clearly makes the stupidity and cruelty black and white. The second ICE murder seems to have finally broken through that a little bit.

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Gord Fishell @gordfishell.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Excited for the publication of our recent work on how pyramidal cells shape the identity of interneurons in the Cortex! Big shout out to @artofbiology and Sherry Jingjing wu! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Pyramidal neurons proportionately alter cortical interneuron subtypes - Nature

Pyramidal neuron-driven mechanisms actively promote the survival and terminal differentiation of their associated interneuron subtypes.

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Divya Sitaraman @dsitaraman.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

Please apply. Amazing opportunity to dive into connectomics datasets for research, educational initiatives, outreach and whatever else your heart desires. Feb 2nd deadline.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 15/01/2026

Back in 2010, I moved to Zürich with two suitcases. I knew no one there, but was tremendously lucky in that the other postdoc in my group at the time was this fellow named Mark. Within the first day or two, he invited me out to watch a World Cup game at one of the many outdoor bars there.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 15/12/2025

Hard to think of a person who brought so many good emotions to so many people as Rob Reiner. What an upsetting end to an upsetting weekend.

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Charles Louis Richter @richterscale.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

SKULL OF THOMAS AQUINAS: TAKE A LEFT NOW PRIEST: No, the GPS says we have to keep going— SKULL: I KNOW A SHORTCUT PRIEST: Do you remember the last ti— SKULL: FOR THOSE WITH FAITH, NO EVIDENCE IS NECESSARY; FOR THOSE WITHOUT IT, NO EVIDENCE WILL SUFFICE

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 12/12/2025

Connectomics has a great presence here, with several instructors from our team! Apply if you want hands on training and feedback on working with cortical connectomics (and whatever else we might have available by then...)!

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John Tuthill @tuthill.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

How do neural circuits generate the walking rhythm? Using connectome simulations, @sarahpugly.bsky.social found a minimal central pattern generator (CPG) that produces oscillations in leg motor neurons. Same circuit motif for each 🪰 leg. w @bingbrunton.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 08/12/2025

I had heard this was coming, but it’s still an amazing indication of how far we’ve come in the last decade or so!

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 18/10/2025

The thing I love about No Kings as a theme and as practice is it cuts to the heart of it: this admin is a nonstop flood of the most unamerican bullshit and to wave the American flag is to protest.

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Davi Bock @dddavi.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

I love this piece! It shows the many ways a connectome can be put to use, AND the many complementary modalities that are needed, beyond the connectome, to answer real questions. And it makes me feel good about having helped to generate the thing. :)

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Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

Calling out political extremists for being hypocritical (“they claim to value free speech, but actually try to censor speech they don’t like!”) is like calling out a football team for playing both offense and defense. They’re not trying to embody fixed standards, they’re just trying to win.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 11/09/2025

Here's a question: With EM, you find a super weird cell type (n=2 animals). They have truly unusual characteristics, but it's structure only so you have no idea what they do, what their transcriptomic/molecular properties are, nor do obviously solve any problem that's been posed.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 07/09/2025

I'm close to releasing a python library that solves some tech debt (and documentation debt) that has been weighing me down for years now. Super excited to start using it, and amazed at how good Claude Code was for catching edge cases, writing tests, and debugging finicky indexing.

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Anh Hoang Le, PhD 🏳️‍🌈🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇻🇳 @anhhle2702.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

YO, what's up with all these almost-witchcraft techniques?? In this paper, they develop a way to freeze cells so quickly that it preserves Calcium waves midway!! WHAT??? HELLO??? So now you can do 3D reconstruction of calcium waves with just a normal confocal. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 19/08/2025

When I was a second year physics PhD, my advisor suggested I go to this "Physics of Cellular Objects" summer school in Corsica. It consisted of a series of 2-3 day long lectures on how biology used physics to accomplish things from virus capsids and bacterial motility...

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Davi Bock @dddavi.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

It was a good experience to step back and briefly take stock of the amazing progress in connectomics since I started working on this stuff (20 years ago!) thanks as well to @natrevneuro.nature.com for the constructive editorial interactions.

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Maggie Astor @maggieastor.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

I cannot emphasize enough that the playbook being used against mRNA vaccines (and vaccines in general) is IDENTICAL to the playbook used to restrict voting rights after the 2020 election: actively sow public distrust, then cite the distrust you sowed as an independent reason for your desired policy

washingtonpost.com

Opinion | Jay Bhattacharya: Why the NIH is pivoting away from mRNA vaccines

As a vaccine for broad public use, mRNA technology has failed to earn the public’s trust.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 04/08/2025

The interneurons continue to surprise!

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Meg Tirrell @megtirrell.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

A major NIH grant to study ways to restore hearing was terminated by the Trump administration bc it was awarded through a DEI initiative—to a researcher who qualified bc of his own hearing loss www.cnn.com/2025/07/29/h... @manorlaboratory.bsky.social

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 17/07/2025

This is a great opportunity, and as usual Mo is too humble. Not just one synapse at a time, _all_ the synapses at a time!

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allen institute @alleninstitute.org · 14/07/2025

Want to use the massive MICrONS dataset for your own research? We understand the challenges and we are here to support you. Submit your proposals for our Proofreading and Annotation program: Virtual Observatory of the Cortex (VORTEX) by August 15. microns-explorer.org/vortex

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Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

🚨 BREAKING: Nearly 4 months the NIH cut its first grants, a judge has ruled that the directives and process that led to cuts are arbitrary and capricious. "The explanations are bereft of reasoning — virtually in their entirety... unsupported by [facts]." Each of them are VOID and ILLEGAL, he says.

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Casey Schneider-Mizell @csdashm.com · 16/06/2025

Even good reporting like this somehow still feels like it underplays that the stated goal underlying the intentional destruction of American science seems to be that there needs to be more prejudice in the system at all levels.

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Ben de Bivort @debivort.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Believe it a not, a third multisite connectomic project also lost funding. The multi-PI R01 led by @darbly.bsky.social with myself and @bassemh.bsky.social as co-PIs.

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Dani Rodrik @drodrik.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Three things made the US a rich and powerful nation: the rule of law, its science & innovation system, and openness to foreign talent. Remarkable how Trump has taken a sledgehammer to all three. No enemy of this country could do more.

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