iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

The platform also contains a friendly GUI which automatically guides an animal through an automated shaping/training paradigm, making this system much more compatible with large teams and undergraduate researchers (plus no one enjoys manually selecting a different custom script for each animal)

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Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

We developed this platform with the goal of minimizing financial and labor cost. Each rig costs ~$1.4k and we suggest alternative materials that would reduce cost to below $1k. Allowing us to train animals in a "high-throughput" manner, even on a task requiring multiple months of training.

Image of several behavior rigs. Parallel construction enables training of multiple cohorts of mice by a single experimenter or a team of experimenters within a single day.

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Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

This manuscript represents our contribution toward the existing open-science movement to expand access to head-fixed behavior. This platform is designed with history based decision-making tasks in mind but is adaptable to other contexts. Some portions may be helpful even to labs using other systems.

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Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Head-fixed behavior offers expanded access to neural activity via electrophysiology and imaging techniques. However, complex head fixed behavior is challenging to perform. Training time is higher, and labs must either develop custom platforms, or purchase expensive commercial options.

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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 24/07/2026

I co-sign this great summary from @dereklowe.bsky.social . The goal is to destroy academic science, and these are the reasons. And all the “gold standard” and “needs reform” and “not high risk” stuff is transparent bullshit to hide the ball on what they are doing.

=
Science
science. But let me make something clear right up front. When I talk to people about this subject (and that includes some journalists as well) and say what I'm about to at the end of this paragaph I am sometimes met with disbelief. But I mean what I say and I am trying my best to say what I mean: The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.
That's it. That's the story. They are naturally not putting it in those words, but instead talking about "gold standard science" and the
"reproducibility crisis" and funding "bold inquiry" for "transformational
breakthroughs". This is all bullshit, and it's important to realize that. Shameless hand-waving bullshit, delivered in a how-dare-vou-

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Kristen Montgomery @kristenmontgomery.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

A favorite recent image of some busy microglia, lovingly named the Rat King (yellow CD68, pink Iba1, blue DAPI) for my first #FluorescenceFriday

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Armando Rubio Ramos @bioarm.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

This is a glimpse of the cytoskeletal structures we found doing U-ExM in more than 200 species, now in Cell🤩: shorturl.at/6oHvi Amazing collaboration between @centriolelab.bsky.social , @dudinlab.bsky.social and @gautamdey.bsky.social labs. I believe last one is a 🕷️ #FluorescenceFriday #Microscopy

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Barack Obama @barackobama.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

Congratulations to all the Democratic candidates who won tonight. It’s a reminder that when we come together around strong, forward-looking leaders who care about the issues that matter, we can win. We’ve still got plenty of work to do, but the future looks a little bit brighter.

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Tanner Anderson, PhD @tanner-anderson.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

Check out my most recent paper published in #eNeuro A pre and post spiking protocol depresses claustrocortical EPSPs, unless you perform the same protocol in the presence of DOI, then the polarity reverses into potentiation! We also see some DOI effects on spike kinetics.

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Jun Nagai @junnagai.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

Just out in Nature! “The astrocytic ensemble acts as a multiday trace to stabilize memory.” We identified astrocytic ensembles that link experiences across days to stabilize memory nature.com/articles/s41.... New astrocyte tools are openly available at Addgene: addgene.org/Jun_Nagai/. 1/8

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Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

This is really helpful! Thank you. How high/low should i be looking for with those numbers/what numbers would you say are acceptable?

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Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

The rig will be used for fluorescence-guided patch, but I have a secret hope to combine it with 1P-calcium sensor imaging for a maybe experiment.

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Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

Currently building a patch ephys rig and agonizing over camera selection. Do any patchers have any advice on what specifications I should be prioritizing? Also, has anyone used the Thorlabs Kiralux sCMOS cameras? 🧪

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Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

The rig will be used for fluorescence-guided patch, but I have a secret hope to combine it with 1P-calcium sensor imaging for an experiment.

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Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 29/08/2025

"While ChatGPT use has been linked to suicides and mental-health hospitalizations among heavy users, this appears to be the first documented murder involving a troubled person who had been engaging extensively with an AI chatbot."

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/09/2025

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Wesley R. Evans @scred62.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Here's a look at a field of striatal astrocytes expressing GCaMP6f-cyto from the Huda Lab for #FluorescenceFriday !

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Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Thanks! We gotta catch up sometime soon.

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Maxwell Madden @maxwellmadden.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

Excited my PhD work in @brianmathur.bsky.social’s lab is now published and available!

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