Mitch Morningstar
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neuromorning.bsky.social
Mitch Morningstar
@neuromorning.bsky.social
Postdoctoral Fellow at University of New Mexico | In vivo electrophysiologist. Interests in alcohol, addiction, FASD, decision making and spatial navigation. IU ➡️ IUI ➡️ UNM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
Interested in spatiotemporal decoding of choice and feedback in the human brain?

My lab’s postdoc Rohit Yadav will present these beautiful MEG results from our novelty bandit at #SFN2025 Sunday 11/16, PSTR094.23 / LL8 (top row: explore vs exploit; bottom: reward vs nonreward)
November 15, 2025 at 2:11 AM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
The ideological cancellation of $800 million of scientific research grants because they supposedly focused on DEI was just backed by the Supreme Court. This is horrific on so many levels.
Supreme Court allows NIH to stop making nearly $800M in research grants for now
But the court, in its emergency docket order, also left in place by a 5-4 order a lower court ruling that threw out NIH memos that enforced the administration's policies.
www.npr.org
August 21, 2025 at 11:11 PM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
Excited to share a new preprint from the Barkley-Levenson Lab! 🤠
Dpp6 Homozygous Knockout Mice Exhibit Increased Ethanol Conditioned Place Preference and Acute Ethanol-Induced Anxiolytic Behavior https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.15.670589v1
August 18, 2025 at 5:21 PM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
Registration is open for the 43rd Annual MWSOT Meeting! Deadlines for early bird registration and oral presentation consideration are Sunday, August 3.
July 23, 2025 at 3:29 PM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
Unsupervised Phenotyping Reveals Disrupted Neural Firing Characteristics in the Anterior Thalamus and Surrounding Brain Regions Following Third-Trimester Equivalent Alcohol Exposure in Mice https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.02.657410v1
June 10, 2025 at 3:15 PM
New preprint in which we utilize UMAP to functionally cluster thalamic neurons to determine what, if any, firing rate and waveform properties are disrupted by third-trimester alcohol exposure
Unsupervised Phenotyping Reveals Disrupted Neural Firing Characteristics in the Anterior Thalamus and Surrounding Brain Regions Following Third-Trimester Equivalent Alcohol Exposure in Mice https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.02.657410v1
June 10, 2025 at 5:32 PM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
The flood of encomiums and morality tales about Elon's turn in Washington cldn't be more predictable, vapid & sickening. If you want a story, get me the story about the crisis comms team directing this. He ran anti-constitutional blitzkrieg thru the federal government, did massive harm, violated ...
May 29, 2025 at 10:57 PM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
“The political environment in Russia made it hard to do science because everything was unpredictable. […] That type of uncertainty is incompatible with science, which requires the ability to plan what type of experiments and research you will do a year into the future.”
Beautiful piece of science writing from an immigrant scientist who moved to the US to escape persecution as a dissident in Russia, only to end up in ICE detention. Gorgeous images too!

🎁🔗 #AbolishICE
Opinion | I Came to Study Aging. Now I’m Trapped in ICE Detention.
www.nytimes.com
May 13, 2025 at 2:12 PM
The Minecraft movie is this generations Rocky Horror
April 6, 2025 at 6:37 PM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
🚨📃New Wassum Lab Paper📃🚨

Out today, @jackiegio.bsky.social discovered brain pathways that support agency and habit and how chronic stress disrupts them to rob of us our agency and cause us to form rigid habits 🧵👇

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

Free full text: rdcu.be/eaxEv
A dual-pathway architecture for stress to disrupt agency and promote habit - Nature
Adaptive decision-making often requires an understanding of our agency in a situation; however, chronic stress can disrupt agency and promote inflexible, habitual behaviour by turning off a brain path...
www.nature.com
February 19, 2025 at 11:37 PM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
The woman who created COBOL, the old (but not obsolete!) computer language that much of the Treasury's code is apparently written in, was a Navy captain. It's not like having high-ranking women in the service is some new thing.
February 6, 2025 at 2:37 AM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
Shit man, some big accounts are sharing this and @hanoumatoi.bsky.social just reminded me that while she was a captain when she gave one of my favorite lectures, Grace Hopper did attain the rank of Rear Admiral.

Anyway, here's part 1 of the lecture.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=si9i...
Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People (Part One, 1982)
YouTube video by National Security Agency
www.youtube.com
February 6, 2025 at 3:25 AM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
Response from a Pennsylvania GOP congress member I emailed urging the continued funding of the NIH.
January 26, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
Democrats: How can we go viral?

(a pastor goes mega-viral for calling Trump a bigot to his face)

Democrats: What if Tim Kaine made a BLT on Instagram Live
January 24, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
For those who have navigated switching from MATLAB to Python for data analyses, what IDEs have been able to replicate MATLAB’s environment the best?
January 7, 2025 at 7:17 PM
Happy to share a bit of work from my time at UNM thus far onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...
We looked at the networks responsible for contextual memories and how they may be impacted by fetal alcohol syndrome disorder
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
December 21, 2024 at 3:27 PM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis? www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...
Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis?
Capitalism is driving the destruction of our planet. We have to think outside – and against – the framework of our current political system
www.irishtimes.com
November 26, 2024 at 9:37 PM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
1/✨ New paper in #eNeuro! We looked at how dominance behaviors vary across mouse strains—turns out, it’s not one-size-fits-all!
Comparing CD1 & C57 male mice, we found strain-specific dominance behaviors that could change how we study social hierarchy in the lab…🧵
Paper here: tinyurl.com/bdeuf6s9
November 25, 2024 at 5:23 PM
Bluesky appropriate
Somehow a whole month has passed by since moving to Albuquerque
November 11, 2024 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
Saw this as a poster at the Frontal Cortex GRC. Amazing work!

Short version: brain areas have very little to do with functional organization. It's all about connectivity, not cytoarchitecture.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A Prefrontal Cortex Map based on Single Neuron Activity
The intrinsic organization underlying the central cognitive role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is poorly understood. The work to date has been dominated by cytoarchitecture as a canvas for studies on...
www.biorxiv.org
November 11, 2024 at 6:34 PM
Somehow a whole month has passed by since moving to Albuquerque
October 21, 2023 at 12:41 AM
Reposted by Mitch Morningstar
More than 53,500 users joined Bluesky yesterday, setting a record for new signups on the site in a single-day

5% of Bluesky's entire user base joined the platform just 24 hrs after Musk said he would charge all Twitter / X users a fee to use the service via @mattbinder mashable.com/article/blue...
Bluesky sees record signups day after Musk says X will go paid-only
The day isn't even over yet Bluesky has already seen its biggest influx of new users in a single-day
mashable.com
September 21, 2023 at 11:32 PM
Dedicating my first Bluesky post to the pickle pizza at the Indiana State Fair. An abomination in its own right, never to be forgotten and never to be missed.
August 18, 2023 at 4:35 PM