I like this one from George & Koob 2010, especially when the goal is to convey that it's complex to the point of absurdity doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Be serious now. Hiring/grants/etc committees don't give you any credit for papers that you are a named coauthor on but aren't first or last, anyway. 🙃 So I don't think anyone in IBL is doing this but it wouldn't help them if they were.

Maybe not the genome being less robust but the protein systems that are built from it. Example in the paper is how a heterozygous allele could produce two similar versions of a protein that work at different temperature ranges, so you can deal with more environmental noise before breaking.

Yes, and genetic heterogeneity often counteracts development stochasticity, such that inbred strains are, counterintuitively, more phenotypically variable. academic.oup.com/geronj/artic...

Re: neuropixels, it is. Imaging voltage. (But also, there is a real explanation for the name)

Congrats to Zhiwen Ye for his amazing work leading this project and making these discoveries!! And thanks to all co-authors for outstanding contributions. #neuroskyence

We believe these results show that dynamics in the brain, even specific traveling waves with detailed links to local anatomy, are distributed globally. So, the moment-to-moment spatiotemporal dynamics observed in any one region cannot be understood in isolation.

Combining widefield imaging and Neuropixels ephys from thalamus, striatum, and midbrain, we found that these traveling waves were shared across all these regions, and multiple areas of cortex, simultaneously. Check out the paper for details on how we quantified this.

Shockingly (to us), an open dataset of axonal reconstructions revealed that cortical neurons have axonal branching patterns that actually match this circular arrangement.

We found prominent spiral waves that were commonly centered in the middle of somatosensory and motor cortex. We could see these with widefield calcium imaging and with ephys in cortex.

(no gifs on bsky, what the heck? Guess you can see it at this dropbox link - www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/m278n... )

In this work, Zhiwen discovered a new type of spiral wave dynamics in the mouse brain, identified a matching axonal architecture, and showed that this striking activity pattern is distributed across cortex and subcortical areas at once.

Traveling waves of activity have been observed in many brain regions and species, usually just in one area per paper. Should we think that each brain region has its own wave dynamics, kept hidden from its synaptic partners? Or have we just been unable to see the big picture?