Laura Andreae

Panel One. Two figures walk up a hill in a park. One walks in front and the other is walking a dog Front "My new year's resolution is to stop lending books" Dog-walker "Really?" Panel Two. Front, becoming agitated "It's just not worth the risk: cracked spines! Bent corners! Torn pages! Grubby fingers! Crumbs! Baths! Burglars! Rats! Children!! I can't allow such precious artefacts to fall into the careless hands of clumsy philistines!" Panel Three. Dog-walker "And how do the other librarians feel about this?" Front "Less supportive Than I'd hoped."

My books cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com

Step into a Europe-wide community of neuroscience leaders. Junior & mid-career group leaders: apply by 30 Jan to become a FENS-Kavli Network Scholar and connect, collaborate, and contribute to shaping neuroscience in Europe. rb.gy/havqur

The deadline to apply for this position at #LancasterUniversity working on the #MURIDAE project @mrcmousenetwork.bsky.social is rapidly approaching!

➡️ 18th January 2026 ⬅️

Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

go.nature.com/49fOOrP

You prob already have this, but Civilization (7)?

Great roundup as always from @markdhumphries.bsky.social

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

❄️ A Year of #FENS: @fkne-scholars.bsky.social ❄️

🧠 #FKNE has continued throughout 2025 to champion excellence in European neuroscience by supporting researchers and strengthening scientific leadership across Europe

👉 Learn more about #FKNE here: buff.ly/2EWch1g

I’m proud to have helped launch the #PITraining survey of FKNE @fkne-scholars.bsky.social

We ask PIs to share what really matters for effective research leadership. Your feedback = better support, better science.
Take part or share:
fenskavlinetwork.org/fkne-pi-surv...
Deadline: 29 Dec 2025

Insular cortex predictions regulate glucose homeostasis Brain-body interactions are essential for physical and emotional homeostasis. The brain uses information from the external world to predict upcoming bodily changes. This process involves interoceptive...

lab preprint! Interopceptive predictions are central to many brain-body interactions theories, but it's unclear if/how they affect bodily physiology. We (fearless Einav Litvak et al) show that insular cortex predictions are essential for glucose homeostasis-THREAD.. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

At #BNA2025 @britishneuro.bsky.social a number of symposia explored how molecular and behavioural neuroscience approaches to preclinical research are changing.
Here 👇🏼 we summarise our symposium highlighting the role of the @mrcmousenetwork.bsky.social

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🧠Nominations open for the 2026 ALBA-Roche Prize honouring mid-career #neuroscientists whose research achievements - relative to opportunity - advances understanding of causal mechanisms of #braindiseases.

🏆€15,000 + travel support for #FENS2026 ceremony
🤝Self-nominations welcome
👉🏾 loom.ly/_EvQvm4

Great opportunity for junior/mid career neuroscientists in Europe! Do apply!

A neural state space for episodic memories Episodic memories are highly dynamic and change in nonlinear ways over time. This dynamism is not captured by existing systems consolidation theories …

I wrote a thing on episodic memory and systems consolidation. I hope you all enjoy it and/or find it interesting.

A neural state space for episodic memories

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪

By popular demand — the next edition of our hands-on @Stanford @BrOrganogenesis course is coming in 2026!

This year, the focus turns to neural #assembloids, reflecting the growing movement toward modeling circuit-level and complex cell-cell interactions in brain disease.

🧠 Deadline: mid-December

Nobel Prizes This Year Offer Three Cheers for Slow Science

Basic, curiosity driven, sometimes very exploratory, research is the seed corn that leads to the biggest scientific advances
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/s...

BBC Inside Science - The science behind autism - BBC Sounds What do we know about the causes of autism?

What do we know about the causes of #autism? @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social Professor Laura Andreae speaks with BBC Radio 4's Inside Science about the genetic factors behind autism, particularly around twin studies.

🔊 Listen now: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

A deep learning pipeline for accurate and automated restoration, segmentation, and quantification of dendritic spines Garcia et al. present RESPAN, a pipeline that enables automated dendritic spine analysis through seamless integration of deep learning image restoration and segmentation capabilities with comprehensiv...

Excited to highlight a new paper from my graduate student Sergio Bernal Garcia who, together withLuke Hammond, developed RESPAN, a new deep-learning pipeline automating the segmentation of neuronal morphology and dendritic spines from fluorescent microscopy images:
www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Branch logic: Dendritic computations diversify inhibition Long known for different circuit roles, parvalbumin and somatostatin interneurons are shown by Morabito et al.,1 in this issue of Neuron, to differ in…

🧪 We got the privilege to write a Preview on the beautiful work of Morabito, Zerlaut, Rebola and colleagues that was recently published in Neuron. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Black background with gold swirls. Headshot of Professor Anna Vignoles: "Philip Leverhulme Prizes recognise the contributions of outstanding researchers. As part of our centenary celebrations, we are thrilled to collaborate with EXPeditions on the joint mission of sharing knowledge more widely by showcasing some of these extraordinary academics." Leverhulme Trust logo, EXPeditions logo, URL: leverhulme.ac.uk/news

We are thrilled to announce a new partnership with @expeditions.bsky.social, the Philip Leverhulme Prize Collection, highlighting the importance of sharing knowledge as widely as possible. Read more about this exciting partnership: www.leverhulme.ac.uk/news/EXPedit... @annavignoles.bsky.social

While the free will debate tends to focus primarily on the implications of determinism for freedom, a long line of philosophers have also argued that free will would not be compatible with indeterminism either. These arguments typically take the form of a so-called Luck Objection: a family of related arguments which all seek to show, roughly, that if an action is not causally pre-determined then it must be a sort of random happening, over which the agent lacks the control required for free will. If successful, these arguments are fatal for libertarian accounts of free will, which are committed to the view that free actions must be both undetermined and under the agent’s control. In this paper, we defend libertarian free will against this challenge from luck. We argue that most formulations of the Luck Objection presuppose a conceptual model of indeterministic decision-making that is not well aligned with recent advances in the natural sciences; specifically, we argue that they make assumptions about the nature of indeterminacy and about the causal structure of decision-making, which libertarians have good empirical reason (from both physics and neuroscience) to reject. We develop a more empirically plausible model of agential decision-making and apply this to the problem of luck. We argue that, under such a model, it is entirely natural to think of an agent’s actions as both ‘undetermined’ (in the sense of being under-determined) and under their own control. We conclude that indeterminism poses no threat to a more naturalistic version of libertarian free will.

Chance, Choice, and Control: Free Will in an Indeterministic Universe (or: "Yes, you could have done otherwise" 😉) philarchive.org/rec/POTCCA-6 (with Henry Potter)

MRC Neurosciences and Mental Health Board (NMHB) member vacancies Closing date 14 September 2025 at 11:59pm (UK time) Number of positions Six Length of term Two years, plus additional two years after review Time commitment Two days per month Remuneration £160 per da...

The MRC are looking for a computational neuroscientist (anything from cognition to NeuroAI) to join their Neuroscience & Mental Health Board, to replace me as I step down next year.

Drop me a line if you want to know more

Deadline September 14th

www.ukri.org/who-we-are/w....

Hello world!
We just released a thing! In this preprint we provide evidence questioning the ability of the axon initial segment to undergo rapid structural plasticity in intact neurons from mouse, rat, and human cortex.

🌟 #FENS-#EJN Awards and Prizes: Last Chance! 🌟

TODAY is the last day to submit nominations for the two prestigious awards offered by #FENS in partnership with @ejneuroscience.bsky.social and @wiley.com!

Chini Lab Chini Lab at GIGA–ULiège. We study how neural activity emerges in early development from a systems neuroscience perspective.

Thanks to the support of the F.R.S. - FNRS, I’m hiring two postdocs to help kickstart the lab. Informal inquiries are welcome via socials or email.

More about the two postdoc positions and how to apply: www.chinilab.com/opportunitie...

RT for visibility are greatly appreciated! 🙏

Investigating morphogen and patterning dynamics with optogenetic control of morphogen production Morphogen gradients provide the patterning cues that instruct cell fate decisions during development. Here, we establish an optogenetic system for the…

Our latest: We developed a chemo-optogenetic system for precise spatiotemporal control of morphogen production. Using dual light + small molecule control of Sonic Hedgehog production, we recapitulated neural tube patterning in vitro & measured spread of Shh

🧵

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

a penguin is sticking his head out of a hole next to a job application ALT: a penguin is sticking his head out of a hole next to a job application

📢 We are hiring! 📢
For our @wellcometrust.bsky.social grant on information gathering biases in #OCD and #Schizophrenia, we are looking for a Postdoc in Computational Modelling, supervised by Peter Dayan and myself.
Interested? See all the details in the job advert here: devcompsy.org/wp-content/u...

Assistant Professor - Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Neuroscience - Department of Neuroscience University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

Come join our new Department of Neuroscience @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05041

Embryology! Neural crest! Looking for a postdoc? Job closes 25 Aug. Informal enquiries welcome, and anyone hanging out at the Xenopus meeting come say hi. #mouse #human #development #neuralcrest #chromatin
@the-node.bsky.social @marcotrizzino.bsky.social

Top: Confocal micrograph of a Drosophila melanogaster larval neuromuscular junction. Motoneurons are labeled in red, while postsynaptic glutamate receptors are visualized in blue (subunit B) and yellow (subunit A). Bottom: Schematic summarising the main findings of the paper. An early manipulation (32-degree heat stress) during the critical period in the embryo stage is then followed up by assessment of synapse size and composition, nerve cell properties, and behavior in the 5-day larva.

Developing motor networks rely on brief windows of plasticity. This study identifies mitochondrial #ROS & HIF-1α as instructive signals that drive lasting #neural & #behavioral changes during these critical periods, linking #metabolism to circuit development @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4mHrWq4