Posts by Year – 2025

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Posts in 2025

Bluesky for Neuroscientists

Published:

Why

Bluesky is a way to connect with other neuroscientists. Is it useful for science? Not necessarily, but it can be fun and at times it can also be useful. I found social media very useful at times for several purposes:

  • new papers/preprints and especially the explainer threads that tell the journey from the author’s perspective, which is often more interesting than the paper itself.
  • finding out about conferences and workshops
  • finding out about job openings. (I found my last two jobs through Twitter). :-)
  • feel less alone in strange times (pandemic, moving somewhere new)
  • parasocial relationships with other scientists, seeing people be human and sharing also their failures. There is some research that people need to feel like belonging to a community to further be motivated to work in the field. This can be especially of interest for marginalized groups, who may not see themselves represented in the field, the internet is bigger than your local department. :-)

Resources

Starter Packs

Okay you got an account, what next?

  • Starter Pack Directory has a searchable directory of starter packs, which are curated lists of accounts to follow based on a theme.
  • also you can click on individual accounts and see if they have a starter pack.
  • https://bsky.app/starter-pack/nschawor.bsky.social/3lhlpujhfxn2m

Feeds

Feeds catch new posts based on specific hashtags or keywords

I played with making custom feeds based on regular expressions. If the post matches certain patterns, it will get added, but that means that there are sometimes some stray posts. Current ones include:

Settings

  • Content Language: somehow for me, if Settings > Languages > Content Language is set to English a lot of posts are missing (even if they are in English :upside_down_face:). Select β€˜None’ and get all posts.
  • Mute keywords: I live my private life somewhere else, I get my political news somewhere else, so I mute keywords pretty aggressively. On every post, the three dots: ... > Mute words & tags
  • Labelers: I am on this platform to see the OC, not screenshots of posts from other platforms. This labeler allows you to hide posts that are just screenshots.

Other platforms

  • LinkedIn: more professional, more :rocket:. I find the Bluesky writing style better, more playful.
  • Mailing Lists: I think this is still the best way to get information about conferences and workshops.
  • Mastodon:

3D printing brains: chimpanzee

Published:

not a human, but with a crisp middle temporal gyrus. who is it? πŸ™‚

more 3D printing, the idea here was to use white material to get a nice diffuse glow when illuminated from inside, but it turned out to be not transparent enough.

the template brain is called ChimpYerkes29, taken from the BALSA database.

I feel the deviation from the human brain is most visible, when you rotate a bit and look at the visual cortex, much less folding. macaque brain for scale!

139 posts
by #tags    
by year: #2026   #2025   #2024   #2023   #2022   #2021   #2020   #2019