Nikola Grujic

Actually the view from my office just got more interesting, as the official celebrations of the 200th anniversary now include a pirate projection saying "Free Palestine". Regardless of opinions, may UCL enjoy 200 more years of freedom of speech.

Exactly 0 (zero) positions for group leaders or professors on the FENS job market board. It is looking grim out there

How to be a scientist in a post-journal world When we created this site to write about things in science that need to be fixed, we chose not to start with publishing, even though it has been our preoccupation for decades.

Check out the latest from Mike and I on how to be a scientist in a post-journal world
9/9

thescientistpapers.substack.com/p/how-to-be-...

Planning your first scientific project as the term is about to start? Teaching a project based course? I am working on an app that should help. planyourscience.com Still looking for feedback. Much simpler than any previous version. Works on mobile. Good science, much AI.

This principle of play and inquiry is something that truly motivates me in what I do 🔬 Science is a method, a way of scrutinizing the world. We shouldn’t take it too seriously; it is a discipline, but it is also playful. 🍄✨

Interesting papers on the role of cell organelles in neuronal dendrites for calcium signaling Researchers utilize calcium imaging to track neuronal activity in the brain, highlighting the role of calcium as a signaling molecule. Recent studies investigate intracellular calcium dynamics, par…

New blog post, where I review some recent interesting papers on the role of cell organelles for neuronal calcium signaling: gcamp6f.com/2025/08/11/i...
Featuring work by @lorenabenedetti.bsky.social, O'Hare et al. and Lin et al.!

Pupil size modulation drives retinal activity in mice and shapes human perception - Nature Communications The pupil is known to assist retinal adaptation to light level changes. Here, the authors find a mechanism for how the pupillary light reflex drives monocular and binocular retinal activity in mice an...

The lab's first paper is out!

We find that pupil constriction in mice drives strong retinal activity in vivo, and that humans can also perceive pupil-shaped stimulus. This has repercussions for anybody using pupillometry.

🧵1/n

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

#neuroskyence #neuroscience #neuro

GrimACE: Automated, multimodal cage-side assessment of pain and well-being in mice Pain and welfare monitoring is essential for ethical animal testing, but current cage-side assessments are qualitative and subjective. Here we present the GrimACE, the first fully standardised and aut...

How much analgesia is needed to manage pain levels in mice after brain surgeries?

A single dose of meloxicam seems to be enough. Even the addition of opioids cannot provide a clear benefit. (in line with recent work from others, see cites in our preprint): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Tell me exactly how rats telling between two wine types will do that. So many studies have already shown that rats can discriminate complex smells and paired those paradigms with brain recordings / pertrubations. This just seems like a (bad) publicity stunt

Pupil size reveals arousal level fluctuations in human sleep - Nature Communications Arousal levels regulate sleep, but accurate noninvasive measures are lacking. Here, a novel method is introduced to track pupil-indexed arousal levels during human sleep, revealing pupil size changes ...

Amazing work from our colleagues at ETH/UZH answering many unknowns about arousal during sleep. And congrats to their participants for being able to sleep with their eyes taped open!

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

Rats can distinguish (and generalize) among two white wine varieties In the olfactory literature there is considerable debate about how differences in olfactory receptors across different species map onto variations in perceptual acuity and performance. Although humans...

The arguments for scientific funding in a time of crisis are only weakened by research like this. I understand this was probably very fun for the authors, but was it really necessary? #neuroskyence
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Sci-hub has been officially promoting a crypto shitcoin on their Facebook and official page sci-hub.se. It looks like it is going to zero. Did sci-hub just do a cheeky rugpull?? What a timeline #academia #openaccess #neuroskyence

Love me a good inbuilt forced pdf reader where no shortcuts I am used to work and it covers only a third of the screen. Thanks for nothing I will download it now pls

I'm in contact with DOGE to see if they can get SFN to refund my abstract submission fees from the cancelled SFN meeting in 2021. Stay tuned

Disturbing, what is the source for this?

Tired of not being eligible for postdoc funding schemes because I don't want to move to another country to start the project. The system where scientists are required to upend their life for vague reasons of changing scientific environments is shite. Just another pointless sacrifice #neuroskyence

Wanted just to follow and post science but you are relentless with political outrage posts. If whats happening now is what outrages you, you haven't been cynical enough

Whens easter im tired

Infraslow noradrenergic locus coeruleus activity fluctuations are gatekeepers of the NREM–REM sleep cycle - Nature Neuroscience Lüthi and colleagues show that activity of the locus coeruleus (LC) is crucial for the cyclic alternation between non-rapid-eye-movement and rapid-eye-movement sleep. Stressful experiences during waki...

Amazing work from the team of Anita Lüthi!

Infraslow noradrenergic locus coeruleus activity fluctuations are gatekeepers of the NREM–REM sleep cycle
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
💤🧪🧠

Some of my biggest scientific revelations came to me on the toilet

My wish for 2025 is to return the meal compensation plans (that were just cut) for (at least) the pdh students without access to the mensa. Not to mention the (mildly put) rude HR message that accompanied the decision to cut..

too late to start a new analysis, yet too early to start predrinking the institute christmas party

What happens if some journal company dies do the papers go down with them

Need a journal where you can publish just one figure. Don't need to make up useless experiments / visualizations for another 4 figs

In fact you don't even need to go to the concert

You can just find pics from the concert you went to online afterwards and pretend you took them

Bring back hot dog imaging

The eLife Model for research publishing: How does it work? eLife is driving a change in scientific publishing. Our approach brings together the immediacy and openness of preprints with the expert evaluation of peer r...

🧵 1/10 How does the eLife Model work?

After 10,000 submissions since launch, we highlighted some of the research published with us so far to demonstrate how our model works and how we’re changing research communication #eLife10k

Is it mathematically possible that every one of my masters students is in the top 5% of all the master students i supervised

I strongly suggest that academic publishers cease to exist.