James Catterson

I also had a chance to speak with HRH The Duchess of Edinburgh about our work using flies in dementia research. Everybody loves the flies. 😇😅🥰

New paper from PhD student @sarahpugly.bsky.social, co-advised by @bingbrunton.bsky.social. Neuroscientists have long sought to understand how the nervous system generates the walking rhythm. Sarah walked into our office one day with an unexpected solution... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

youtu.be/9YA6RoMP50E?... fucking other worldly and mind bending. So good if you’re looking for experimental electronic or IDM

In his acceptance speech, Lula says he will work to regulate digital platforms in Brazil. “Digital crimes must be dealt with like real-life crimes.” This comes after Meta directly interfered with the Brazilian elections, favouring Flávio Bolsonaro.

University of Nottingham, right now, is cutting 560 jobs. Do we need to rebrand universities as very large, very clean, land-based oil rigs to get government support?

Link to article: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #scienceadvances #mosquito #biting

Between 2021 and 2025, around 2 million cyclists passed the floating bus stops on Leith Street, Edinburgh, and around 5 million bus passengers boarded or alighted here. No injuries have been recorded. Over the same period, drivers injured around 600 Edinburgh pedestrians, killing 16.

Thrilled to have been awarded the 2026 Philip Leverhulme Prize! 🏆 Big thanks to all lab members and mentors through the years! Very excited to explore some new mitochondrial avenues with this award. 🥳🔬🧬 @leverhulme.ac.uk @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @cloeucl.bsky.social @uclcber.bsky.social

🧠🪰 Excited to share our paper in @elife.bsky.social detailing the synaptic connectome of the neurosecretory network in Drosophila. We mapped the hormone-releasing neurosecretory cells (NSCs) in the fly brain and their connectivity. 🧵https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.102684

The flies arrived in Cambridge this morning—healthy and happy! So nice to see another successful shipment! And great to draw one of our all-time-best customers out of retirement long enough to recreate our first order! Here’s to another 40 years of the BDSC helping to make fly genetics happen!

40 years ago today, the BDSC made its 1st shipment. To celebrate, Trudy Kaufman, who packed the 1st shipment, boxed up the same kinds of flies for John Roote at Cambridge, who placed the 1st order. Watch for pics of the arrival next week. We’ve shipped 4,882,378 vials total. That’s a lot of flies!

A study of wild orangutans now suggests that mothers go out of their way to arrange play dates for their offspring go.nature.com/4yQ9G4x

When you consider the scale of the economics and social impact of this, it’s genuine serious Hard Journalism being done here.

Delighted to take on this role and support the amazing work that happens in our faculty! Grateful for the opportunity 🧠🧪

How does neurodegeneration spread across the brain? 🧠 @sjorsscheres.bsky.social, Michel Goedert & Masata Hasegawa’s groups have demonstrated that human misfolded tau filaments act as a molecular template for prion-like propagation in the mouse brain. mrclmb.ac.uk/news-events/... #LMBResearch 🧪

Sharing Matthew Broadhead's recent preprint outlining the discovery & characterisation of the novel Honeycomb Synapse - formed by postsynaptic scaffold proteins that form nanoclusters arranged into perfect rings of ~6, creating the eponymous hexagonal perforations. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Single-neuron computations depend on the subcellular distribution and voltage sensitivity of ion channels. | @pnas.org #HorizonEU @erc.europa.eu (1/5) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Just seen it's Wikipedia's 25th birthday. The greatest website online, and possibly the internet's greatest fruit

Super excited to share my postdoctoral work at @imbavienna.bsky.social @viennabiocenter.bsky.social - We discovered that some retrotransposons, or "jumping genes" 🧬, are able to spread from cell to cell via a new viral infectivity route. A short thread: 🧵👇 (1/7)

A few years ago we were actively working to dismantle systemic racism which is discreet, complicated and takes a lot to understand and legislate against. We had taken the conversation to a very sophisticated place. Now we're back asking the state to enforce the fucking law, which is easy!!

A landlord making £100,000 a month says young people have “no excuse to be poor”. Excellent. I love financial advice. Gather round, children, let's examine how he himself stopped being poor. metro.co.uk/2026/09/20/i...

ʙɪɴᴅᴄʀᴀꜰᴛ2 is out, and we're not waiting for the paper. The full code drops today, free for academic and industry use. We're releasing it early so you can start designing right now, and bring its full power to the current Adaptyv competition. github.com/PacesaLab/Bi...

We are incredibly proud to have two books on the 2026 McIlvanney Prize shortlist 🎉 Both #TheHollowBoys by @tariqashkanani.bsky.social and #TheVanishingPlace by Zoë Rankin are up for Bloody Scotland's prestigious prize! A huge congratulations to our fantastic authors 📚🩸

It is so mentally corrosive to try to ascertain, every day, whether the images I am seeing or the texts I am getting or the phone calls I am receiving are real - produced by a human who is trying to communicate something with me, even indirectly. It makes me feel insane and paranoid all the time

Very happy to share my postdoc paper is out now in @natcellbio.nature.com titled "Tissue flow acts as a guidance cue for immune cell polarization and directional migration". If you love imaging and immune cells, this is for you! #microscopymonday www.nature.com/articles/s41... A 🧵: 1/n

It's finally happened: the improved quality of machine transcription and the greater ability to extract value from unlabelled data means "your tech is eavesdropping on you for marketing purposes" has crossed from "false conspiracy theory" to "true and concerning" www.theverge.com/tech/991190/...

I want the Prime Minister to look into a TV camera and say the RNLI are heroes, that we do not change policy by street violence in this country, and that he expects any criminal action to face the full force of the law. That's it. That's all he has to do.

This is like that scene in Inception where they go down another level! 🤯 *THIRD*-order neuron tracing. Incredible! Another beaut from the Barnea lab. 👏 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I hereby declare the "learn to code" era officially dead: Big declines in the number of people studying computer science in the last year or two 📉 Chart from this week’s edition of our newsletter on AI and the labour market www.ft.com/content/9183...

Here it is: a report from Daisy Chain Fields from the one and only Jenn Pelly, most qualified to rock this assignment: www.npr.org/2026/09/02/n...

Nature research paper: Aberrant excitatory neuronal ERBB4 promotes Alzheimer’s disease pathology go.nature.com/3S9ym84

I think my White Whale in this respect is Woolton Hall in Liverpool. It's actually Grade I listed, but it's been derelict for decades and has had several fires. No one has a clue what to do with it, so we just let it rot, apparently.

Just get rid of Grade II entirely - if you want to put a heat-pump and double-glazing in a nice but otherwise entirely generic 18th Century cottage then you do that. You own it. You should basically be allowed to do what you want with it.

Not for the first time I think "why the hell do we have 350,000 listed buildings in this country?" - that's nearly 2 percent of them. There is no way that one in every fifty buildings in this country needs to be on a special little list that needs you to spend loads of money to do anything with.

Today, we are delighted to be hosting the Scottish Neuroscience Group Meeting 2026 (SNG). This annual gathering brings together Neuroscience researchers from across Scotland’s universities to discuss new data and to forge new collaborations and friendships.

Dangit but sciencing is fun. Discovered a >>10Mb pericentromeric inversion that looks like it adaptively introgressed and is a massive QTL for disease resistance. Preliminary and could be totally wrong, but holy bleep it's been a fun 90 minutes working this out (we had suspected much of this).

Boy is he going to mad to find out that faculty ALSO need a union.

The story of interwar cinemas in Edinburgh is usually one of three acts: a brief heyday, a long decline as a bingo hall and then demolition. There's often a fire in there too for luck. Today's subjects -… https://threadinburgh.scot/2026/08/28/the-gaff-the-thread-about-craigmillars-picture-houses/

God that elephant 🐘 picture needs to come with a warning 😵‍💫🤮

~ 4,180 gallons (15,822 liters). ~ 28,012 lbs (12,706 kg) of jet fuel used. ~ $29,926 cost of fuel. ~ 44 tons of CO2 emissions.

Shat out already. More to come.

Absolutely vile framing from the @nytimes.com. Why doesn’t this leave behind hard questions for the media that hounded him? Or the global right-wing that gleefully turned a local matter into an international incident?

A massive update: At least ~15 companies~ are selling scientists antibodies using faked validation data. We've documented 18,000+ manipulated images on 17,000+ products sold by leading laboratory suppliers including Thermo Fisher, Abcam, Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Millipore Sigma and Bio-Techne. 1/🧵

This is why Dolly Parton will be remembered and loved ❤️📚

The professor's discovery that ever since we descended from the trees the female-presenting members of our society were inevitably destined to operate the Hoover would seem to settle the longstanding question of Nature Versus Nurture. And yet: Nature abhors to vacuum.

A small fish that can repair damaged nerves holds promise for new drugs to treat multiple sclerosis. But research has been slowed by Britain’s post-EU reality. #Brexit www.politico.eu/article/tiny....