Ning Leow
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whatnowning.bsky.social
Ning Leow
@whatnowning.bsky.social
120 followers 190 following 6 posts
Neuroscientist / Post-Doctoral Fellow @ IMCB, A*STAR 🇸🇬/ Formerly @MITBrainandCog 🇺🇸& @uclnpp 🇬🇧 / recovering revenge bedtime procrastinator

Still building up this account!
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whatnowning.bsky.social
Ning Leow @whatnowning.bsky.social · Nov 18
Thrilled to make my first BlueSky post to share that a major part of my PhD work is now up on @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social! Tweeprint to come, but for now glad to be able to put this out there!
Reposted by Ning Leow
jonathanamichaels.bsky.social
Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature!
www.nature.com/articles/s4...
Sensory expectations shape neural population dynamics in motor circuits
Nature - Experiments with human volunteers and macaques show that expectations produced by probabilistic cueing of future sensory inputs shape motor circuit dynamics in order to increase the...
www.nature.com
October 29, 2025 at 4:11 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
pawelburkhardt.bsky.social
First neurons didn’t appear overnight. We trace their roots to ancient secretory cells - showing how lifestyle & behavior shaped the evolution of first synapses.🧠🌊 #Evolution #Neuroscience

Our latest in @natrevneuro.nature.com
Link: rdcu.be/eMX3E

@jeffcolgren.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social
The evolutionary origins of synaptic proteins and their changing roles in different organisms across evolution
Nature Reviews Neuroscience - Recent studies have shed further light on the evolutionary origins of chemical synapses, In this Review, Colgren and Burkhardt explore how ancient proteins were...
rdcu.be
October 27, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
laurenslosky.bsky.social
Now online @nature.com!

Want to change the consequences of receptor activation?

Small molecules binding the GPCR-transducer interface change G protein subtype preference in predictable ways, enabling rational drug design 💥

So many new possibilities! 🧪🧠🟦

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

🧵👇
Designing allosteric modulators to change GPCR G protein subtype selectivity - Nature
Studies of the G-protein-coupled receptor NTSR1 show that the G protein selectivity of this receptor can be modified by small molecules, enabling the design of drugs that work by switching receptor su...
www.nature.com
October 27, 2025 at 8:50 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
smtuffy.bsky.social
The pivot from “I’m building god” to “I’m building a jerkoff tool” is pretty funny
October 14, 2025 at 7:40 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
ricardsole.bsky.social
Can a single cell learn? Even without a brain, some microbes show simple forms of cognition. Can this basal cognition be engineered? Check our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social on the minimal synthetic circuits & their cognitive limits. @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
September 10, 2025 at 11:48 AM
Reposted by Ning Leow
natmetabolism.nature.com
#Throwback 🧪

REVIEW | The time is now: accounting for time-of-day effects to improve reproducibility and translation of metabolism research

S Deota, S Panda et al.
The time is now: accounting for time-of-day effects to improve reproducibility and translation of metabolism research - Nature Metabolism
This broad group of authors summarizes the impact of circadian factors on metabolic biology and offers recommendations on how to account for and report biological, environmental and experimental factors affecting circadian rhythms in metabolic studies in rodents.
bit.ly
August 30, 2025 at 8:01 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
sussillodavid.bsky.social
Coming March 17, 2026!
Just got my advance copy of Emergence — a memoir about growing up in group homes and somehow ending up in neuroscience and AI. It’s personal, it’s scientific, and it’s been a wild thing to write. Grateful and excited to share it soon.
August 4, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
dlevenstein.bsky.social
I continue to think interneuron circuits are an untapped inspiration in neural network design for context-dependent computation.
Feature-specific inhibitory connectivity augments the accuracy of cortical representations
To interpret complex sensory scenes, animals exploit statistical regularities to infer missing features and suppress redundant or ambiguous information. Cortical microcircuits might contribute to this...
www.biorxiv.org
August 5, 2025 at 12:05 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
pessoabrain.bsky.social
“Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures”
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Small contribution in this piece by @frosas.bsky.social and colleagues on how we need both types of research culture in neuroscience.
#neuroskyence
July 22, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
neural-reckoning.org
"No animal prior to the advent of modern neuroscience has ever seen repeating sequences of images."

Wonderfully pithy observation @georgkeller.bsky.social love it.
georgkeller.bsky.social Georg Keller @georgkeller.bsky.social · Jul 14
Stimulus surround (i.e. statistics of natural stimuli) and visuomotor coupling are much (by orders of magnitude) stronger predictors of visual input (that require no additional pretraining…). No animal prior to the advent of modern neuroscience has ever seen repeating sequences of images.
July 15, 2025 at 9:05 AM
Reposted by Ning Leow
laklab.bsky.social
Our work, out at Cell, shows that the brain’s dopamine signals teach each individual a unique learning trajectory. Collaborative experiment-theory effort, led by Sam Liebana in the lab. The first experiment my lab started just shy of 6y ago & v excited to see it out: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
June 11, 2025 at 3:18 PM
whatnowning.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
System-wide dissociation of reward and aversive dopaminergic signals
Dopamine is central to reinforcement learning, classically linked to reward prediction error signaling. However, recent findings suggest a more complex picture, with dopamine neurons responding to ave...
www.biorxiv.org
May 28, 2025 at 1:48 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
eboyden3.bsky.social
May 22, 2025 at 10:55 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
khoudary.bsky.social
super excited that the first paper from my PhD is now out! we develop a "philosophical toolkit" for computational cognitive modeling & use it to conceptually re-analyze a long-standing debate about evidence accumulation models of decision making 🧠📈 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Reasoning Goals and Representational Decisions in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience: Lessons From the Drift Diffusion Model
The appropriate form of the drift diffusion model depends on how one wishes to reason about their target with the model. If the goal is to parsimoniously explain the speed-accuracy tradeoff, the appr...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
May 20, 2025 at 11:00 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
gunnarblohm.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s42...
Compositional pretraining improves computational efficiency and matches animal behaviour on complex tasks - Nature Machine Intelligence
Hocker et al. demonstrate a method for training recurrent neural networks, which they call ‘kindergarten curriculum learning’, involving pretraining on simple cognitive tasks to improve learning effic...
www.nature.com
May 20, 2025 at 11:28 AM
Reposted by Ning Leow
thetransmitter.bsky.social
Basic pain researchers Steven Prescott and Stéphanie Ratté critique the clinical relevance of preclinical studies in the field and highlight areas for improvement.

By @sydneywyatt.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/pain/basic-p...
Basic pain research ‘is not working’: Q&A with Steven Prescott and Stéphanie Ratté
Prescott and Ratté critique the clinical relevance of preclinical studies in the field and highlight areas for improvement.
www.thetransmitter.org
April 18, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
dulaclab.bsky.social
I highly recommend this inspiring new book by Nahum Ulanovsky! A plea for neuroscientists to embrace “Natural Neuroscience”: use emerging technologies to uncover meaningful behavior and neural representations in free-roaming animals exposed to real-world stimuli.
mitpress.mit.edu/978026204499...
Natural Neuroscience
Natural neuroscience departs from the classical reductionist approach, which emphasizes control at the expense of natural behaviors, by proposing a shift tow...
mitpress.mit.edu
April 15, 2025 at 10:28 AM
Reposted by Ning Leow
apeyrache.bsky.social
🚨new paper alert
Blind mice use stereo olfaction, comparing smells between nostrils, to maintain a stable sense of direction. Blocking this ability disrupts their internal compass.

Kudos to @kasumbisa.bsky.social! Another cool chapter of the Trenholm-Peyrache collab😉

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Stereo olfaction underlies stable coding of head direction in blind mice - Nature Communications
Stereo olfaction involves comparing odor differences between the two nostrils. Here, using neuronal recordings and a behavioral test, the authors demonstrate that blind mice use stereo olfaction to fo...
www.nature.com
April 14, 2025 at 6:37 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
carlbergstrom.com
Since people expressed curiosity, here's an excerpt from my textbook Evolution (coauthored with Lee Dugatkin) that addresses fever as an evolved defense and why we can treat it safely nonetheless.
The proximate mechanisms responsible for triggering mammalian fever are relatively well understood. When immune cells recognize the presence of a pathogen, they release signaling chemicals known as cytokines. Among many other functions, cytokine signals stimulate the brain region known as the hypothalamus, which is responsible for regulating many of the body’s physiological systems (Figure 20.2). The signals induce a shift in the body’s thermal setpoint for temperature regulation, promoting warmth-seeking behavior while driving an endogenous increase in body temperature and inducing fever (Osterhout et al. 2022). For example, when components of the bacterial cell wall are bound by immune cells known as macrophages, the macrophages produce the fever-inducing signals. The presence of bacterial cell wall components is a strong indicator of bacterial infection, and thus this pathway illustrates a mechanistic coupling between indications of pathogen challenge and the fever response. Consequences of Fever In humans, higher fevers are associated with more severe infections. A number of studies of human patients have shown that patients who receive fever- reducing antipyretic drugs such as aspirin, acetaminophen, or ibuprofen recover less quickly from viral infection (Hasday et al. 2000). These observations indicate that fever may play a beneficial role in shortening the duration of infection. Studies of patients with bacterial sepsis (a severe and very dangerous full-body inflammatory response induced by bacterial infection) have often, but not always, revealed a higher survival rate in patients that exhibit fever than in patients without fever. It is important to recognize that this observed correlation does not provide direct evidence of causation. Survival rates could be lower in patients without fever because, for example, the inability to mount a fever response could be indicative of more severe illness. As we described in the introduction of this chapter, numerous nonhuman species exhibit a fever response as well (Figure 20.3). In many of the species, manipulative studies are possible. Animals infected with bacterial pathogens and then treated with antipyretic drugs have more rapid bacterial proliferation and higher mortality rates than individuals allowed to develop a normal fever response. Similar results have been observed for viral infections. Because manipulating temperature by pharmaceutical means may cause additional side effects that make it hard to interpret the experimental results, researchers have also conducted experiments in which they manipulate body temperature directly. These studies tend to show comparable benefits to elevated body temperature. Taken together, the correlational studies in humans and manipulative studies in … of bacterial cell wall components is a strong indicator of bacterial infection, and thus this pathway illustrates a mechanistic coupling between indications of pathogen challenge and the fever response. Consequences of Fever In humans, higher fevers are associated with more severe infections. A number of studies of human patients have shown that patients who receive fever- reducing antipyretic drugs such as aspirin, acetaminophen, or ibuprofen recover less quickly from viral infection (Hasday et al. 2000). These observations indicate that fever may play a beneficial role in shortening the duration of infection. Studies of patients with bacterial sepsis (a severe and very dangerous full-body inflammatory response induced by bacterial infection) have often, but not always, revealed a higher survival rate in patients that exhibit fever than in patients without fever. It is important to recognize that this observed correlation does not provide direct evidence of causation. Survival rates could be lower in patients without fever because, for example, the inability to mount a fever response could be indicative of more severe illness. As we described in the introduction of this chapter, numerous nonhuman species exhibit a fever response as well (Figure 20.3). In many of the species, manipulative studies are possible. Animals infected with bacterial pathogens and then treated with antipyretic drugs have more rapid bacterial proliferation and higher mortality rates than individuals allowed to develop a normal fever response. Similar results have been observed for viral infections. Because manipulating temperature by pharmaceutical means may cause additional side effects that make it hard to interpret the experimental results, researchers have also conducted experiments in which they manipulate body temperature directly. These studies tend to show comparable benefits to elevated body temperature. Taken together, the correlational studies in humans and manipulative studies in … downtime—is far less than the cost of failing to produce a fever when it is needed to clear an infection. Thus, we might expect that fevers should be relatively common, and most should be unnecessary. If so, this means that in most cases, we should be able to intervene safely, reducing fever with antipyretic drugs. Medical technologies—most notably antibiotics and rehydration therapy—and improvements in nutritional status further reduce the risk of death by infection relative to what it would have been throughout much of our evolutionary history. Even many of those infections that might historically have been lethal without a fever response can now be safely controlled without fever. This is not to say that treating most fevers with antipyretic drugs is necessarily a good idea. Further research will be needed to resolve that issue. But it does provide an explanation for why we can often safely interfere with fever, despite its role as an evolved defense against pathogens.
April 13, 2025 at 7:39 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
lizneeley.bsky.social
Latest update (same link): spokesperson says the conference ban for scientists is *reversed* & travel can resume "following established approval processes within each Institute & Center."

The reporting shows how much protocol seems to be getting set verbally, and not in writing. Such a disaster.
April 11, 2025 at 1:16 AM
Reposted by Ning Leow
stephaniemlee.bsky.social
the @chronicle.com has launched what is going to be a tremendously useful tool: a tracker of the Trump administration's activities affecting higher ed, particularly in the areas of civil rights, research, policy, and immigration. check it out: www.chronicle.com/article/trac...
Tracking Trump’s Higher-Ed Agenda
The federal government is reshaping its relationship with the nation’s colleges. Use our new tracker to keep up with the latest.
www.chronicle.com
April 9, 2025 at 9:21 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
tyrellturing.bsky.social
Interesting commentary in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social, arguing that we need to be careful not to always assume that rodents prefer novelty:

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

🧠📈 🧪
The curious interpretation of novel object recognition tests
Novel object recognition tasks are commonly used to assess memory in rodents. These tests rely on an innate preference for exploring objects that are new or have been moved or changed. However, this p...
www.cell.com
April 8, 2025 at 3:51 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
mitpress.bsky.social
We're disappointed to see Ben Barres's powerful book "The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist" among the ~400 titles removed from the Naval Academy Library. Needless to say, we're proud to have published his book and will keep it — and his memory — alive.
The Coming Out of a Transgender Scientist
"I know that I am making the right decision because whenever I think about changing my gender role, I am flooded with feelings of relief."
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
April 8, 2025 at 8:24 PM
Reposted by Ning Leow
carandinilab.net
Many of us use 2p scopes to image 3D volumes of brain. But then we analyze the data plane by plane, resulting in duplicated neurons, missed neurons, and low s/n. Let's go 3D!

Suite3D: Volumetric cell detection for two-photon microscopy
by @haydari.bsky.social & team.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
April 1, 2025 at 11:10 AM
Reposted by Ning Leow
alinouriz.bsky.social
Kicking off Bluesky with BlueBerry, our open-access, multichannel wireless optogenetic device for freely moving rodents. Visit www.OptoBlueBerry.org for documentation and see its neuroscience applications from large-scale to social settings in our recent preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... ​
BlueBerry Wireless Optogenetics
BlueBerry is a multi-channel wireless optogenetic system for freely moving mice and rats.
www.OptoBlueBerry.org
March 30, 2025 at 4:52 PM