Eyewire

Wishing you Happy Holidays and a wonderful new year!

The Institute for Advanced Study (@the_IAS), the fabled home of Einstein and Gödel, announces a 2026-27 program on Modeling Fly Vision, intended to refound theor/comp neuro on the bedrock of 21st century brain maps. Apply for membership! #special-year" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">ias.edu/sns/csb#specia…

Feast your eyes on this newly discovered cell type: the bistratified huntsman. It prefers dark, spooky visual stimuli. Tricks and a few treats from eyewire.org. Happy Halloween! #citizenscience

Something spooky spotted in the retina! Happy Halloween 🎃 #citizenscience

DYK around half of the brain is not made of neurons? Among the other half is the octopus-like microglia. In this visualization by our Electron Microscopy team, microglia (green) wraps around a pyramidal cell (blue), one of two types of excitatory neurons in the brain.

Fantastic view of the 50 largest bilaterally symmetrical cells in the fly brain by @quorumetrix View these cells in Codex. Click 3D view if you dare! codex.flywire.ai/app/search?dat…

This is personal for me, my alternative career path is an 'un-anticipated use case' starting with this @eye_wire RGC, thankfully uploaded to 3d.nih.gov/entries/3DPX-0… I spent much time 3D printing it, embedding it in colored resin, which naturally lent itself well to fulldome vis

After 7 years, thrilled to finally share our #MICrONS functional connectomics results! We recorded activity from ~75K neurons in visual cortex in a single mouse, then mapped its wiring using electron microscopy. To systematically characterize neuron function, we built the first foundation model of the mouse visual cortex—trained via deep learning on data pooled from multiple mice and visual cortical areas. Our foundation model generalized to new neurons, animals, and even unseen stimulus domains. It also accurately predicted entirely new modalities, such as anatomically defined cell types. Importantly, this robust generalization enabled us to create accurate functional digital twins of individual mouse brains. Using the digital twin of the MICrONS mouse—where we knew the exact neuronal wiring—we discovered that neurons don’t connect randomly, even when anatomically positioned to do so. Instead, given multiple potential partners (axons near dendrites), neurons preferentially choose partners with similar feature selectivity (“what”) rather than receptive field overlap (“where”). Foundation models offer a powerful approach to systematically decode the neural code of intelligence. Huge thanks to @IARPAnews for funding this groundbreaking effort through the @BRAINinitiative, and to our amazing team at @Stanford @StanfordMed @bcmhouston, @Allen, @Princeton, @uniGoettingen and others! #Neuroscience #MICrONS #NeuroAI #Connectomics #FoundationModels #AI nature.com/immersive/d428…

Scientists have mapped the vision centers of a mouse brain, the largest and most detailed such rendering of neural circuits in a mammalian brain: bit.ly/4lfru2q

Bipolar cells segmented by AI in our new dataset! Screenshot from Jonathan Oesterle

A quick guide to 3D neuron navigation in neuroglancer: youtu.be/4Pi0QpjkDcI (try saying that 3 times fast) Explore interactive neurons from the microns dataset: microns-explorer.org/gallery-mm3

Conversation with Mala Murthy @MurthyLab about the FlyWire connectome and fly neuroscience: …r-vivid-with-alan-alda.simplecast.com

Today, Princeton’s John Hopfield, the 2024 Nobel laureate in physics, will receive his Nobel Prize medal and diploma in Stockholm. Watch as professors @SebastianSeung and Carlos Brody describe Hopfield's groundbreaking research and legacy.

Happy Halloween from all the monsters of EyeWire! #citizenscience

Vampyramidal neurons. Happy Halloween! #neuroscience

A special shout-out to Krzysztof Kruk, an amateur scientist from Poland and veteran of @eye_wire. He singlehandedly annotated the majority of neurons in the #FlyWire optic lobe, and wrote software that aided others doing the annotation. What a hero!

We are excited to share educational materials designed to bring FlyWire into classrooms! We have designed interactive lessons to be used by high school and college teachers, instructors, or scientists doing outreach. Check it out: codex.flywire.ai/academy_home Image by @exp_perception

If you are good at programming / data analysis / algorithms and like challenges read on! FlyWire is issuing its first Data Challenge. We'll fly the winner to Princeton to give a talk about their solution🧵

This might make you think twice next time you reach for the fly swatter. The whole brain wiring diagram of the fly! All 140,000 neurons and their 50M synapses are available to explore in Codex, the Connectome Data Explorer: codex.flywire.ai #sfn23

An amazing video showing 45.5 hours of neutrons growth in 1 minute! Credits: @eye_wire #MedTwitter #neuroscience