Neuroscientist by training, tinkerer by nature. Now scanning transparent mouse brains with light-sheet microscopes. Microscopy, clearing, data crunching, tinkering.
Working as postdoc at @radboudumc with Nael Nadif Kasri and Corette Wierenga, looking at neuron-distribution differences in mouse models of ASD.
Married, father of two. Toots in English, German, Dutch. Boosts a lot.
opted into tootfinder for full-text indexing. Check it out: https://www.tootfinder.ch/index.php?join=1
Say goodbye to 1.5°C. But remember, the next target is 1.51°C and not 2°C. We need to keep fighting.
Every tonne of CO₂ emitted makes the job of future CO₂ removal harder, and every 0.01°C of temperature increase makes the world more chaotic and dangerous.
From Josh Moore, German Bioimaging research software engineer and OME and Zarr developer and maintainer:
🚀 We’re hiring again! Join German BioImaging as a Software Developer!
💻 Build scalable #bioimaging solutions
🌍 Collaborate globally
🎯 Contribute to open science through #OME #Zarr
📣 Tell your #NGFF friends.
Remote, full-time. Apply by 30 June 2025. All submissions via:
https://gerbi-gmb.de/machform/view.php?id=86038
1/ Meet the team behind the science at eLife 👋
When you submit a paper to eLife, who reads it? Where does it go? Who’s behind the scenes, keeping everything running?
Let’s introduce the people who keep the wheels turning. 🧵
https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/4d9b0438/publishing-with-elife-meet-our-editorial-staff?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic
Feels like it's socially relevant information that every guy I knew in CS/HCI who was an unrepentant grifter dude making extreme unevidenced claims about human cognition ten years ago is flourishing in an AI position now and has "AI expert" all over their socials. Every. Single. One. Meanwhile every single woman I worked with back then is in like a laborious, rigor-intensive, multidisciplinary research role
God I wish I had our salary data
🎉 Today we're bringing 3D print hosting into the Fediverse! 🎉
Have you wanted to escape the walled gardens of Printables, Makerworld and Thingiverse, and host your 3D content somewhere more open?
Now you can, with our official public Manyfold instance, 3dprint.social!
➡️ Sign up now, at https://3dprint.social
❤️ And if you can, please support the project at https://opencollective.com/manyfold
Wonderful to chat with Paul on Brain Inspired, where we discuss many things. Among them: What are we brain researchers trying to do here (wrt causality)? I also stick my neck out to predict the next big breakthrough in emotion research.
0:00 – Intro
6:12 – Nicole’s path
19:25 – The grand plan
25:18 – Robustness and fragility
39:15 – Mood
49:25 – Model everything!
56:26 – Epistemic iteration
1:06:50 – Can we standardize mood?
1:10:36 – Perspective neuroscience
1:20:12 – William Wimsatt
1:25:40 – Consciousness
Thanks for having me!
An extra special aspect of both apps is that they were co-designed with our teams of citizen scientists.
That means that from the very start, we had a team that helped us to design the entire app and project.
COVID hit in the midst of our starting up period, and since then we've been having meetings with the co-design team roughly every two weeks (94 in total).
(8/)
The #Nachtlichter app was designed to assist participants in counting and classifying light sources. We pre-defined street segments (usually from one street corner to the next), and participants went there at night and reported all the different lights they could see.
One question that we had to deal with early on was "how do we categorize all the different light sources that are out there?" In the end, we came up with 18 categories (including "other" as the final category for uncommon things like flagpole lights, glowing park benches, illuminated water fountains, etc.).
(9/)
We had originally proposed that we would cover at least 6 square kilometers in at least 3 German communities.
In the end, our fantastic team of citizen scientists made observations in 33 communities in 9 countries (but mainly in Germany), covering a total area of 22 square kilometers!
(10/)
So what did we find? Well, first, we compared the number of lights that our participants counted (per square kilometer) to the brightness of the #VIIRS_DNB satellite instrument.
We see a clear correlation between the two, and this gives us a "conversion" factor from "nW/cm^2sr" to "lights/km^2".
We used this factor to calculate how many light sources out team would count if we covered the entire area of Germany exactly at midnight. Our result is 78 ± 3 million lights, or roughly one per person.
(11/)
You can see that while the relationships are obvious, the number of each light of different light types is not directly proportional to the satellite brightness. That's similar to what we saw for Tucson: as you go from more rural to more urban places, the relative importance of street lights decreases.
We looked at this by comparing the fraction of lights of different types for observations in different land cover types.
(12/)
These results are particularly important for people who model artificial night sky brightness (skyglow), because up until now, most skyglow models assume that all of the light comes from streetlight-style lights.
This shows that there are a great number of light sources that shine sideways (signs, and windows), that are right now being largely ignored.
This is also important for efforts to reduce #LightPollution, because it means that while streetlights are important, fixing them is not going to come close to fixing the entire problem.
Illuminated advertisements and lights mounted on buildings are also important - and the lights from residential houses probably matter a lot more than people generally think!
(13/)
Huge thanks go to the hundreds of people who took part in the project!
Thanks also to @helmholtz and @bmbf_bund for funding our research!
If you'd like to learn more, we've also written a "questions and answers" document for non-academics. It's available in both German: https://doi.org/10.48440/gfz.1.4.2025.001
And English: https://doi.org/10.48440/gfz.1.4.2025.002
Check out also this "behind the paper" blog post written by two of our citizen scientists: https://communities.springernature.com/posts/behind-the-paper-citizen-science-illuminates-the-nature-of-city-lights-citizen-scientists-insights-into-the-research-project-nachtlichter
And thanks to everyone who read and shared parts of this thread!
(14/)
Nature Cities has also published a "research briefing", with comments about the paper from me, one of the reviewers (Noam Levin), and the editor. Check it out: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00242-w
(An addition to the thread later in the day, 15/15)
Another article about #LightPollution also came out in Nature Cities today: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-025-00258-2
@travislongcore is a co-author, and the paper's title is "Artificial light at night outweighs temperature in lengthening urban growing seasons"
The authors looked at how temperature, artificial light, and how urban a city is (impervious surface fraction) affect the start and end of the growing season for plants.
They found that artificial light "increased exponentially toward urban centers, and exerted stronger influence than air temperature in lengthening the urban growing season, especially by delaying its end, although the effects varied across climate zones."
In case you are interested in light pollution and didn't see it yet, check out the thread above 👆
@skyglowberlin Ahhh I was literally just wondering on the bus this morning about whether increased lighting vs 'just' climate change might be behind some of the unseasonal flowers @joncounts and others have been noting....
@cosmos4u yeah, at first I thought it was good that they came out together, but that may have sucked the air out of the room for ours...
It was reported in El Pais, Deutschlandfunk Nova, and (maybe?) BR.
Coming out a week before the summer solstice probably also doesn't fit well to the stories the editors want to tell - the "hot time of year" for interviews with me has nearly always been January and February, when the nights are long.
@skyglowberlin @travislongcore
This is cool.
I also noticed that certain wildflowers bloomed near the glass door of my house at least 2 weeks earlier in the Spring than it did in the surrounding yard.
There might have been some affect due to temperature leakage, but it really seemed to be due to the light, and this supports that.
@skyglowberlin great thread, thank you.
I read a couple of times about vehicle lights being indirectly counted but couldn't see the contribution quantified?
🙏🏽
@jbenjamint Yeah, we asked people to rate how many cars were driving. The scale was something like:
o continuous traffic
o several per minute
o one car per minute
o little to no traffic
We didn't have a good way to bring that into the paper in the same way as the count results, but also, traffic pretty much ends on the vast majority of German streets around 9-10 pm. I mean, there are still cars, but it's nothing compared to the early evening.
Car headlights might help to explain why we see such a discrepancy between citizen scientist observations of star visibility in the early evening and satellite measures of light emissions well after midnight (see: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7781)
@skyglowberlin @helmholtz @bmbf_bund
Thanks to cheap 360 cameras, it might be quite simple to get a bunch of volunteers to actually survey a target at midnight.
I'm thinking a group of motorcyclists could be prepositioned with chosen routes, and at the right time, ride out. Send the videos back, run them through some image processing, presto.
Similarly, riders willing to do this over moderate distances could get you rural data.
@Benhm3 We thought about ideas like that, but it's difficult to clearly identify light sources from imagery alone. In this example, a human can figure out (especially if they are there) that the light here is coming from floodlights and count them. But it would be much more challenging to try to get that just from imagery.
There are lots of other examples where lights can only really be seen from the sidewalk and not the street.
@skyglowberlin @helmholtz @bmbf_bund
Wow. Fascinating
David Ho
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