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Recent articles

Davi Bock standing in front of a poster showing visualizations of connectomes.

Beyond wiring diagrams: Inside a $19 million effort to expand access to connectome technology

Davi Bock’s lab took the millions of images that led to the complete connectome of a fruit fly brain. Now he wants to apply “this high-throughput flashlight across all areas of biology.”

By Calli McMurray
6 October 2026 | 11 min read
Illustration of pipa frog showing nerves in fingertips.

How the pipa frog hunts prey by touch

Each of the frog’s eight fingers branches into 16 ultra-sensitive tips, which together function as a fovea—potentially the first demonstration of this type of sensory structure outside of mammals.

By Calli McMurray
30 September 2026 | 7 min read

Reverse engineering neural circuits; success stories from computational neuroscience

Kevin Mitchell talks with Timothy Behrens about ring attractors, the role of innate structure, and an expanded view of cognitive maps.

By Kevin Mitchell
6 August 2026 | 60 min watch

Explore more from The Transmitter

Barbara Finlay looking at a glass jar with a brain.

Remembering Barbara Finlay, ‘maverick’ of evolutionary neuroscience

Finlay, who died on 12 September, championed the idea that developmental constraints dictate how evolution sculpts brains, a concept she used to model the timing of hundreds of events and align them across mammalian species.

By Calli McMurray
23 October 2026 | 8 min read
A crow looking at a screen showing a circle of white dots on a black background.

Crows have brains ‘in the fast lane’

The birds accurately complete decision-making tasks twice as fast as primates, although their endbrains look considerably different.

By Sarah Thau
22 October 2026 | 4 min read
A boy manipulates blocks at a table while sitting across from a woman taking notes.

Prevalence of profound autism declines with new definition

The updated, more precise definition used in a CDC study includes adaptive scores.

By Brianna Abbott
22 October 2026 | 5 min read