You know those moments when you see research that so well aligns with your personal interests that ask yourself if you went into the wrong scientific field... yeah, that's this for me. 😜
Raccoon information seeking! Very cool work on raccoons optimizing information gain in puzzle solving from @sarahba.bsky.social and lab:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
The reason businesses put their money behind liberal democracies is because stable=predictable wealth. That the current batch of wealthy think that they could instead become oligarchs in a fascist dictatorship to make more money was always going to backfire.
www.techdirt.com/2026/03/02/a...
Agree this is a very cool paper.
The result is that soma-dendritic mismatch reflects an error (teaching) signal.
Below panel (5e) is key data, supporting the idea that their SD residual approach captures differences in their two populations as a function of the behavioral outcome (error).
In 2023 a bill to prevent AI from autonomously launching nuclear weapons *failed to pass*. This was apparently not newsworthy.
www.congress.gov/bill/118th-c...
I think this is a *super* important paper - if this result can be replicated with other regions or tasks then this may come to form our core understanding of credit assignment signals in the neocortex!
#neuroscience 🧪
3/3) It's weird how snowflakey the AI doom crowd can be, especially on that site. Anyway, I still stand by the article we published on this subject in 2023:
www.noemamag.com/the-illusion...
2/3) Today my notifications had a bunch of snarky, fairly angry replies from some rando guy on tweets I made back in *2021* where I said I didn't think super-intelligent AI killing everyone was the biggest concern, and errors from "dumb AI" being put in sensitive positions would be a bigger risk.
1/3) Occassionally when one of my students posts a paper on X/Twitter I will just go peak to see how it's doing, and I can't help but sometimes look at my notifications at the same time.
That site is such a weird place man...
hey team! I need advice! If there were theoretically an organization whose sole purpose was to systematically identify and break nuisance and stupid IP in the biomedical space, creating shareware equivalents, what would be the highest value targets? e.g., AAV serotypes, antibodies, CRISPR, 1/n
Isn’t it cool that the iron in our bodies came from a 5 billion year old supernova?
www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...
We are…..literally stardust
(🎤 drop)
#NephJC
Or rather, that's an extension of what I said above. I guess my ultimate point is that I usually find 99% of the benefit in terms of my scientific thought comes from the outlining process, not the fine-tuning for reviewers.
It's not about speed - my claim is that all of that obsessive editing and refining we do can sometimes actually be *counter* productive vis-a-vis the actual science because it turns us into *salespeople*.
That's why I think the traditional paper model is not useful for shaping our thought.
Totally agree that writing our a paper (or grant) helps to think about the problem.
But, I'm not sure that thinking aide requires all of the obsessive fine-tuning of language and images that we do to impress reviewers.
I think we could obtain the same benefit with stripped down notes/essays.
New preprint 📣
Do you use the @alleninstitute.org mouse brain connectome?
In work led by Vikram Nathan we found issues with existing connectome representations, fixed them, showed the impact on connectome measures.
Do you wonder what they are?
Do you wonder what they do?
tinyurl.com/5y9mft4e
Congratulations to Siva Reddy (@sivareddyg.bsky.social), Core Academic Member at Mila, on being awarded the prestigious 2026 Sloan Research Fellowship. This fellowship recognizes his outstanding contributions to the field and his scientific leadership.
Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom www.nature.com/articles/s41... - new paper with Clinton Haarlem, Cliodhna Hynes and colleagues
Different species see the world as fast as they need to...
TBH the thing that is most sad about the loss of ~2015-2021 era science twitter is the loss of a public square where grad students can see, and participate in, the diversity of expert opinions in the field. It really shaped how I see science.
Screenshot of an article from CBC News. The headline reads: Ottawa puts $50M behind Inuit-led university as part of major announcement for northern communities.
Canada’s first Inuit-led university will be a game changer for the North.
I was sure the illusion would break at some length: can't keep grow forever, right?
Wrong. My brain hurts.
Excellent thread for grad students to dive into - so much expertise (and diversity of opinion!) in the comments 👇
Evidence that our information environment influences our thoughts and views.
It’s an important paper because this kind of thing hasn’t been shown so clearly before. There was the analysis of Facebook data w Facebook permission which showed very little change… 1/
Community meme: I CAN EXCUSE FASCISM. BUTI DRAW THE LINE AT MERCANTILISM.
The Supreme Court:
The key question here is, how much worse does AI make this?
Because, it was always possible for people to post false information online and have that influence search results.
But, AI likely makes this form of manipulation easier. It would be good to see a rigorous comparison.
Impressive analysis of human data led by David Durpret's team in Oxford:
A learning-evoked slow-oscillatory architecture paces population activity for offline reactivation across the human medial temporal lobe
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Advice for a young investigator:
For figures in Google Docs, insert a drawing, then put both your image and the text box containing the caption inside the drawing
For MS Word, insert a text box and put your image and caption inside
For Pages, insert image and text box separately then link them
Hippocampal trace coding dominates and disrupts place coding https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.17.706430v1
But, for real - to what extent might the active state reflect burst spiking?
Burstprop! 😜
With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅
Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
