@ruchiradatta
Mathematician and computer scientist. Have done research in game theory, AI/ML for NLP, and computational biology (phylogenomics, cancer, and immunology). Now working on making energy-efficient AI/ML. Vegetarian.
Another day, another major Python Package Index compromise leads to a major security problem. opensourcewatch.beehiiv.com/p/popular-py... via @sjvn.bsky.social
The story's moral is that you really must check and recheck any third-party code you pull into your program. #security #programming #AI
folks, please don't submit LLM-generated PRs to open source projects. It makes no sense.
If the maintainers want to use an LLM to fix an issue, they can use Claude or whatnot directly. They don't need you as intermediary, that's just silly.
If they don't want to use LLMs, they have reasons.
📢In the second opinion piece of our 5-year anniversary Series, @evodynamics.bsky.social discusses the field of collective cooperation and the challenges ahead. www.nature.com/articles/s43... #evosky #cssky
🔓 rdcu.be/e5SIY
The first-ever Lean in Munich meetup happened this week! 🎥 Watch Sebastian Ullrich's full talk on Lean's foundations, software verification, and AI: youtube.com/watch?v=2Dr2149l_9Y
#leanlang #leanprover #formalverification #mathematics
ICYMI: New online! Eco-evolutionary dynamics shaping biodiversity in the urban mosaic
A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social:
The Deliberation Taboo
Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Thank you!
And right on schedule: there goes pseudonymity on the Internet. arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800
1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.
We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.
So the retina wasn’t built de novo.
Instead, it is likely rooted in an ancestrally median, already complex eye — lateralized & rewired to solve early chordate sensory challenges.
More here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
and curious what you think!
8/8
Front cover of my book, titled "Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world's music" (published today by Oxford University Press)
1st of my 4-page essay published in Nature today titled "Music is not a universal language - but it can bring us together when words fail" Picture caption: "Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (centre) performed in Spanish at the half-time show of the 2026 American Football Super Bowl LX."
My book is now published! 🌏🎶🧪
You can download it for free at academic.oup.com/book/62353 - I’d be grateful if you do!
I also published an accessible summary with audio/video today in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Try reading that first, then give the whole book a read if you like it!
We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another.
doi.org/10.64898/202...
Injecting particulates into the atmosphere isn’t a magical fix for the climate crisis, says Prof Mike Hulme
- #Geoengineering does little to defuse most of the risks that really matter for people – and it runs the risk of making some harms worse
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
'Viral infections thus may appear to add fuel to the multifactorial fire of neurodegeneration, whether by direct damage or via the immune sys. To us, this insight may also give hope for future preventive strategies, as targeting infections could reduce the risk of getting neurodegenerative diseases'
Yet another good reason to mute or block the trolls in your life
These negative social ties--known as 'hasslers"--are chronic stressors and are linked to impaired physical health and faster aging.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Really liked this paper which ties up two observations that are equally mindboggling (low-rank logits & subliminal/weird generalization effects) and presents one other such observation
arxiv.org/abs/2602.04863
#AcademicSky #PsychSciSky
Psychology:
✳️ It's imperative to examine non-WEIRD samples
Also Psychology:
✳️ Let's use AI to do our research & scholarship*
* despite its very strong pro-White, pro-male, pro-heterosexual biases (bc data it's fed emphasizes subsets of the world's population)
Thank you for sharing! Is there an introduction to current neuroscience from the dynamical systems point of view, for mathematicians who are familiar with dynamical systems, though not with current neuroscience?
Last call for this PhD studentship! Deadline Sun 22nd Feb
In the latest @braininspired.bsky.social, @jaanaru.bsky.social argues that our brain’s computations are of a different nature than any AI; brains compute across spatial and temporal scales, and the computations are entwined with the biological materials.
www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...
rustfs: 🚀2.3x faster than MinIO for 4KB object payloads. RustFS is an open-source, S3-compatible high-performance object storage system supporting migration and coexistence with other S3-compatible platforms such as MinIO and Ceph. ★21512 https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs
And if you just want a simple landing page website, here's a quick guide. You can do it!
gregpak.com/how-and-why-...
Maximum stress the skin can endure in a number of rodent taxa. The naked mole-rat is an outlier, combining high resilience with thin skin.
The skin of the naked mole-rat is actually very stiff – and can endure (relatively) enormous mechanical stress, as tensile tests revealed. We argue that this relates to nakedness, since the lack of pelage allows the dermal collagen network to be more extensive and resilient. (4/8)
Group of Ansell's mole-rats huddling
Do subterranean mammals have hyper-elastic skin thanks to super-sized hyaluronan (HA) polymers?
We challenge this popular idea in a new preprint, presenting the first skin elasticity measurements of burrowing rodents & HA size profiles for Ansell’s mole-rat (1/8) 🧪
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
where we expect to find some signal. Stuff we have no reason to suspect does not get investigated at the same rate as stuff we have a reason to look into. Scientific activity is not memoryless or haphazard. We're not scrambling in absolute darkness; light of past evidence illuminates future steps.
And of course, an ultimate mechanism is that scientists do not randomly select their hypotheses or results from an urn of unknowns. This is a strange, naive vision of science, very prevalent in metascience. Selection happens as a function of background knowledge in a domain. We look more closely
Yes, microplastics are bad for our health, but testing for them is not the answer.
Research shows up to 90% of people have them in their bloodstream. Don't pay thousands to test, take precautionary measures instead – more on that in Part 2.
#EatYourIceCream #Health #Wellness #Microplastics
Might I suggest a fourth for the to-go coffee and tea drinkers? BYO travel mug! All those paper cups are lined in plastic. Putting a hot (not to mention acidic) beverage into them is a microplastic soup recipe. Same goes for the fully plastic cups.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36089043/
the first formalization of Dudley's entropy integral theorem for sub-Gaussian processes, and an application to least-squares (sparse) regression with a sharp rate.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2602.02285
Repo: github.com/YuanheZ/lean...
