It is possible to work on neural networks as a neuroscientist and actively oppose how AI is developing and how it will affect society.

Consciousness science as a marketplace of rationalizations my commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's thought-provoking BBS paper, and more generally about the field. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Truly crazy - Texas groups are demanding absolute ideological alignment. There are multiple TT job calls at Texas public universities right now. I will not be applying.

Do you plot transcriptomic data, coloring each cell by its cell type? ~ Don't use a default colormap! ~ Instead, use colormaps that capture biological meaning. If two cell types are very similar, their colors should be similar too. Read on 🧵 🧬💻

This is real – Anthropic just agreed to a $1.5B class action settlement for authors of copyrighted works it stole. File your claim here: www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com Unclear if this is just 'books' or journal articles too, but I'm putting mine in anyway www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

what’s crazy is how they figured this out. makes for good science reading! “Replication of an alien genome within one’s own cytoplasm echoes the endosymbiotic domestication of organelles [mitochondria]. Clonal males may thus be regarded as organelles at the superorganism level” 🤯

This interview of Monica López-Hidalgo by @analog-ashley.bsky.social is inspiring. All scientists’ job description should include this, great model

who is liable when an error is made by a BCI-using human with AI intervening in the output? The human? The BCI manufacturer? No one?

Get on my wavelength, man

Oh no how is it that "neuromodulation" means such different things across communities? Who let this happen? For the record, the right answer is serotonin, etc. The wrong answer is brain stimulation in a medical context, DBS, TMS etc. I will endlessly defend this turf.

me: Dang I wish there weren’t such incentives for self-promotion all the damn time also me: *logs on to see what papers folks are promoting today*

“scientific progress can’t be cleanly separated from questions about our values. By aiming for a value-free science, we risk missing the political and moral values already implicitly embedded in the technologies we create.”

I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts. Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird. (he drew a bird into a spectrogram, played that sound to a starling, and the starling reproduced it back to him with enough accuracy he got his bird drawing back in their call's spectrogram) www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQC...

One man cannot, overnight, change a fact as written in thousands of copies of hundreds of different books across the world's libraries. But under pressure from the politicians or guided by his own depravity, he can rewrite history overnight by altering the output of the LLM he owns.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower, Former President of the United States

TIL that Earth and the inner planets don't have stable orbits. Their eccentricities evolve chaotically, and by a lot. In about 1% of simulations, inner planets collide with each other in the next few billion years www.scholarpedia.org/article/Stab...

New work from the lab highlighting the differential effect of arousal on distinct excitatory projections!

The claim that some researchers conducted scientific studies of a group of twins "separated at birth" and reared apart without contact is at best a myth, and at worst a lie. www.madinamerica.com/2020/02/expl...

Proud of Williams College for choosing to decline all new federal grants because of anti-DEI requirements www.science.org/content/arti...

Interesting preprint: functional connectivity between pairs of neurons in V1 isn't about tuning properties nearly as much as it is about which neurons engage with pupil diameter. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... IMO we should be looking more often to neuromodulator receptor profiles in cortex

A study recently made the rounds here claiming that ‘interdisciplinarity reduces impact’. But, citations are inflated by bubbles. Which bubbles would pop given higher rates of interdisciplinary migration?

I’d love to see this method applied to embeddings of genes in models of single cell ‘omics data. Would be a fast way to match orthologous genes across species

Full solidarity with Harvard means that every institution needs to stand up and deliberately provoke Trump. Opening new fronts. It can be petty. Science and medicine has the winning cards and everyone knows it.

it took me a very long time to learn that openly identifying problems before other people do, but not having immediate, non-threatening solution(s) in hand to solve them, rapidly increases the likelihood of being professionally punished, especially if you are a non-white woman

To come up with a good AI policy for a university, one first has to have an idea of which skills and formative experiences they are prepared to lose for the sake of AI use, and which ones they will fight to retain. And it’s here that we have discovered that consensus is most importantly lacking.

How can biological systems anticipate future events? In our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social, we show how a simple genetic circuit can predict future trends through a simple (and perhaps widespread) mechanism @drmichaellevin.bsky.social @koseskalab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I don’t know which academic needs to hear this but yes you should absolutely email other academics just to tell them you enjoyed their article/book/chapter. Just do it. Don’t overthink it. Hello So-and-so, just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed ‘Title’. Hope you’re well. Best, You. Done.

Fighting (sacrificing) today for free speech on campus isn't just about this issue and it isn't just about today. It's about tomorrow, and the day after, and next year. I don't know about you but I don't want to know what comes after green card revocations.

This is crazy. Single-cell foundation models are largely still riding on promises. And crucially they have a bad track record at predicting the response to genetic perturbations (!): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

These words from William James feel prescient in our modern attentional crisis: "Ask, 'In what does a moral act consist?' [...] It consists in the effort of attention by which we hold fast to an idea which but for that effort of attention would be driven out of the mind" (continued)

How can we formulate a general theory of evolution that includes the multiple scales of change and their causal connections? Check this paper by Ilya Temkin on hierarchies and Eldredge's @nilese.bsky.social punctuated equilibrium theory @andrejpaleo.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/service...

Amplifying the story of Badar Khan Suri, a postdoc at Georgetown on a J-1 visa. He was arrested on Monday and sent to a detention center in Texas for "spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media", Another clear 1A violation. apnews.com/article/geor...

The one way all of us can make a difference right now - even if you're not in a position of power - is by creating social media. Make your first Insta Reel. Make a Tiktok. Talk to the camera! The court of public opinion is the one that matters most.

Ripping a student from their home, challenging their immigration status, and detaining them solely based on political viewpoint will chill student speech and advocacy across campuses nationwide. Political speech should never be a basis of punishment or lead to deportation.

Thanks to all of the NIHers and their friends who reached out to me. I am still here (DM me or Signal jeremymberg.78) I still have a very incomplete picture but based on what I have been told, the damage to NIH and to many wonderful people who work(ed) there is/was impossible for me to imagine 1/n

The earliest studies on necessary and sufficient neural populations were performed on simple invertebrate circuits. In her latest column, @neurograce.bsky.social asks if this logic still serves us as we tackle more sophisticated outputs. www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

Apparently all the PhD researchers holding prestigious NSF-funded research fellowships are having their salaries withheld until some unspecified time when the leadership figures out how to eliminate any grant funding that doesn’t align with the president’s political ideology.

Resist. Here is our lab's values statement: www.ncclab.ca/values

In 3D space, a sphere can touch 12 other identical spheres without overlapping. In 24-dimensional space, this number is 196,560 (!) For noisy neural codes, this means there are a LOT of distinguishable directions you could point a vector www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicia...

📢 Apply now for the 7-week #Mathematics #SummerSchool in London! You will develop mathematics skills and intuition necessary to enter the #TheoreticalNeuroscience or #MachineLearning field. ℹ️ www.ucl.ac.uk/gatsby/study-and-work/gatsby-bridging-programme Please help spread the word!

One of the ideas I'm most excited by is 'deliberative polling'. The ideas of Audrey Tang @audreyt.org and the Computational Democracy project are inspiring; github.com/compdemocracy AI *could* be part of the solution to our failing democracies – and not the problem – if we just design it that way.

I was taught that bio's Central Dogma was DNA->RNA->protein. Apparently this is not what Crick meant – and (as usual) it's Watson's fault we learned it. Crick wrote, "If you intend to discuss Jim’s [incorrect] version, I strongly suggest you call it ‘Watson’s Dogma." press.asimov.com/articles/crick

Attending NAISYS at CSHL this week? Come learn about how neural networks are ensembles of tiny little classifiers we call Neural Tangent Experts. A version for AI audiences was just accepted as a spotlight paper at NeurIPS 🔦: arxiv.org/abs/2408.17394 But what might this mean for neuroscience?

My self-advice for writing grants is to write each sentence in the voice of David Attenborough. Good writing is a story. A story has an arc. A story has a characters. A story has resolution. The best stories, though, are also narrated by a kind British man with a passion for nature and education.