At @uwpsychology.bsky.social, former Fellows-to-Faculty awardee Sama Ahmed studies the neurobiology of multitasking: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/fellows-to-faculty-awardee-sama-ahmed-studies-the-neuroscience-of-multitasking/ #neuroscience

Full survey results show American public have high levels of confidence in scientists while revealing some partisan differences (including on how to fund science), but statements asserting lost trust should be read instead as intentional efforts to degrade trust. www.pewresearch.org/science/2026...

Wow! Yay! The Senate just rejected Trump’s proposed science cuts, voting 82–15 to boost funding for NOAA, NASA, and the NSF. The bill already passed the House 397–28. Strong bipartisan support for science still exists.

Thank you Vishal Mathur for choosing “What Is Intelligence?” as your favorite read from 2025! I really enjoyed our conversation for @hindustan-times.bsky.social last October on how prediction is fundamental to intelligence.

I talked to @latif.bsky.social at @radiolab.bsky.social about brain organoids for their new episode. Listen here: radiolab.org/podcast/brai...

Are you a journalist looking to deepen your understanding of complex systems? Join the 2026 CSSS Journalism Fellowship at SFI, offering a space to study complexity alongside researchers and reflect on science communication from within the field. Apply by Feb. 4, 2026 santafe.edu/journalism-f...

Gift link.

Move over ReLU 🚀 Meet **ReSU** (Rectified Spectral Unit): a biologically inspired, self-supervised unit for learning from dynamical data. A backprop-free multilayer ReSU network learns predictive features and recapitulates *Drosophila* vision. To appear at AAAI: arxiv.org/abs/2512.23146

Episode #36 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On low-dimensional manifolds in motor cortex – with Sara Solla @sasolla.bsky.social theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn36 Manifold analysis has changed our thinking on how cortex works. One of the pioneers of this modelling approach explains.

Applications open for SFI’s 2026 GWCSS program, a 2-week workshop for Ph.D. students and early-career scholars to explore complex systems and computation, collaborate on challenges, and advance their research with support from SFI faculty. Apply by Feb 4, 2026 www.santafe.edu/gwcss

The @nytimes.com Lost Science series continues. Here's my Q&A with a scientist who was studying how wildfire smoke threatens human health when the EPA decided that her research was no longer a funding priority. Gift link: nyti.ms/4jhpw14

Easy action to do right now 👇 You don't need to be in earth sciences; just let them know you value high quality research and recognize how important it is to the country.

Delighted to talk at Brown about our self-supervised neuronal algorithm for modeling biological circuits—and challenging backprop along the way. Thanks to @leokoz8 for the kind invitation! youtu.be/AF3Uhrm__U4?...

Biological neurons cluster dynamical stimulus trajectories to predict what’s coming and infer what just happened. If you’re at NeurIPS, stop by our poster #2107 — on display now until 2pm

Interested in algorithmic neuron models and learning rules at the intersection of neuroscience, AI, dynamical systems, and control theory? Have a PhD in neuroscience, physics, EE, or math? Consider joining us: apply.interfolio.com/173400 If you’re at NeurIPS, feel free to DM me.

I send money to @wikipedia.org every year. This is something you can do to make a difference and fight against AI slop.

It feels like the converastion about manifold dimensionality is back, so I thought I'd share a paper that explains nicely why measuring the "embedding dimensionality" of a manifold (e.g., counting PCs) can be very different from its actual "intrinsic dimensionality (DoFs) doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

One thing I feel strongly about: The NIH peer review system is the beating heart of the agency and the whole US biomedical research agency. It is the worst system for assigning grants but no other system has been developed that is better. It draws democratically from the scientific community.

PSA to academics posting threads about your paper here: you can (and should) post the link to the paper in the first post. Your X/Twitter brain rot have have you thinking otherwise, but please free yourself of that. (Also you can call them 'blue-prints' if you want).

We've seen some remarkable outcomes in people with advanced, refractory cancers, including pancreatic, melanoma, and renal, with personalized neoantigen mRNA vaccines. But this work is now endangered. www.scientificamerican.com/article/pers...

Today over Chicago's Lakefront

It’s baby octopus season 🐙🦑 Saw this little guy last night with the Salish Sea School in Anacortes, WA as part of their free community dock walk I volunteer as an interpreter for. We can tell it is a giant pacific octopus from the single line of chromatophores on each arm.

Day 2 of the #NaturalPhilosophy Symposium concluded with a panel discussion featuring the day's speakers: Alan Guth, Jennifer Nagel, David Albert, Simon DeDeo, Emily Riehl, and Anil Seth. Stay tuned for the exciting final day of the Symposium! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Apnv...

Yet another epic fascinating bluetorial from @jeremymberg.bsky.social

🚨Job alert🚨 The lab has up to *3 postdoc openings* for comp systems neuroscientists interested in describing and manipulating neural population dynamics mediating behaviour This is part of a collaborative ARIA grant "4D precision control of cortical dynamics" euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/383909

For children and teens, heart and blood vessel complications of Covid overshadow the very rare and short-term risk of vaccinations, a new report from nearly 14 million kids www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Do you have what it takes to win Science’s #DanceYourPhD competition? We want you to top last year’s food-themed frolic from the Helsinki chemist who dressed up as a chili pepper. Or maybe you can get #AI to dance on your behalf? Learn more: https://scim.ag/3LuVObX

🧪⚛️Max Born won the Nobel Prize in Physics for giving the correct interpretation of the wave function in a footnote to his paper in 1926. The rest of the paper incorrectly states that the wave function amplitude gives the probability. The mind boggles about what Nature's bot would say about that.

So my reviewers were bots before we knew bots existed?

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Born #OnThisDay in 1815 was George Boole FRS. Boole was a mathematician, logician and philosopher who helped establish modern symbolic logic and whose algebra of logic, now called Boolean algebra, is fundamental to the design of digital computer circuits: https://bit.ly/3g1qY9c

Why fundamental research is fundamental to progress, seeding major breakthroughs Editorial @nature.com this week And 7 basic science discoveries that changed the world nature.com/articles/d41... nature.com/articles/d41...

Applications for our Fellows-to-Faculty Award are now open! This program supports early career scientists in #autism or #neuroscience research by facilitating their transition into tenure-track faculty positions. Apply by 1/14/2026: www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/10/31/a... #science

The amount of AI generated art in slides at this conference, primarily used by older scientists, is killing me. Scientists please. Don’t use these ai platforms to make your figures or slides. They look bad and I have yet to see them meaningfully improve the message of talks.

Fixing my typo on myocarditis 1-3 cases per 100,000 male adolescents! Sorry I messed it and still no editing function here