Amid the rise of billion-parameter models, I argue that toy models, with just a few neurons, remain essential—and may be all neuroscience needs, writes @marcusghosh.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...

Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro

I've spent all day struggling to write a single page of a popular science article. I bang away at a word processor; give up; start diagramming on paper. Take some notes; draft a few sentences in pen; return to the computer...and very slowly I figure out what I was trying to say in the first place.

This is obscene. Why can't other politicians say that? The 25 richest families are collectively $358.7 billion richer than a year ago, with a combined fortune totaling $2.9 trillion.

can you imagine having even a fraction of the money pumped into ai bullshit but instead you get to R&D something actually fucking useful and which doesn't exist exclusively to extract wealth from creatives and those who enjoy creative works.

Je reprends, et ensuite n'y reviendrai pas. Une pub mignonne où un loup devient végétarien se met à tourner, et ça y est, "les écolos devraient s'en inspirer au lieu du punitivisme, car ça marche". Xième épisode "le problème c'est que vous êtes des casse couille peine à jouir contre productifs". 1/

@petrznam.bsky.social is working to understand how the three-dimensional world is encoded in the brain, in a new project supported by a Consolidator Grant from the @erc.europa.eu www.crick.ac.uk/news/2025-12...

Que j'aime (non) ces braves gens se déclarant de gauche de vraie qui ce matin ont tous sorti le canot et les rames pour venir faire la morale sur l'air "désolé l'oeuf de Bardella c'est une violence in-to-lé-rable vous ne pouvez pas cautionner débat d'idées." Déjà, les mecs, un oeuf. Ensuite 1/

By mimicking Reform to win back support, the Labour government is making a serious mistake. This race to the bottom emboldens Farage, punishes vulnerable people, amplifies racism, and undermines those working to hold communities together.

So if AI succeeds loads of people lose their jobs as they're replaced by AI, and if AI fails, loads of people lose their jobs as the economy crashes?

Join us at Crick - amazing team and great colleagues to collaborate on exciting design and development projects

Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026. The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social. Please apply here until Nov 25: www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...

New awareness campaign

Interested in #neuroscience + #AI and looking for a PhD position? I can support your application @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social ✅ Check your eligibility (below) ✅ Contact me (DM or email) UK nationals: www.imperial.ac.uk/life-science... Otherwise: www.imperial.ac.uk/study/fees-a...

Really enjoyed reading this short opinion piece by Tim O'Leary. I think it echoes the classic Feynman quote "what I cannot create I do not understand". I think engineering approaches such as neuromorphic computing will prove fundamental to scientific understanding of how biological brains work

Proud to have contributed to @gaiabianchini.bsky.social and @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social new paper on how the superior colliculus temporally integrates multisensory information

> Computing has always been a seesawing discipline. We had the AI winters of the 1970s and the 1990s, and we had the dot. com crash and the ensuing “Image Crisis.” It seems another crisis is upon us. Will we ever learn? It is time for some serious thinking! cacm.acm.org/opinion/comp...

Researchers at the Crick found that virgin female mice can become aggressive towards pups when hungry, but only in certain hormonal states. It highlights the importance of understanding hormones when observing how different physical states interact in the brain. www.crick.ac.uk/news/2025-10...

Happy Sarkozy in prison Day

Join us *next Monday*! #CrickXrays25 X-ray #nanoimaging of biological tissues 🇬🇧🌐 @crick.ac.uk & online tinyurl.com/crickxrays25 Sponsored by @dectris.bsky.social, @webknossos.org and @biologists.bsky.social and backed by @brukercorporation.bsky.social and Histomography

So a small update on French politics for my English speaking followers the guy who had been charged with forming a government and came up with the same government than the previous government has quit this morning following the announcement of his government and is now in charge of forming a new one

Applications for Doctoral Clinical Fellowships at the Crick, including a project in my lab, are now open! Please share widely!

Many AI researchers draw inspiration from neuroscience. Naomi Saphra favors a different analogy. Interpretability, in her view, should take a cue from evolutionary biology.

GUESS WHAT WEEK IT IS

I collected some materials on critical AI from my perspective; hope it's useful: olivia.science/ai "CAIL is as an umbrella for all the prerequisite knowledge required to have an expert-level critical perspective, such as to tell apart nonsense hype from true theoretical computer scientific claims"

Life in academia according to autobiographies of Nobel laureates

Our pre-print is out! Critical point drying of brain tissue for x-ray phase contrast imaging. @apeart.bsky.social @yuxinzhang.bsky.social @jkbrmn.bsky.social @apacureanu.bsky.social @andreas-t-schaefer.bsky.social @carlesbosch.bsky.social @esrf.fr @crick.ac.uk bioarXiv: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Reading about this brought to mind a piece I wrote two years ago, inspired by one of my favourite authors. Ursula K. Le Guin emphasized that there’s a big difference “between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.” OpenAI’s AI-generated movie offers us nothing.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Is anarchist science possible? As an experiment, we got together a large group of computational neuroscientists from around the world to work on a single project without top down direction. Read on to find out what happened. 🤖🧠🧪

Hugh Bonneville started his live ITV London News interview on Downton Abbey by talking about Gaza.

Old Soviet joke for today: A man walks into a newsstand every day, looks around, and leaves. After a long time of this, the owner says “Can I help you find something?” “I’m looking for the obituaries.” “The obituaries are in the back of the newspaper, comrade.” “Not the one I’m looking for.”

The contrast in reporting these stories is nuts, right? It's not just me?

ChatGPT, comment on éteint un incendie rapidement ? Réponds en breton

We were asked to write a commentary on NeuroAI for Nat. Rev. Neuro. with Sadra Sadeh, so here it is: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1 in 3 doctors were born overseas. 1 in 2 builders were born overseas. 1 in 6 nurses were born overseas. 1 in 4 transport workers were born overseas. 1 in 7 UK business founders were born overseas. 1 in 5 university academics were born overseas. The UK would be screwed without them.

1/N What are the organizational principles underlying crossmodal cortical connections? We address this in this new preprint, led by @alexegeaweiss.bsky.social & ‪@bturner-bridger.bsky.social‬ in collab w/ ‪@petrznam.bsky.social‬ @crick.ac.uk www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How does the structure of a neural circuit shape its function? @neuralreckoning.bsky.social & I explore this in our new preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... 🤖🧠🧪 🧵1/9

Preprint update: The new version of #SPARKS🎇 is out! Everything's in here: sparks.crick.ac.uk A thread on what changed 🧵👇 @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social @sdrsd.bsky.social @alexegeaweiss.bsky.social #neuroskyence #NeuroAI #ML #BioInspiredAI

Boiling here at home in Cyprus but I put the finishing touches a couple of days ago on this preprint: What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? doi.org/10.48550/arX... Wherein I analyse HCAI & demonstrate through 3 triplets my new tripartite definition of AI (Table 1) that properly centres the human. 1/n

Check out our new review/perspective (w/ @juangallego.bsky.social & Devika Narain) on neural manifolds in the brain! It was a lot of fun to think through these ideas over the past couple of years, and I'm excited it's finally out in the world! 🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 📄: rdcu.be/ex8hW

Traditional liberal parties' (read: Labour, Macron, the SPD) habit to just bow down to fascist anti-migrant and genocidal rhetoric is leading straight to this globally at a frightening speed. So happy to finally see an alternative emerge in the UK: consider joining yourparty.uk!

We're hiring,, of interest to people in spiking neural networks and neuromorphic particularly. See below. 👇 Note the deadline for applications is very soon! Apologies for this but various admin necessities made it unavoidable.

How can we best use AI in science? Myself and 9 other research fellows from @imperial-ix.bsky.social use AI methods in domains from plant biology (🌱) to neuroscience (🧠) and particle physics (🎇). Together we suggest 10 simple rules @plos.org 🧵 doi.org/10.1371/jour...

New preprint for #neuromorphic and #SpikingNeuralNetwork folk (with @pengfei-sun.bsky.social). arxiv.org/abs/2507.16043 Surrogate gradients are popular for training SNNs, but some worry whether they really learn complex temporal spike codes. TLDR: we tested this, and yes they can! 🧵👇 🤖🧠🧪

‘Boiling 🐸' effect makes people oblivious to threat of climate crisis, shows study ...people grasp climate change better through simple yes/no visuals. A frozen lake that no longer freezes hits harder than a temperature graph. Same data, clearer impact. www.theguardian.com/news/2025/ju...

Yeah, let's give an American company access to loads of government data and pay them a load of money to run the government for us using software that systematically fabricates false information and has nasty racial biases. That'll surely stimulate the UK economy. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

We developed a compact and open-source, low-cost photodetector system for neuroscience experiments doi.org/10.1016/j.oh... @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social

1/ Mapping synaptic connectivity between individual neurons is extremely laborious. We developed BRISC, a new method that makes it possible to map inputs onto 100s of neurons in the same animal in a matter of weeks! Led by Alex Becalick and @antblot.bsky.social. 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I just wrote a longer article expanding on the themes in the thread above, about how to move beyond peer review and make science better and more trusted, concluding with a slightly more concrete call to action. thesamovar.github.io/zavarka/tran...