I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

New video about a piece by the modern artist Sol LeWitt, and the group theory behind it. youtu.be/_BrFKp-U8GI

Reminded again of Kevin Murphy's excellent RL overview: arxiv.org/abs/2412.05265 A lot of the stuff covered here really is at the cutting edge and not compiled so nicely anywhere else

woah are the japanese 鳥類 (chorui?) & bangla চড়ুই (chorui) somehow related or is it (I presume) just a fun coincidence

(1/26) Excited to share a new preprint led by grad student Albert Wakhloo, with me and Larry Abbott: "Associative synaptic plasticity creates dynamic persistent activity." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It was a great experience mentoring this cohort for the past 8 months—excited to see what they get up to next!

New preprint!

 tl;dr — We ran around late at night to record wild rats in NYC and figured out how to quantify their behavior and environment. 🧵 w/ Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, Emily Mackevicius www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Proud to make my National Geographic debut with this incredible discovery! Meet Mirasaura, an extremely weird little guy with independently-evolved "feathers" that solves a longstanding Triassic mystery and makes one of the period's oddest families even stranger. (Now with a fixed link!)

Everyone, please meet Sphenodraco! A newly described sphenodontian (a tuatara relative) from the Late Jurassic of Europe published TODAY! #paleoart #reptiles #sciart #art

I am happy to share that I’ve been awarded tenure here at Columbia University. Alhamdulillah. I thank my wife, parents, mentors, colleagues, friends, and family. I thank my lab members, present and past, for entrusting their careers in my hands and making this a thrilling journey.

We are looking for early carrer researchers who want to share their fascination for Neuroethology by introducing their work.

Mamdani winning and it's not even close! Rejection of Machiavellian power-mad sex-harasser w full support of Dem establishment & $20M in PAC $$, in favor of a young fresh, guy really committed to ordinary people with a huge grassroots volunteer effort. Huge grassroots victory!

"GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE"

Turns out there was a more exciting message than better things aren’t possible

When we run leftist candidates, those candidates win. Because leftist values ARE the values the people believe in. Respond to. Show up for. Whatever the donor class may tell you, and however hard they may fight us, remember that. These are the policies that WIN.

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature! When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️ The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar bit.ly/3HvWSum

Check out my review of Is Anyone Listening?: What Animals Are Saying to Each Other and to Us by marine biologist and dolphin researcher Denise L. Herzing, published in Current Biology: www.cell.com/curre.../abs...

youtube.com/shorts/v-JNF... Incredible, not just a "how did dinosaurs go from teeth to beaks" but also how young and old animals had completely different diets.

Found a baby songbird? Here's a newly updated chart!

May will be the month of the hyena. Here you have your daily dose. #SciArt #hyaena #wildlife #art #mammals @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social

Koreaceratops

NEW: Entire scientific fields have been wiped out by the nearly 800 grants cancelled at NIH, finds a @nature.com analysis of the unprecedented cuts. About half of all 2024 NIH projects related to LGBT+ health or vaccine hesitancy — gone. See the other topics and US states hardest hit here:

Kristopher Jensen (@kristorpjensen.bsky.social): Recurrent network models of planning in prefrontal cortex www.youtube.com/watch?v=baY8...

📽️Recordings from our @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #COSYNE2025 workshop on “Agent-Based Models in Neuroscience: Complex Planning, Embodiment, and Beyond" are now online: neuro-agent-models.github.io 🧠🤖

🔥 Spicy take alert! "Vocal Learning Versus Speech Evolution: Untangling a False Equivalence", new from Adriano Lameira onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics

Thrilled to receive an Honorable Mention for the NSF GRFP! Congrats to all the awardees and those recognized! Excited to continue advancing research on RL mechanisms with birdsong as a model. 🎶

🚨 New BBB Seminar 🚨 Join us next week to learn about *names* from Mickey Pardo (🐘) and David Omer (🐒) 🗓️ April 17th @ 10:00 EDT ✅ Register here: braincoustics.com

🚂 see y’all in Montreal 😊 #cosyne2025

How does barcode activity in the hippocampus enable precise and flexible memory? How does this relate to key-value memory systems? Our work (w/ Jack Lindsey, Larry Abbott, Dmitriy Aronov, @selmaan.bsky.social ) is now in eLife as a reviewed preprint: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

1/7 Our paper on individual variability in decision-making is finally out in @nature.com! Inspired by the classic work by Mante and Sussillo, we trained many rats to solve context-dependent decision-making, and we found that different brains use different neural mechanisms to solve the same task!

"Social and individual factors mediate chimpanzee vocal ontogeny" www.nature.com/articles/s41... key finding: older sons of gregarious mothers ... overall more exposed to others’ calls #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics cc chimp ppl @kathelijnekoops.bsky.social @jilldpruetz.bsky.social et al. 🙂

Want to procedurally generate large-scale relational reasoning experiments in natural language, to study human psychology 🧠 or eval LLMs 🤖? We have a tool for you! Our latest #ICLR work on long-context/relational reasoning evaluation for LLMs ReCogLab! github.com/google-deepm... Thread ⬇️

Still time to submit to our special collection on 'Vocal communication in corvids' in Animal Cognition @springernature.com. link.springer.com/collections/...

We know dopamine guides reinforcement learning in externally rewarded behaviors—think a mouse learning to press a lever for food or juice. But what about skills like speech or athletics, where there’s no explicit external reward, just an internal goal to match? 🧵 (1/7)

New paper from Kasdin and Duffy (feat. @pantamallion.bsky.social, @neurokim.bsky.social, and others) on how dopamine shapes song-learning trajectories in juvenile birds. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share our latest work! It’s been a great experience working on this (including building a whole new lab!) 😊 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

By studying songbirds, our own Vikram Gadagkar, @neurokim.bsky.social, Jonathan Kasdin and colleagues witnessed the role the brain’s reward machinery plays as the brain naturally learns over time through practice. Learn more! zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/songbirds-hi...

The demographic drivers of cultural evolution in bird song | www.cell.com/current... | @currentbiology.bsky.social | #ornithology 🪶

common swift

This ongoing story is horrifying. Free speech is vital.

(1/23) In addition to the new Lady Gaga album "Mayhem," my paper with Manuel Beiran, "Structure of activity in multiregion recurrent neural networks," has been published today. PNAS link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (see dclark.io for PDF) An explainer thread...

Congratulations to our own Vikram Gadagkar, one of five @columbiauniversity.bsky.social faculty named @sloanfoundation.bsky.social Research Fellows! 👏 news.columbia.edu/news/five-co... #brain #learning #socialbehavior

It’s time, I need to know, which Digidestined’s crest would you have?

The next bridging brains and #bioacoustics seminar is tomorrow! Still time to register ⬇️

Come hang out with me this Thursday 😊

🦑 #Marineresearch 🐋 #whales New research into #baleenwhale vocalizations shows species that fight back against #Orca attacks use higher frequencies. Whale species that flee from Orca use sounds in frequencies below orca hearing range onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

always love a resurrection fern

Good morning, please have a nice bug*. #invertebrates #BugADay #Bugsky *Polyphemus moth

Reposting a sketch from my BirdABC series for this #WeirdBirdWednesday! Shrikes are definitely weird - these predatory songbirds often get honorary raptor status among those who research birds of prey due to their similar hunting strategies and hooked beaks. 🎨🪶 #SciArt #BirdArt

(1/30) New preprint! "Symmetries and continuous attractors in disordered neural circuits" with Larry Abbott and Haim Sompolinsky bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...