Johnny Knoxville says Ed Witten should be more careful when talking about physics.

Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1

Interesting piece claiming that the asymmetry between writing acceleration and review acceleration is breaking science. Essentially Brandolini’s law (The amount of energy needed to refute bs is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it) applied to science publishing >

I can't stop laughing at this post. It's perfect.

Fix for next 11th hour grant push — Dr Robby tells me to Dr the f**k up 🔥

Wow!

This is satisfyingly niche. Shots fired by the chemical reaction networks community. arxiv.org/abs/2603.12060

Among the frustrating aspects of the funding situation in the U.S. is that the strategic response is to apply for more grants, with the result that the equilibrium success rate is pushed lower (up to a point). Scientists get less while spending more time writing grants rather than doing science.

The question of if and how we should be integrating AI into programming and neuroscience education is an ever-present one in my mind. Here are my current set of thoughts, driven by an undercurrent of *you need to talk with students about it* regardless of how you personally use AI, or not.

The difference between these two is racism

“In our culture, preferring an algorithm to a trainee feels like a betrayal of the academic mission.” That’s because it is. www.science.org/content/arti...

The 2nd meeting of #Scialog: Neurobiology and Changing Ecosystems has begun in Tucson! Special welcome to all our new Fellows. Cosponsored with @allenphilanthro.bsky.social, the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation, and @kavlifoundation.org.

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico? In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony. It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small! rdcu.be/e5H8G

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Many of the scientists Jeffrey Epstein courted were already well-established and well-funded. So why didn’t they all just say no? Science talked with three who did just that. Here’s how Epstein approached them, and why they refused to have anything to do with him. ⬇️ https://scim.ag/40qbXnv

Knuth on Claude code! www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/paper...

Truly honored to be recognized by the Sloan Foundation. Major thanks to my research collaborators, students, and my many amazing mentors over the years

This is work that we presented at last year's #Cosyne workshop on #GNN s sites.google.com/bu.edu/gnnwo.... Better late than never. You can reproduce everything with the associated notebooks. I think it's a good start to learn how to use GNNs to infer something about NNs. arxiv.org/abs/2602.13325

The biggest problem holding neuroscience back right now isn’t data or tools, thanks in large part to the BRAIN Initiative. It’s fragmentation across species. I wrote this to hopefully spark discussion around an issue that can only be solved as a community👇 www.thetransmitter.org/animal-model...

Excited to share “Orofacial behaviors, not eye movements, govern neural activity in mouse visual cortex” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Summary below...

A special year for the Cajal Course in Computational Neuroscience: the BRAIN Prize winners Haim Sompolinsky and Larry Abbott will join us as keynote speakers. And we will bring you the same great roster of instructors as every year. Applications are now open! cajal-training.org/on-site/comp...

Reupping this cause it’s evergreen and I feel better knowing someone out there called him out like this

📢 Applications open on 19 Jan for the 7-week #Mathematics #SummerSchool in London. You will develop the maths skills and intuition necessary to enter the #TheoreticalNeuroscience / #MachineLearning field. Find out more & register for the information webinar 👉 www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...

The best cooking threads start with purchase of a refractometer www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/co...

New work from @mikeeconomo.bsky.social lab showing flexible engagement of motor cortex during dynamic motor control!

Very excited to share a new preprint - my first paper in the @mikeeconomo.bsky.social lab where we asked when and why the motor cortex is recruited for movement control:🧠👇https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.13.699314v1

Puccini and Toscanini had a stormy friendship. One Christmas, Puccini sent Toscanini a panettone, forgetting they had fallen out. Remembering later, he sent a telegram “PANETTONE SENT BY MISTAKE. PUCCINI”. He received a telegram back “PANETTONE EATEN BY MISTAKE. TOSCANINI”! 😂

Doing a PhD is - at heart - one long discussion with your mentor. The discussion changes over time - with unexpected turns and ups & downs - but through it all is a pair of people discussing a topic endlessly to make sense of it. PhD students: choose someone you like to talk to!

thinking of the introverted woman who said she's never felt FOMO. she's only felt ROMO (Relief Of Missing Out)

Great read. Too many people assume that the role of theory papers in neuro is to "explain neural data". I'm not even sure we can explain anything yet. Data is more like a muse for theory.

The Batman Effect, just published in NATURE: When an experimenter dressed as Batman boarded a train, passengers were significantly more likely to offer their seats to another “pregnant” experimenter than if Batman wasn’t present (67.21% vs. 37.66%) #SciComm 1/2 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

🔔 NEW PREPRINT FROM THE LAB ‼️ We introduce a new ML model, LoRAX, for predicting olfactory responses from chemical features, a tricky problem that benefits from progress in ML for biochem. We combine LoRA fine-tuning with protein and chemical foundation models, www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Today, we're announcing Kosmos, our newest AI Scientist, available today. Kosmos makes fully autonomous scientific discoveries at scale by analyzing datasets and literature, and is the most powerful agent for science so far. Beta users estimate that Kosmos does 6 months of work in a single day.

1. New preprint resolving a conundrum in systems neuroscience with an AI scientist, and humans Reilly Tilbury, Dabin Kwon, @haydari.bsky.social, @jacobmratliff.bsky.social, @bio-emergent.bsky.social, @carandinilab.net, @kevinjmiller.bsky.social, @neurokim.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

First published paper from the depaqlab, led by the supernatural @ryguy.io! Glad to add a new software resource to the neuro community for fitting SSMs, including hierarchical models and switching GLMs, and many others! If you love Julia and SSMs, this is for you!

“The bad review will come from your list of suggested reviewers”

What if we did a single run and declared victory

Ouch. This one cuts to the bone.

Chemists call for ban on generative AI for chemical structures: "serious errors could damag[e] the next generation of scientists" As ever, the problem seems to be not AI but lazy application of it and lack of checks. Whether _that_ problem is solvable... www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-che...

"the quickest way to get a collaborator to return edits on your manuscript is to write down their affiliation wrong" (ancient academic proverb)

Can one bring together Reinforcement learning and Drift Diffusion models to understand collective foraging ? Congrads to Jonathan Marienhagen , Lisa Blum Moyse and Dominik Deffner on this new study. Very happy that I was part of this collaboration. Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

PLOS Comput. Biol.: Stochastic activity in low-rank recurrent neural networks https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013371

“NeuroAI should not remain limited to learning statistical relationships, but should also help in building mechanistic and causal models of neural activity. These models will incorporate biological properties of neural circuits, including cellular characteristics and network properties.” 💯💯💯

New preprint from @darbly.bsky.social‬ @briandepasquale.bsky.social‬ and my labs! If you love (or hate) mosquitoes, have a look: doi.org/10.1101/2025... We used TEM to describe the circuitry used for CO2 detection by mosquitoes. As usual with mosquitoes, nothing is as expected! 🌬️🦟

Congrats to the 2025 cohort of McKnight Scholars! www.mcknight.org/news-ideas/2...

How do brain circuits evolve? We started looking for some answers by using synapse-resolution cross-species comparative connectomics on an entire olfactory circuit 👇 bit.ly/44aVm9E

Can #AI become a true scientist? @ninamiolane.bsky.social ‬explores how new technologies are reshaping scientific discovery, and why human expertise remains essential as we enter a new era of research powered by intelligent algorithms. 🧪‬ plos.io/4kZi0aB

Tired of your boring old DDM? Check out recent work by grad student @ryguy.io that introduces a *state-dependent* DDM using an underlying HMM. We find mice change their speed-accuracy strategy from trial to trial! Code provided! (in Julia of course!)