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!)

90% of doing science is being open to new ideas.

Unsurprising, but nevertheless tragic. Makes it very hard for integrators and multidisciplinarians to exist in academia. #academicsky

Hivemind, what's the best approach/tool to aggregate neural data across sessions (and animals) in dimensionality reduction analyses, particularly when it's not known how overlapping the pool of neurons are over different sessions?

"The core strategy is to slow NIH spending to generate surpluses...then use surpluses as justification for slashing the budget...unspent [$] won’t be because NIH doesn’t have good science to spend on [but] because the administration has blocked spending" donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...

Using pretrained vision-language models to align neural signals from different modalities: arxiv.org/pdf/2407.14020 Cool stuff, though I would still love to see if we could align different neural modalities without the pretrained VLMs... 🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

“Science is a smart, low cost investment. The costs of not investing in it are higher than the risk of doing so… talk to people about science.” - @kevinochsner.bsky.social makes his case to the field #sans2025

First big new @simonsfoundation.org neuroscience collaboration launches - exciting!! The product of a HUGE competition among the best minds and teams. Congrats to this group: www.simonsfoundation.org/neuroscience...

Olfactory neuroscientists have known for a while that their stimuli stink. A new analysis illuminates the extent of the problem. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/olfaction/sm...

Cool project led by Victor Geadah, fitting smoothly time-varying (and condition-varying) linear dynamical systems to neural activity. arxiv.org/abs/2502.18347

I feel compelled to acknowledge the dread and dismay that many international students in the US are feeling at the moment - we see you, even if we feel rather powerless for now. Here's the very first visa stamp on my Indian passport ~40 years ago to come to UW Seattle for an MS in Bioengineering.

📣 Grad students and postdocs in computational and theoretical neuroscience: please consider applying for the 2025 Flatiron Institute Junior Theoretical Neuroscience Workshop! All expenses are covered. Apply by April 14. jtnworkshop2025.flatironinstitute.org

@petersenpeter.bsky.social @jakhmack.bsky.social @sejdevries.bsky.social @bingbrunton.bsky.social @jeremymagland.bsky.social @briandepasquale.bsky.social @maryamshanechi.bsky.social +others not on sky: David Kleinfeld , Tim Gardner, Maryam Shanechi, Carlos Ponce, Eli Schlizerman, Edgar Walker,...

Can we get more of this? “The Japanese American National Museum will ‘scrub nothing,’ Fujioka said, and instead will highlight the importance of DEI. “Our community is based on diversity, equity is guaranteed to us in the Constitution, and inclusion is what we believe in,” Fujioka said.

Lots of excellent advice in this piece. The core message - only through writing do you really think and order your thoughts into logical sense. Makes a case for not using AI for 1st draft because you bypass the thinking step www.nature.com/articles/s41... @naturebiotech.bsky.social #PlantScience

Got for it! But be warned — I’m sensitive to initial conditions!

Already feeling #cosyne2025 withdrawal? Apply to the Flatiron Institute Junior Theoretical Neuroscience Workshop! Applications due April 14th jtnworkshop2025.flatironinstitute.org

#cosyne2025 GNN workshop w/ @neurokim.bsky.social was a huge success! For those looking to stay in touch, see GitHub repo for workshop docs, including our tutorial github.com/depasquale-l...!

This is an utterly amazing paper.

"I contend what you are doing is against the rights I have as a citizen of this country." #tdih 1944 Frank S. Emi interrogated when he refused WWII draft while imprisoned (Exec. Order 9066) as a Japanese American by US gov't. Convicted of conspiracy. Read ⬇️ www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/fr...

@cosynemeeting.bsky.social Also! Don’t miss a 💡 insightful tutorial on GNNs for connectomics analysis tomorrow at the workshop! Details here: sites.google.com/bu.edu/gnnwo...

@cosynemeeting.bsky.social #wheresmikelong

Rounding out our speakers @cosynemeeting.bsky.social GNN workshop is @dom-beaini.bsky.social of @mila-quebec.bsky.social and @valenceai.bsky.social. Come hear him tell us how to learn a…MOLECULE! Don’t forget brains 🧠 are made of chemicals ⚗️ and chemicals + graphs = 🫶

More 🔥🔥 speakers at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social GNN workshop: @ninamiolane.bsky.social who runs the @geometric-intel.bsky.social lab at UCSB. She will take us beyond 🚀🚀 GNNs, presenting a survey of message passing topological neural networks for neuroscience

@cosynemeeting.bsky.social workshops are almost here! Join GNN workshop w @neurokim.bsky.social and Sam Lewallen to hear @herrsaalfeld.bsky.social head of computation @hhmijanelia.bsky.social present on GNNs for learning structure and function underlying neural assemblies #cosyne2025

T-3 days to #cosyne2025 GNN workshop! Join us to hear Gal Mishne of UCSD talk about graph based methods for learning dynamic functional connectivity. Gal has done a TON of great foundational work on graph based approaches to data analysis in neuroscience — not to be missed!