🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

wow scientists have located you in the lower left of this UMAP plot of spinal-cord excitatory neurons

there should be time cis-regulatory elements that bend the time helix to allow two distant regions to interact

"the reconstructed microbiome of the Shroud [of Turin]" is now a phrase in the corpus www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

isn't it kinda weird how sometimes you can tell there's a typo in a chunk of text but initially can't consciously pin down where it is?

>: (

working on my agent harness

per Rogers et al. 2026, social isolation turns mammals into good fathers; per Farinha et al. 2026, "parental rejection is associated with extended lifespan in owl monkeys in captivity." there's some kind of latent shakespearean drama here

i was trying to reconfirm the "correct" pronunciation of "Ralph Fiennes" the other day and stumbled across his third cousin once removed Ranulph Fiennes, who fought for the sultan of Oman, "was the first person to…completely cross Antarctica on foot", and cut off his own fingertips with a saw

i can't really justify this but i have the intuition that lots of things could be, like, 10-15% better (more goodness per unit cost) without but it would take an annoying upfront coordination effort, which would be worth it, but it's hard to motivate anyone cuz it's just 10-15%

correspondent on cnn portugal: these missiles can't reach portugal but *faint smile* they CAN reach spain

anyone have a good "workflow" or approach for getting a claude to filter incoming preprints/papers that might be of interest to you?

nominative determinism?

9yo decided to make lunch and described it as a "Daddy-coded feast", which apparently just means putting a bag of snap peas on the table

this but for bluesky

is this anything?

Oh to be a little Tardigrade walking across a microscope slide. 🫧🐻🧪

Oh wow, new work on one of the sites long claimed to show early peopling of the Americas challenges early dates. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

(memory triggered by twitter searches) last i checked, the oldest surviving sentence written in an alphabetic script was this comb inscription about getting rid of lice

i should have a thread of sweeping yet flat-affect sentences from academic paper intros

personally i always feel kind of jealous of dinergoths. they've got it all figured out!

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species) he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

have you learned the Umami Lesson anon

guy who says he's getting into "chinese peptides" but means endogenous opioids (in this scenario the guy is chinese)

half-baked thought: the tyler cowen podcast "project" is kind of his meditation on whether, in the absence of cross-domain transfer learning, all intellectual pursuits, maybe all human pursuits of "excellence" period, are just so many silly little fandoms

moral heatmap meme but it's decrying people with anti-squirrel bird feeders. imagine betraying our euarchontoglires brethren in favor of some jumped-up lizards

who the heck decided to call confusing fossils "problematica" and not "remains, poorly understood"

no, it's fine, i just…didn't know it would be Saudi

This is why we love #CalciumSignaling Look how mechanical damage triggers long range Ca2+ waves in this plant !! By @annalisabellandi.bsky.social, who is now around here ;) Full www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @science.org #microscopy #cell #mechanobiology 🧪🔬

"Here, I quantify the unique contribution of cultural evolution by comparing the global human range to mammalian ranges…I show that achieving the human range would require about 88 My of lineage divergence, over 2,200 species, and a nearly four-order-of-magnitude range in body mass."

i think there's a general point here, which is that people seem really miscalibrated about what skills & knowledge others will just "pick up" ambiently and effortlessly as they go through life. i think it's really not many things

it's too late, i've already depicted your brain as a mop in a bucket

having recently read some Great Expectations and Oliver Twist to my daughter, i'm mad again at the discourse about that one Dickens passage that was supposedly not "difficult". there are multiple things per sentence that trip up a present-day reader!! don't pretend there aren't!!

i haven't gotten around to looking at the new David Reich paper but i feel like i could have scooped him if i had just finished this frickin' sentence in my notes. d'oh!!

tfw you keep trying to push your A keycap back on

whoa, the rare ancient DNA single-author paper!

"Recent neuroimaging work suggests that the primate ventral visual stream is organized according to a 2D object space, defined by two axes, namely animate-inanimate and stubby-spiky."

visual 👏 metaphor

mogged in a powerful, unexpected way by my kid's friend's father: me: you know how there's that french book that doesn't use the letter E? him: yes. by Georges Perec i think! me: that sounds right…i think it was translated to english at some point… him: yes. by a friend of mine

12-year-olds are in my house right now karaoke-ing to, of all things, Regina Spektor

people love demanding to know who farted, but i don't see how they will benefit from having the answer

i love talking to my own kids, and i think i'm above-average-comfortable with talking to other people's kids, but something about hearing kids *talking to each other* makes me want to jump into a wood chipper

i'm sorry, "kissing bugs" carry a parasite that "can damage the heart…leading to heart failure"?! and they are part of the "assassin bug" family??

"We show that directional migration rates can be inferred via linear regression on time-dependent genetic dissimilarity between populations" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is an awesome discovery: A single-celled organism with no brain called Stentor seems capable of Pavlovian learning. Yes, it can actually learn to associate two things despite having no neurons. My latest for @newscientist.com. 🧪 #science #memory #learning www.newscientist.com/article/2519...

Narratively having Ever Given getting stuck in 2021 to set up Hormuz in 2026 is great foreshadowing. You want your audience to understand the basics of international shipping in a lower stakes context so you drop the real plot without a lot of saggy exposition about the minutiae of cargo logistics.

Defuddle now returns Youtube transcripts! Paste a YouTube link into defuddle·md to get a markdown transcript with timestamps, chapters, and pretty good diarization ...or if you just want to read it, try the new Reader mode in @obsidian.md Web Clipper powered by Defuddle

Panic! at the Cartesian Theater

tag yourself

"the American Beefalo cattle breed…developed in the 1970s and defined as a hybrid between American bison…and cattle" → "most Beefalo did not contain detectable bison ancestry. No individual Beefalo within our data set satisfies the ancestry requirements specified by the" American Beefalo Association