in my view the UK needs to grow up, move to a proportional representation voting system which will favour more sensible politics, cross fingers for a leader with some vision and spine, who can face down the far right threat and reintegrate with the EU Anything less will hasten the country's decline

🧵 1/10 There is a lot of "the EU won't want us back" in reaction to the statements made by Streeting and Burnham. As someone who has some experience of working closely with European diplomatic colleagues, and still has friends in Europe, I would say it is quite easy to construct the case for why

🪰 How does a fly see so well while moving so fast? @neveenmansour.bsky.social and colleagues show that, through a process they termed synaptic high-frequency jumping, flies can transmit visual information at bandwidths up to ~1000 hz during rapid movement! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

one of my favourite memories from living in the US is the "chicken of the sea" tuna brand you can picture the marketing team who dreamt it up under a deadline wife and I still quote it regularly while cackling with laughter

v thoughtful piece on one of the GOAT comp neuro papers The only point I would add is that it is also incredibly (and unusually for its sub-field) clearly written. The clarity is imo a big part of the reason it was so influential, and remains an underestimated aspect of scientific paper writing.

“Autism subtypes identified using cross-species functional connectivity analyses” Excellent work by @gozziale.bsky.social and colleagues, now out in @natneuro.nature.com 🧪🧠🧬 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

ArXiV has a new LLM policy (Screenshots with alt text so you don’t have to click through to the other place and see all the stupid responses)

The good taxpayers of New York have given me a pair of Meta glasses because I am low vision disabled, and I seem to have used them more than a lot of people on here, so let me say a little about my experiences:

Nature research paper: Efficient robot navigation inspired by honeybee learning flights go.nature.com/48Zo7Zb

Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain? Out today in @nature.com, we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster - but at a cost. Read on👇 #neuroskyence 🧪 #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics Shareable link: rdcu.be/fiyrS

UKRI urged to be ‘transparent’ after adopting grant lotteries. Funder’s quiet introduction of randomisation option across opportunities prompts questions, plus support for “innovative” action. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

1/ Check out our new modeling paper on predictive learning in the hippocampus! 🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A central idea in neuroscience is that the brain makes sense of the world by learning to predict its environment 🧠➡️🌍.

This letter is incredibly unusual for a ministerial resignation in that it actually spells out in plain English why Phillips is resigning, and why she thinks Starmer should go. With worked examples. Genuinely quite refreshing.

Our first endeavour in jointly explaining human brain-behaviour through gameplay! An impressive effort led by @botoscsabi.bsky.social and @sreejan.bsky.social with the help of a team of collaborators! Parer: arxiv.org/abs/2605.08019

For your Monday, here's one of the JWST Deep Field images. This is a portion of the sky about one-fifth the size of a full Moon. And it contains THOUSANDS of galaxies—some of which extend back to when the Universe was a couple of billion years old. The redder a galaxy, the farther away it is.

Very excited to have this officially published: A neural state space for episodic memories A brief thread... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪 @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

Musk brings court case about OpenAI moving away from non profit status but correspondence shows he was in favour of doing this if ‘he was the controlling shareholder or allowed to merge it with his car company, Tesla.’ 👍 www.ft.com/content/c68b...

New paper from the lab! "Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Science progresses one funeral at a time" - Samuelson

"Retirement norms in academia should also be re-evaluated, the team says. The researchers found that after a 1994 change in US law that ended up prohibiting universities from mandating retirement by a certain age, papers began relying on older references."

Experienced researchers are less likely to produce ‘disruptive’ science than are those just starting their careers, finds an analysis of the scientific papers published by 12.5 million researchers over 60 years. go.nature.com/4uUvMk3

2014 REF: 2026: closing UG History

RE: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/t...

I remember hearing a statistical modelling/systems neuroscience talk circa 2010 which opened with the claim that "the goal of systems neuroscience is to predict what each neuron in the visual cortex does in response to a visual stimulus". Which totally jolted my physics-trained theory neuro brain

Whenever you think that Kemi Badenoch can't do worse, she still surprises you. After 54 years the ship has sailed, but murder should have been prosecuted, no matter who the murderers are.

"...relative to how it much it costs to have a human do one inference query" v human. Looking forward to inference querying with my buddies in the pub later

while I was postdoc at the Salk institute I met an older man in San Diego, he told me polio ravaged his generation. When he was a young solider about to ship to Vietnam he visited Salk institute while a drinks reception was going on, someone pointed out Jonas Salk to him & he burst into tears of joy

I teach this in my IP law class b/c when asked in an interview who owned the patent, Salk replied: "Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" He looked for vaccine solutions his entire life…including a quest for a vaccine to prevent HIV from becoming AIDS.

Indeed... arxiv.org/abs/2604.23903

longer I'm doing science the more baffled I am by scientific trends. Names go in and out of fashion often for... no obvious reason. When I was doing my PhD in late 00's AI was an embarrassingly cringe word. Machine learning otoh was cool, new, shiny. Then it became deep learning. Now it's AI again?

So much insight squeezed into this hour, a great episode. Do not miss the supplemental chat at the end where cybernetics is shown to be a victim of a) its own success (many fields are effectively cybernetics w/o the name), b) its socialist associations, c) of bad blood between Minsky and Wiener.

New paper out in J. Neuro! We used MEG and pattern classifiers to ask: if a memory is reactivated in the brain, does that mean you'll recall it? Short answer: no. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1... Read on for the details! [1/7] #neuroscience #memory

Some useful public speaking tips from Freud here.

Understanding the Genetics of Autism www.brainfacts.org/diseases-and... - a primer I wrote for @brainfacts.org to try and counter the pseudoscience around autism by explaining what we actually know about the (complex) genetics of the condition

Good on ya, ERC, reversing the recent changes to resubmission eligibility. But the ERC's budget needs to increase, it is overwhelmed — systematically rejecting great applicants. *And* we need more alternatives, getting an ERC is becoming life or death for researchers in certain fields/countries

Smell is topographically organized after all. A spatial code governs olfactory receptor choice and aligns sensory maps in the nose and brain: Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

This will be a wonderful inspiration for President Trump who will be happy to gift back all that he’s earned in office to the people of America …Hang on, I’m getting some new information in my earpiece

"there is no more authoritative source on what autism is than the perspectives of autistic people" Here's my belated response to Professor Dame Uta Frith's TES interview in which, among other things, the concept of masking is described as having "no scientific basis" medium.com/@suefletcher...

Super excited to (finally!) show our work on identifying cell types! Now in press www.nature.com/articles/s41.... We show how to identify cell types from ephys recordings *without* optotagging. This opens the study of not just individual cell types, but the interacting neural circuit during behavior

necesarry

Since ChatGPT came online in late 2022, grant application numbers across 12 UK and EU funding bodies have increased by *57%*. For MSCA fellowships the number is *+142%*. I do believe that what we’re doing is insane and that we need to stop doing it IMMEDIATELY. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Fish absolutely going to WIN the next decade of systems of neuroscience

🧠Introducing OmniMouse: One of the largest datasets in neuroscience along with a systematic study of scaling properties of brain models Co-led by 🤩 K. Willeke, @pollytur.bsky.social and @alexrgil14.bsky.social Models trained on up to 3M neurons, >150B tokens

For those interested in memory, engrams, and how scientific ideas and career trajectories evolve over time, I recommend this personal perspective by @sjo09.bsky.social (even though I'm pretty sure I missed many of the Taylor Swift references). www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1...

Long post but well worth the read. I think there are a lot of deep lessons here for how AI will affect science research, not just maths Bessis argues that the aspects of maths research that AI automates will become devalued in the community, and the human creative parts will become more celebrated

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

Feels like this paper on protein-templated DNA synthesis by a natural enzyme warrants some comment. So here's a 🧵. /1 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s Read the full story: go.nature.com/4v4rxmQ