also applies to academia.

The principle I go by is to treat every person like a person. You never know who will be successful, nor do you know who will become a dear friend. So just be kind and engaged. The only people who hate being treated as normal are nightmares. Not clicking with them is a secret bonus.

Friendly neighborhood biologist here. I see a lot of people are talking about biological sexes right now. Lots of folks make biological sex seem really simple. Well, since it’s so simple, let’s find the biological roots, shall we? Let’s talk about sex...[a thread] (Reposted from the other site)

Mp3 players fucking rock we fucked up so bad putting everything on phone

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A

Japan is joining Horizon Europe, the EU’s flagship research and innovation programme. Openness and international cooperation can shape a bright future for science and technology. Through science, we can build bridges, strengthen competitiveness, and accelerate the green and digital transitions.

Includes me exposing the myth that Cambridge somehow earned its way into its leadership position in UK life sciences. It didn't. Leeds was in the lead, and then the Medical Research Council in London picked Cambridge and London as winners because it was their mates.

I went to a dinner with the AI Minister and I read a paper on Lovelace Institue --- a proposal from Tony Blair's Institute on how we could fund breakthrough science better. And I wrote that all up into one incoherent mess for you to enjoy. tomforth.co.uk/nationalpurp...

Lovely time today at the 2nd All-Ireland Computational Neuroscience Symposium at Queens U Belfast. It's a small but growing community on the island. imo the talks were all genuinely great and I'm really excited for the future Round 3 back in Dublin next August apparently if anyone wants to join! ☘️🧠

I think it's also important to recognize that LLM "summaries" are not epistemically grounded in the ideas of the source material. When they're correct, it's more because *other* writing (in the training corpus) contains similar language. That makes it especially bad when applied to novel results.

Bichan Wu (@bichanw.bsky.social) & I wrote a tutorial paper on Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) — the statistical method underlying "communication subspaces" from Semedo et al 2019 — aimed at neuroscientists. arxiv.org/abs/2512.12467

Fully-funded International Neuroscience Doctoral Programme🧠 Champalimaud Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal 🇵🇹 Deadline: Jan 31, 2026 fchampalimaud.org/champalimaud... Research program spans systems/computational/theoretical/clinical/sensory/motor neuroscience, neuroethology, intelligence, and more!!

New paper for #neurips2025! AI models adjust millions of internal settings to get better at a task. But how are these adjustments determined? For decades, we've mostly figured this out through trial & error. We took a different approach...🧵 (1/6) 🔗 openreview.net/forum?id=oMi...

Would repost this a million times if I could! It‘s the entitlement inherent to many of these complaints that makes them so hard to take seriously.

“Basic neuroscience hasn’t produced new drugs.” 💊 Not true - zuranolone (PPD), suzetrigine (pain), gepants (migraine), and more... were born out of a long arc of studies in the lab. I wrote a Perspective on why this matters. @thetransmitter.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/drug-develop...

Come for the great overview of dimensionality reduction, stay for the funky visualisations

🧠🪰 The adult Drosophila brain connectome now gives us a complete wiring diagram of ~140k neurons. But a wiring diagram alone isn’t understanding. How is this massive network organized? Our paper tackles that question by mapping community structure across the entire fly brain. 1/

I still don't get this. The journal is asking for my opinion, not GenAI's. We don't even get any public credit for doing reviews... it's as close to a thankless task as you can get in academic research. So if someone don't have time to do a review solo, then why not just decline?

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

"The board is implied. If you show the board, you limit the imagination. If you don’t show the board, anyone could be playing Mastermind at any time. In a limo. In a bunker. On a yacht while plotting the downfall of a minor principality."

The ZSL Scientific Medal is also awarded to Professor Stephen Montgomery, @bristolbiosci.bsky.social whose research has provided insights into the relationships between ecological niche specialisation, brain structure, and cognitive function 🏅 @ebablab.bsky.social

GWAS has been an incredible discovery tool for human genetics: it regularly identifies *causal* links from 1000s of SNPs to any given trait. But mechanistic interpretation is usually difficult. Our latest work on causal models for this is out yesterday: www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short🧵:

Artificial hibernation uncovers distinct synaptic engram architecture for memory retention https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.09.692927v1

The point is that most papers we all write are incremental -- based on well established methods and ideas -- and have an audience of subfield experts. These are judged by expert colleagues when they read the work. These don't, in my view, need traditional peer review.

Peer review is important and useful but we should focus our efforts on a small number of papers that matter (making big claims, using new approaches) and let the vast majority of work live on a preprint server to be judged by their utility over time to domain experts.

Impact of demographic change in one image.

great metaphor for how LLMs work in general... taking shortcuts based on a bad world model due to it forming a close-but-not-quite right projection of real world data

Another new paper from the lab: Predictive theories like the SR imply that navigators who navigate differently should have cognitive maps which differ in predictable ways. Here we show that this holds in mouse hippocampal CA1. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Connectomics is Method of the Year 2025!! @natmethods.nature.com just released the news nature.com/articles/s41... In my perspective piece, I afford some predictions into the future and compare how we are doing vs. genomics www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Soapbox time: the problem with metabolic efficiency arguments in neuroscience is that they often confuse energy efficiency with energy expenditure. Biological systems are optimized for energy efficiency, but that does NOT imply they are optimized for low energy expenditure 🧵 1/

Both paper and thread are worth a read 👇

anecdotally I feel this applies to lots of industries where there is an over supply of enthusiasts relative to the stable job pool: yes academia but also fashion, creative work, art, even breweries

totally familiar emotional reaction of wanting to fall to the ground when something disappointing happens... but why?

I don't believe Irish military neutrality is viable any more. There are bad state-level actors across the world, our global tech infrastructure is critical to society but also extremely vulnerable to modern hybrid and low-cost attack methods.

Quite breathtaking story - military grade drones at Dublin airport which flew on the path Zelensky's plane took. The drones reached the flight path of his plane exactly the time it should have been there, but just missed it because Zelensky arrived ahead of schedule:

Finally got the job ad—looking for 2 PhD students to start spring next year: www.gao-unit.com/join-us/ If comp neuro, ML, and AI4Neuro is your thing, or you just nerd out over brain recordings, apply! I'm at neurips. DM me here / on the conference app or email if you want to meet 🏖️🌮

Great minds, fools, etc.: neurodojo.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-...

all academic applications should have consolation prizes. doesn’t have to be much, like a mug that says “i applied for leverhulme 2020” or a t-shirt “UKRI reject 2023”

Move over RPE, hello FoMO... such a great seminar today by visitor @lauragrima.bsky.social who told us about her joint experimental-computational work on mouse foraging behaviour in *naive learning* contexts using RL, feat. cool novel role for dopamine. Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A beautiful summary of our paper! Thank you @neurosock.bsky.social

around 12 years ago I had the good fortune to meet Massimo Scanziani and told him about my ongoing postdoc project that I was preparing a manuscript on, his first question was "what is the central message of your paper?" That one prompt changed the way I write papers forever

I taught (and co-taught) a course on human population genetics from 2000-2024. Having retired, I'm now making all the course materials public: github.com/alanrogers/p... #popgen #evbio

I chatted with Evan McLoughlin on The Giant's Shoulder podcast about the flaws that undermine claims of a link between autism and the microbiome cc @statsepi.bsky.social @deevybee.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie0S...

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

Terrific work led by @emmaroscow.bsky.social showing that hippocampal replay reflects events with large prediction errors, all the better to bootstrap learning as we slumber Congratulations to Matt Jones & Nathan Lepora for seeing this through to the end! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I have learned that in machine learning sparsity is measured as 'fraction of zeros', as in sparsity=0.9 means very sparse. Whereas in neuroscience sparsity is measured as 'fraction of non-zeros', so sparsity=0.1 would be very sparse not sure what to do with this discovery but there you go

“It’s giving mechanistic insight into how estrogen modulates reinforcement learning—all the way down to the molecular mechanism,” says Ilana Witten. By @avaskham.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/sex-hormones...

Flu carnage here. 1/3 of my kid's nursery class are off, hearing similar things in other local schools. Primary kids here get a free, in-school flu vaccine but the uptake is far from 100% 😞

this is mesmerizing

This is £600m from the same university sector that is pretty close to collapse in a growing number of major institutions? Many of them universities that are among the biggest employers in the very ‘left behind’ towns and cities that Labour talks so much about…