Congrats we just made it impossible to come here for a PhD www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/16/m...

really thinking about this tweet as i’ve been struggling to breathe through nausea for the last 5 hours

From a great collaboration with @lorenzoposani.com, @shuqiw.bsky.social, Samuel Muscinelli, Liam Paninski, now in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Should I still teach coding? I take pride in the biomedical signal processing class I have been teaching and refining since 2003. This is the first class where our engineering students learn to code with concrete problems to solve (60% of the grade). Should I still insist that they code themselves?

The global neuronal workspace (GNW) is currently the best documented neuroscience mechanism by which conscious processing arises in the human brain — and now Anthropic researchers have discovered a similar workspace inside their large language model ! www.anthropic.com/research/glo...

1. A bit of evolutionary biology. I'm really intrigued by a new perspective piece from Steve Frank that explores connections between how natural selection creates systems that generalize and recent work in machine learning about the surprising capabilities of massively overparameterized systems.

New open dataset out in Scientific Data 🚨 We are releasing BBBD: the Brain, Body, and Behavior Dataset. Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Work with @parralab.org

Free eBook: Patterns, predictions, and actions: A story about machine learning by Moritz Hardt, Benjamin Recht This graduate textbook on machine learning tells a story of how patterns in data support predictions and consequential actions. arxiv.org/abs/2102.05242

Excited to share this preprint from @ianoldenburg.bsky.social . To evoke movement with holo stim, you need the right pattern at the right time! Interestingly, the preparatory state before spont motion is not the same as the state permissive for evoked motion. Dig in! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

(1/n) Thrilled to share my first paper at Meta FAIR! "EgoBabyVLM: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Learning from Naturalistic Egocentric Video Data" 👶 Human infants learn language from sparse, noisy multimodal input. Today's VLMs can't. We built a benchmark + challenge to close that gap. 🧵

Updated preprint and code from my lab. If you want to explore more realistic neural dynamics in models that can still perform visual tasks, check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

5,843 terminated NIH grants. 110 canceled announcements. Courts ordering reinstatements. Political pre-issuance review in action. My take in MedPage Today. @medpagetoday.com www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/seco...

Excellent and thought-provoking essay by Ted Chiang. [gift link] www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

Neuron–astrocyte associative memory | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees. Amazing work by the bees who were put in these puzzling situations by @akshayebhambore.bsky.social in the lab of @olliloukola.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

ALRIGHT EVERYONE HERE IS THE OFFICIAL SUFS GUIDE TO LEAVING PUBLIC COMMENTS ON THE OMB-2026-0034 PROPOSED RULE: www.standupforscience.foundation/policy-and-advocacy/the-sufs-guide-to-writing-public-comments (share with all your friends!)

Incredible! Scientists receive a rare standing ovation after announcing that a new treatment can double the survival time for pancreatic cancer, the deadliest cancer which was once considered “undruggable.” When we fund and support science, we can achieve anything! (Video: Dr. Wish Dhillon)

What are the real problems to be solved in continual learning? In my latest post, I tackle this question — reviewing where I think the field went astray in the past, how language models changed things, and where the real challenges remain. infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/what-are-t...

🚨🚨New open resource for EEG researchers 🚨🚨 Want to work with neural synchrony and intersubject correlation of EEG? We released ready-to-use correlated components spatial filters for the 64-channel 10–20 montage.

This paper changed my mind on how visual processing works in the brain. We knew it was dynamic given all the recurrent connections. But I thought it would converge to a fixpoint during a fixation. Not so, it seems ... The dynamic captures different aspects of the stimulus at different times. Nice.

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

Now out in Nature Machine Intelligence @NatMachIntell “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust and shape-based AI vision”: doi.org/10.1038/s422.... A wonderful case where brain inspiration improved AI. With @martisamuser.bsky.social, Radek Cichy and @timkietzmann.bsky.social .

"Quality is a relic now. Nobody wants it. Nobody pays for it. Nobody measures it. The metric is velocity. The metric is how fast you can ship a 3,167-line function that burns a quarter million API calls daily and call it 100% AI-written." 🔥 techtrenches.dev/p/the-snake-...

Children exhibit visual understanding from limited experience, orders of magnitude less than our best models. We introduce the Zero-shot World Model (ZWM). Trained on a single child's visual experience, BabyZWM rapidly generates competence across diverse benchmarks with no task-specific training. 🧵

Extremely cool paper 😎 All elementary functions from a single binary operator arxiv.org/abs/2603.21852

A neurodevelopment-inspired warm-up strategy to address uncertainty calibration: networks are briefly trained on random noise and labels before exposure to real data, leading to well-calibrated confidence and strong detection of unknown inputs. Cool results! #NeuroAI www.nature.com/articles/s42...

French government switching to #linux 🇫🇷❤️🐧 "2026 is set to be l’année de Linux." 😅👌 magnifique! share.google/xHwAIaMQuFzz...

For #NSF and #NIH watchers, Grant Witness now has interactive data on numbers of grants and total funding obligations, broken down by institute and directorate, new awards and non-competitive renewals. The stranglehold on new awards is still a disaster. grant-witness.us/funding_curv...

NEW preprint with @stephen-ramanoel.bsky.social and @mobilebrainimaging.bsky.social 🎉 In this final study of my PhD, we combined immersive virtual reality with mobile EEG and gait analysis during a path integration task, recording from 30 young and 32 older adults www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

after much deliberation and giving AI the benefit of the doubt, Wikipedia editors have had enough of AI slop. New policy bans LLM generated content, periodt www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

My NIH update Let me start by saying again how glad I am that NIH is now posting these curves on the Reporter front page. It is satisfying that leading by example from outside has led to this change and (I hope) reflects a commitment for NIH_leadership™ to hold itself accountable for this. 1/6

🎉 Excited to share our publication in PNAS! 🎉 What happens when our stream of consciousness turns towards the body? Our fMRI study of 536 individuals finds that 'body-wandering' is associated with patterns of brain connectivity, physiology, affect, and mental health: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

"We present The AI Scientist, which creates research ideas, writes code, runs experiments, plots and analyses data, writes the entire scientific manuscript..." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Humans happen to have the same problem... pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32483374/ Conclusion : AI is human? 🤪😱🤦

In case you missed it-- check out our Paper Skygest preprint! ⤵️

Is there a single "interoceptive sense"? Our new study in @commspsychol.nature.com says: probably not. In 241 participants, cardiac and respiratory interoception were completely uncorrelated — only subjective confidence was shared across domains. www.nature.com/articles/s44... #psychscisky 🧪

New @bodybrainbehaviour.bsky.social preprint, and this is a big one for the lab: @teresaberther.bsky.social did the deepest of dives into #gut-brain coupling with MEG and HD gastrography. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A brief 🧵on our first trip into this corner of #brain-body #neuroskyence:

Russell Vought's OMB is continuing to hold up funds at NIH. www.medpagetoday.com/publichealth...

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

NEW from the #KempnerInstitute: InputDSA, a tool to separate intrinsic dynamics from input-driven effects—enabling accurate, efficient comparisons of complex systems with external inputs. Read the #DeeperLearning blog post by @annhuang42.bsky.social & @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social: bit.ly/4bkrvy9

RIP redundancy reduction? Beautiful work by Liu & colleagues showing that neural redundancy increases with learning, as predicted by a Bayesian model: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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

NEW: #Kempner researchers develop a mean-field theory of task-trained RNNs that bridges random and learned connectivity—and find macaque motor cortex is best captured by an intermediate, task-specific recurrent structure. Read the blog post 👇 🔗 bit.ly/47f3Ldl

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10

The impact is already hitting science agencies hard. The NIH—the world's largest public biomedical research funder—has had to rely on leftover stopgap funds. New grant awards have slowed to a trickle — exacerbating the effects of a record-long shutdown in October. (h/t @jeremymberg.bsky.social)

😂😂😂😂

"Post-Learning Offline Pauses Support Consolidation Beyond the Mind-Wandering State" www.preprints.org/manuscript/2...