Thanks ChatGPT, I feel better now...

Why do humans have linguistic intuition? And why should you care? A short thread about my new paper in @cadlin.bsky.social This work has the most original insight I've ever had, a genuinely new idea about the nature of language cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/ca... 1/20

Who wants to collaborate on an academic publication about my tune-identification AI?

Thank God for Bluesky: A little love letter to the people who would not compromise with Nazis iandunt.substack.com/p/thank-god-...

Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

Haven’t read the full article yet, but this is a big deal if true! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture. They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

Do you think you could remember the exact rain texture that opens “Riders on the Storm”? We showed that the answer may be a surprising “yes” – at least in some circumstances. Check our new work with @Bastug, @Rajendran, @Agus @Chait @Pressnitzer doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

My art is not "AI slop" I am very proud of this artwork, based on my own watercolors and drawings. It IS scientifically accurate, based directly on the work of the great comparative neuroanatomist Glenn Northcutt (and inspired by Georg Striedter's wonderful book). ChatGPT did the styling only...

Delighted to share our latest research on consonance. We asked participants from India and UK to rate how “tense” different harmonic intervals sound. We found that musicians across both cultures agreed almost perfectly on which intervals feel tense or relaxed, however, ....

I wish I could impress upon my students that "agree" or "disagree" are not the only two options for engaging with, or responding to, a piece of philosophy that tells you something about the world or about how experience is had. You don't need to agree with a thing for it to tell you something.

Replication Research (R2), a diamond open access journal, has joined our growing list of PCI-friendly journals 🎉 Learn more about them here is.gd/r2_journal #PsychSciSky #SciPub

While journal publishing has always been deeply problematic, hurting both the pace and trajectory of science, something is happening in this moment that is finally causing the system to crumble under its own weight and cost. 1/

Amos Goldberg is an Israeli professor of Holocaust history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He teaches Holocaust and genocide history. When does Goldberg think the genocide began? In April 2024, Goldberg concluded that Israel was committing genocide … www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-...

Cool new @PeerCommunityIn.ecoevo.social.ap.brid.gy recommendation by @alexmesoudi.com of an article on melodic evolution by @johnmcbride4lyf.bsky.social et al. evolbiol.peercommunityin.org/articles/rec...

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

From today, all new submissions to Nature that are published will be accompanied by referees’ reports and author responses — to illuminate the process of producing rigorous science https://go.nature.com/4kIRR01

Paper is finally up and open access (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...), it's a sequel to an earlier paper where we'd argued that there's not good evidence that pre-publication peer review is a net benefit (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/...). So in this one we suggest an alternative.

✨We are organising (again) an online workshop on Theoretical Modeling for PhD candidates and Master students in cognitive science and psychology. Check out the website and the schedule: Registration is open! (closes July 1, spaces are limited) 🧵1/n computationalcognitivescience.github.io/workshop/

I joined bsky as a scientist, not as an activist, but I feel compelled to share this video essay on the genocidal nature of the war in Gaza. I support the right of Israel to exist, and I commiserate with my Israeli friends on the brutal horrors of Oct 7. But this brutal war must stop, now.

We who study the philosophy/sociology/science of science etc. have an obligation to explain the true gold standard. It's not a checklist that makes a result impeccable, but rather the development of consensus among experts through nuanced interpretation of multiple (imperfect) sources of data.

A great article by @hormiga.bsky.social scienceforeveryone.science/p/the-power-...

If true (which I have no idea about) bluesky should stop it.

This is unfathomable... The UN must intervene, all governments and organizations who can, must intervene and deliver large scale humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Our Programmatic Stage 1 Registered Report exploring cross-cultural consistency in song-speech relationships ("Many Voices 3") received In Principle Acceptance from @pci-regreports.bsky.social! Recommendation & public reviews: rr.peercommunityin.org/articles/rec... Manuscript: osf.io/c2dba (1/4)

Are dance & infant-directed song human universals? Like many people, I've long thought so. But in a new paper in Current Biology, Kim Hill & I report that the Northern Aché (Paraguay) lacked both behaviors, likely losing them after cultural collapse. Open-access link: www.cell.com/current-biol...

"De novo prediction of protein structural dynamics" I'll be presenting an overview of the field tomorrow at a workshop. Link to a PDF copy of the presentation: delalamo.xyz/assets/post_...

Looks interesting @johnmcbride4lyf.bsky.social and others interested in scale tunings www.cell.com/current-biol...

Work with Steven Brown and Elizabeth Phillips: They annotated by ear an impressive set of ~400 scales from vocal music across the world. I used algorithms to get accurate estimates of scale degrees in cents. Cool stuff! Data is all available here: zenodo.org/records/1060... Will release code later

Our beautiful birds of prey are routinely and illegally slaughtered on driven grouse moors . If you are as sick of this criminal persecution as me then please sign this ⁦‪@wildjustice.bsky.social petition petition.parliament.uk/petitions/70... Please RT

My latest work, out in Nature Physics. This takes the prize for longest project I've been involved in (although I joined late), slightly beating the 6 years that my work on the evolution of musical scales took. summary: tools from physics may pinpoint hotspots in proteins that are key to dynamics

Cultural differences and similarities in animals sounds: cats [miau] in almost all languages, but pigs [ojŋk], [røf], [ʔut it]... pudding.cool/2025/03/lang...

Anyone want to listen to music from protein sequences (technically NMR data)? I was wondering when I would get round to integrating my protein and music evolution research themes, but it looks like someone else has got there first! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Bluesky tip for newbies: Bluesky has no real algorithm. Likes here do nothing but show the poster that you enjoyed their content. That kindness is always going to be appreciated by creators, but if you want to help to boost something here, you have to repost it so others see it. 🙂

Join the 2nd Meeting of the Vienna Network of Music & Cognition Research (ViNoMaRe)! Connect with researchers, explore new perspectives on music, and get inspired through talks, discussions, and more! 📅 June 6, 2025 | 17:30 📍 CEU, Vienna @weareceu.bsky.social Register: forms.office.com/e/HUUQuXSsuR

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.” Absurd we still need to go through this 🧪👩‍🔬

As a physicist, I am excited to share my first publication in a musicology journal! With my collaborator @alex-cooke.bsky.social at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Ryan Buechele, and a then-physics and music major at CWRU and now an OSU physics PhD student. ⚛️🧪 🧵 (1/7)

Foldseek-Multimer—now published in @naturemethods.bsky.social—our fast multimer search tool, enables complex comparisons against the full PDB in seconds. It comes with BFMD, a collection of 300K+ predictions gathered from community projects. 📄 nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐 search.foldseek.com

Typically when I speak to people about peer review, everyone acknowledges the problems, but they typically assign some sort of value to the peer review process. How often do you think a review (received or written by you) has improved a paper? For me, I'd guess a ballpark around 25%

Do whales optimize their vocalizations for efficiency, just like human language? 🐋🎶 My latest study in Science Advances (@science.org) suggests they do—following linguistic laws seen in human speech. 🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Hope you'll forgive a quick thread as I take over as the new EiC of @elife.bsky.social

All I'm saying, @royalsociety.org, is that your one of your Fellows giving Nazi salutes is never going to be a good look for you.

Bad. But how bad? I once asked myself, while finding fakes in the Scientific Report @natureportfolio.bsky.social. So I decide to "do my our research" - I took 100 articles in a row from Physical sciences that contains diffraction. Result - 15 fakes out 100. Details in the 🧵 #ResearchIntegrity 1/x

"We believe that a “publish first, curate second” approach would be a strong alternative: authors decide when & what to publish; peer review reports are published, either anonymously or with attribution & curation occurs after publication, incorporating community feedback and expert judgement"

It's a bit odd that musical aptitude is commonly measured by asking listeners whether two musical sequences are the same. That's not something musicians do very often! If you'd like to instead measure melody/rhythm reproduction we've made open-source tests in Javascript/HTML: tinyurl.com/musRepro

So many people confuse LLMs (or genAI, in general) for models of human cognition, language, learning, etc., so I thought it may be useful to share once more my brief comment, titled "Psychological models and their distractors". (open access link: rdcu.be/cGQpY) 🧵 1/n

Now an additional piece up with this excellent graphic summary. www.scientificamerican.com/article/hidd...

PsychoPy does have a twitter acct and it's just been locked by X. Why? Because, although psychopy is 22 yrs old, when we created its account it was only 12, or so. That means psychopy was too young to give its informed consent. Even though it is now old enough, they want parental consent!! 🤣🤣

What did the dove sing to Pope Gregory? Ancestral melody reconstruction in Gregorian chant using Bayesian phylogenetics. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.19.608653v1

Looks like today is a good day for papers. My work is finally out in Physical Review Letters. AlphaFold2 was blasted for predicting structures for unstable proteins when it came out. AlphaFold predictions are actually informative of stability changes: big structure change --> big stability change