Hmmm. If science isn't already machine readable then I blame the machines...

UKRI will more than double its AI research budget to £397m. The R&D+compute budget of OpenAI = $8.5b. A single company has nearly 20 times the research budget of an entire G7 country. The lesson is simple: we can't chase the same research goals. We need to take risks that VC-backed companies won't.

Moderna have announced that they won't run new phase three trials now with massive impacts for new vaccine development- why- its because of RFK Jr and his anti-vaccine campaigns and cancelling mRNA vaccine research which affect the sales the company can then make 🧪🧵 #PublicHealth

AI alignment:

If you have tenure consider publishing less... doi.org/10.1038/d415...

I worry that wikipedia is losing ground to LLMs, like google gemini. Should I worry? Is this happening? Is this a bad thing?

when doing neuroscience projects I often advocate for computational modelling, followed by data analysis to test model's predictions. however a few times now I have had pushback from collaborators/reivewers suggesting it would be better to do the data analysis first, then the modelling. thoughts?

Or is this just evidence that the Royal Society lost relevance a long time ago? Having this tool on their books at least gives them the occasional headline.

Would love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What is the computational role of dendritic excitations? Byung Hun Lee and team mapped voltage dynamics throughout the dendritic trees of CA1 pyramidal neurons in mice navigating in virtual reality. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

See also M Dresler's clever analysis of "predatory funding" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/EJRMFD...

I don't always get pretty, isolated, AND transfected primary neurons in culture, but when I do I take advantage.... Rat hippocampal neuron overexpressing ThymosinB4-mScarlet and imaged for 16hr on a @zeiss-microscopy.bsky.social LSM880 with Airyscan. #FluorescenceFriday #Microscopy

I had a PhD application with an entirely hallucinated reference section. When I asked the kid why I couldn't find the journals let alone the references, he doubled down and said they were placeholders for the actual papers and the rest was definitely his work. We can't keep on top of this.

When your PI presents your work

Researchers extract latent representation of humanity's future from latest AI model

"a control system"

Meanwhile, applicants explore use of AI in writing proposals and... fuck it, everything.

With the US demonstrating its role as the paragon of democracy, unsullied by bribery and manipulation by wealthy individuals, the UK is desperate to follow. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... Reform UK receives record £9mn donation from Christopher Harborne

Artificial intelligence promises rapid and polite feedback on papers — but we must first review the reviewer. This stand first says it all… A timely World View Colin in our pages by Giorgio Gilestro 🧪 #academicSky @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This kind of approach is crucial for a theory of intelligence:

We are opening a FACULTY POSITION (tenure track, permanent) in the University of Cambridge at the interface of control and biology, interpreted broadly. Theorists and wet lab quantitative biologists with backgrounds in control, EE, applied math, ... apply by Jan 28! www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/univers...

OK UKRI

The best scientific papers are provocations, not results you can rely on. Discuss! What I mean is that they should try to force progress by making an outrageous statement that the established field wants to be wrong, but do it so well that proving it wrong is a real challenge.

Hmm.... ya think?

Springer-Nature statement “Whilst the details of peer review are confidential, we can confirm that the article underwent two rounds of review from two independent peer reviewers, supporting an accept decision.” How am I now expected to believe that two people looked at the paper twice and DGAF?

Farming failed to take off in Europe due to a shortage of heads it seems.

In addition to being a fascinating (if horrific) insight into a mostly-unknown period of European prehistory, this includes a BANGER of a quote: "I can see why all these people without heads wouldn’t be good for a community, and might be a cause for abandonment." www.science.org/content/arti...

hey I'm reposting this for no reason at all today... www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Decades after it was raised as an issue in neurophysiology it is nice to see this topic confronted in the ML/neural net community. I just wish the intellectual connections were stronger and more explicit, because we can't sensibly separate ideas from neuro with those in AI.

my little take on whole-brain neurophysiology and what it tells us about global coordination of neural activity on behavioural timescales (I steered clear of tasteless analogies for this one...) authors.elsevier.com/a/1m7H5_LsQS...

My little book on Schrödinger's famous classic 'What Is Life?' is out! Offering the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of the book's origins, reception, impact, and legacy, it uncovers Schrödinger's motivations in writing it, and shows how it has shaped our current understanding of the cell

Anyone who has been actively recruiting STEM graduates over the last decade feels this plot in their bones.

After 13 years in the US, I’ve made the difficult decision to leave. Having packed up everything and rethought about priorities, rather painstakingly, while I’m sad to leave the life I’ve made here, I’m also relieved that I won’t have to plan my life around immigration policies anymore.

If evolution, comparative #neuroskyence & #PainResearch are your thing, here's a great review from Terry Walters: journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

PREACH! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What problem is explainability/interpretability research trying to solve in ML, and do you have a favorite paper articulating what that problem is?

New cures feel sudden, but the seeds were planted decades ago by basic scientists. Which seeds will turn into cures? Unpredictable looking forward, a straight line looking back. 🧪🧬 🧵

Interested in doing a Ph.D. to work on building models of the brain/behavior? Consider applying to graduate schools at CU Anschutz: 1. Neuroscience www.cuanschutz.edu/graduate-pro... 2. Bioengineering engineering.ucdenver.edu/bioengineeri... You could work with several comp neuro PIs, including me.

Bluesky needs polls: 🔘 agree 🔘 disagree 🔘 show me the results

“Too often people go to university to ‘explore research and knowledge’.” - business secretary, Peter Kyle. What do they want knowledge for? Heaven forbid that students go to university to learn something!

UK guts public spending, wrecks research training, exits largest economic bloc on Earth, adds red tape to talent-based visas, wonders why it can't recruit "top AI talent" to help cut even more costs: on.ft.com/3Kl9tBJ AI ‘hit squad’ set up to drive Whitehall efficiency struggles to hire top talent

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025... Harvard Funding Cuts Endanger the Massive Fruit Fly Database That Powers Genetic Research

Brain chauvinists: here's the signalling, control and computation that really matters most of the time :) Congratulations Ginny - this is not only a technical tour de force, it brings systems neuro to the rest of the body.

BBC coverage of Reform is becoming increasingly problematic. And goes beyond the usual white noise. Continuous soft balling is not balance, it is a fundamental abdication of duty. Farage's tax issues, cranks given platforms at their conference, climate change denial. All need coverage. Most haven't.

Clinical statistical meta analysis making the same grade school statistical error that the original studies make? What do we call this? Meta effect size effect size inflation?

We're going to see a lot of bullshit in the coming days and weeks about "causes of autism", and most will be based on flawed, over-interpreted observational studies (1/n)

Yes, the media should ask these questions. They don't. They can't. They lack the training and work inside rigid rules about how to capture attention and storytell. They have mantras for "what the public understands" that don't include science or data. Politics runs on media, hence our world today.

The Reform UK conference gives a standing ovation to "special guest" Lucy Connolly, who pled guilty to stirring up racial hatred after she called for asylum hotels to be set on fire with people inside them.

Why is it difficult to accept that our awareness of having made a decision can only follow in the wake of our decision-making apparatus having done its job? And that the same order of events must therefore hold for any coherent thought?

Having lied to congress earlier in the week, Farage flew back to the U.K. to lie to his party conference. Populists don’t like having to deal with reality and truth. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/univers...