HALLOWEEN NAME MATCHMAKING THREAD 2025! 🎃 Having trouble coming up with a Halloween username? Ask for help in this thread and Bluesky's classically trained name artisans may generously weigh in!

We will have an NHP position open at @westernu.ca this year. Posting is coming soon. If you're interested about our setup and the opportunities here, feel free to get in touch.

Silent movie edition! THE COUNTRYMAN AND THE CINEMATOGRAPH (1901) was a joke that was taken seriously by later generations. "Look at this smock-wearing country dolt, I bet he thinks movie trains will hit him!" quickly became a much-repeated "fact" about early cinema.

For those of you professors who are team “you erase the boards when you come in, not before you leave,” I would like to let you know that I lectured about the history of vaginal and rectal fistulas today and i am sure the prof coming in after me appreciates that i erased the board before i left.

Charming little octopus from a Roman villa at Villaquejida, León, Spain. Limestone, 2nd-3rd century AD. Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid 📷 me #Archaeology

Doing Octoblerone, where I eat toblerones every day for a month and draw absolutely nothing.

New paper out in NUSA! 'An un-Austronesian Austronesian language: Proto-Western Yapen and its lexicon' by me & @montreallx.bsky.social (Sorry for the sketchy looking link preview, it really is the journal's website!) 🧪 #linguistics tufs.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/2001...

Hodgkin's House - 1928 https://botfrens.com/collections/173/contents/3104415

All capital I's should have serifs to distinguish them from lowercase l's

It seems unbelievable that some journals still keep digitized versions of journal articles from over a hundred years ago *paywalled*!

but how about an alternative.... where 'filling in' (or something like that) doesn't *need* to happen within early visual areas? something like, filling 'up'?

Who's to say filling in requires activity in V1?

When a typo in your Google search leads to new and exciting philosophical positions

Sketched up some black tomatoes, my favorite. They aren’t really black but rather brick red with green shoulders

Have you ever just not handed in a revision for a journal (e.g., because this was an originally invited paper but you have a real heart-project you want to do, and this revision would yet again side-track you from focussing on the thing you really want to do)? I feel a strange sense of "whatever",,,

Harry, I've reached the top...Bury me in grape pie for the next 3 weeks

This sounds like the start of a kids' joke, but it might be a serious question. Reposting either way.

Why do Amtrak trains blow their horn every time they emerge above ground in New Jersey from Manhattan?

It looks like Dinosaur Field Station of NJ is closing and selling their Dino sculptures

I sort of wish that Hit Points had never been invented because devs often make battles feel "bossy" by giving them arbitrary amounts of health, and fighting them feels like clocking in at the damage factory. Every blow scored or received in a battle should make the rest of it feel different.

Exciting news! 🎉 Our Computational Neuroscience course has been awarded NIH BRAIN Initiative funding! Students will get hands-on experience w real BRAIN Initiative datasets, helping them build computational skills that are essential for the future of neuroscience. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

I also think it's telling that writers of the consummate skill and subtlety as those behind the Sopranos still couldn't make dream sequences that didn't suck.

Truly impressive number of birds migrating tonight. More than 800 MILLION birds up in the air right now❗ #BirdMigration

Bluesky is getting better than twitter all the time. Just realised that twitter broke how you post long threads, after 40 you have to post each new post individually as comments. Bluesky on the other hand lets you post a billion (ish) post thread in one go, easy peasy.

I guess this rapture thing isn't happening so I did one of my overdue reviews

…who confirmed the squid ID as a true giant squid, Architeuthis dux. Next, I reached out to an expert on sperm whales at NOAA, who was also blown away and agreed she’d NEVER seen anything like this! This planet is a phenomenal place.

You can see billows of black ink still flowing, a last battle cry from the battered squid… When I saw these videos, shared by @lud_adventure on Instagram, I immediately reached out to Smithsonian expert Dr. Michael Vecchione…

As two hulking predators, the confrontations are likely violent. Here, for possibly the first time EVER, we get to see the spoils of a sperm whale victory, as this sperm whale returns to the surface waters off the coast of Mauritius with a massive squid in its maw...

For centuries, scientists and sailors have know that sperm whales hunted the “giant squid”, Architeuthis dux. Whale bodies are scarred with huge sucked marks and gashes from Archituthus. But the battles take place in deep water, far beyond where humans can easily travel…

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Wicker rocking chair from Shearer Cottage https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2012.2.4

‘Nickname’ is not ‘nick’ + ‘name.’ It was originally ‘ekename.’ ‘Eke’ was the Middle English word for “also” or “in addition.” Since ‘ekename’ began with a vowel, people used ‘an’ before it. Over time, 'an ekename' became 'a nickname.'

I wonder how much basic academic science funded by the public underlies this new treatment for Huntington’s disease?

Lemmings (1991)

Panelkas with bridges, Tbilisi, Georgia r/brutalism

every time I am forced to explain an odds ratio to a non statistician I am reminded of why odds ratios are a fucking stupid thing to calculate. i will not be taking questions at this time

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Ugaritic word of the day: ṯ-ʕ-r ("arrange, order").

These findings show that the building blocks of fast, high-capacity memory are present in mid-level visual cortex. Take-home: cognition is distributed. And stay tuned: Grace’s next papers will explore mechanisms by which these signals interact with the larger network and are disrupted in disease. 8/

We also found faster response dynamics to familiar images, consistent with pattern completion. This means that after the first couple of image fragments, V4 already signaled the whole image (but only during successful memory). The hippocampus does this, but we were surprised to see it in V4. 🤯 7/

We found all of these neuronal signatures in V4. But the only ones that reliably predicted behavior were related to how consistent population responses were during memory encoding and retrieval. More consistent responses = greater memory success. 6/

We looked for proposed neuronal signatures of memory, including: • magnitude coding • repetition suppression • sparse coding • population response consistency (=similar responses to novel and familiar images) 5/

Grace and awesome staff scientist Cheng Xue tested whether area V4 contains the signals that could support recognition memory. Their task revealed images bit by bit. This allowed us to analyze dynamics and increased difficulty so we could compare neuronal responses on correct vs error trials. 4/

Most previous studies have focused on hippocampus and higher cortical areas. But behavioral work shows that memorability depends on visual features and recognition memory distinguishes even semantically similar images. Seems like a job for mid-level visual cortex. 3/

When she was a rotation student, Grace DiRisio pointed out that visual recognition memory challenges all our neural coding theories because of its remarkable capacity. Linear codes work for low capacity functions e.g. discrimination & attention. Memory for thousands of images is another story. 2/

New preprint! How can you remember an image you saw once, even after seeing thousands of them? We find a role for humble mid-level visual cortex in high-capacity, one-shot learning. doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.22.677855 🧵🧪1/

wildwood cabins, grand lake, colorado, 1991

🚨 Exciting new crab preprint! A Japanese team found that sideways walking only evolved once! Maybe carcinization itself is necessary but not sufficient to go sideways? When it's lost, the species that go forward have alternate anti predation behaviors. 🧪🦑🦀 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...