After a long internet side tangent I am disappointed to learn that Lorenz attractor earrings do not exist on the mass market 😑

Are you an early career researcher coming to the American Control Conference? Check out our jazz cruise social, hosted by @cssnextcom.bsky.social - a committee within the IEEE control systems society! Please note that RSVP is required and space is limited.

The new episode of the Night Science Podcast is a must-listen! Art professor Lois Hetland wrote a classic book about the “studio habits of mind” – observe, reflect, envision, express engage & persist, stretch & explore, craft & connect – and we explore how these relate to scientific process!

Google meet at its best

We put out this preprint a couple months ago, but I really wanted to replicate our findings before we went to publication. At first, what we found was very confusing! But when we dug in, it revealed a fascinating neural strategy for how we switch between tasks doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.29.615736 🧵

six years ago! never forget

In this SFI Seminar, Carolyn Parkinson from the University of California, Los Angeles, explores how human thought and behavior unfold within social networks, and how the demands of navigating enduring social bonds may shape the brain. Watch Parkinson’s SFI seminar:

The Mobula rays migrate through La Paz, Mexico every year, creating a spectacular marine event. Original post

Extremely confused, I got locked out of my LinkedIn profile, and support claims there was some violations of their user agreement and will not unlock it; have never done anything on there beyond an occasional post and resharing papers.

Happy to share a new preprint from my PhD thesis! “A novel framework for expanding RNNs with biophysical detail to solve cognitive tasks” 🧠💻 📝 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @jonescompneurolab.bsky.social

Signed Networks: theory, methods, and applications arxiv.org/abs/2511.17247

Accidentally replied "thank" instead of "thanks" in an email and now tempted to make this a thing

BifurcationKit may have finally made me a Julia convert

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗳𝗼𝗹𝗱𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻? This looks like a must read (suppl material bursting with goodies). #neuroskeyence doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀? Interesting paper tackling this difficult question. Answer (in part): it's complicated! The same fixed system can be interpreted as implementing many (even infinitely many) computations depending on the chosen decoding map. doi.org/10.1088/2632...

New blog post: "Higher orders need higher standards" skewed.de/lab/posts/hi... I discuss our current work disentangling misconceptions around "higher-order" networks: arxiv.org/abs/2602.16937 Explainer thread for the paper here: bsky.app/profile/tiag...

What just happened ⛸️😶

Final group tonight LOCO LOCO LOCO Oh oh oh oh oh oh ohhhhhhhhhhh The Pope is dead Renaissance man VINCERRRRRRRRRRO You are something but not nothing bit.ly/45JzQJH #MilanoCortina2026

𝗧𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗮𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 "Cortical traveling waves in time and space: Physics, physiology, and psychology" is going to the top of the list! doi.org/10.1016/j.ne... #neuroskyence

New Journal Club: Neural manifolds are maturing from visualization trick to biological claim. But if population activity lives on low-dimensional manifolds, what constrains the geometry?

𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁/𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰 So we model the dynamics. Version of record of our paper is available. #neuroskyence elifesciences.org/articles/102...

Just noticed that my google chrome browser randomly switched my default search engine from Google to Yahoo search. I have never used Yahoo search in my life (it still exists???). How does this happen??

Final week to apply for SFI’s 2026 immersive, summer programs in complexity science: Apply by Feb 4, 2026 CSSS and GWCSS : www.santafe.edu/engage/learn... Journalism Fellowship: santafe.edu/journalism-f...

𝗦𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 A test of spatial computing in the prefrontal cortex: oscillations shape representational content. #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

"Research is messy. … Trying to protect students from that reality does them a disservice." On #InternationalDayOfEducation, take a look back at this Working Life essay on teaching students about scientific failure. https://scim.ag/4sTaQcH

"The paper scope is well-contained, resting essentially on one key idea that works beautifully." thank you Reviewer 1ijb 🥹

Kai's write up and @cailinmeister.bsky.social's thread do a great job of summarizing our results. Rather than cover them a third time, I thought I'd clarify some misconceptions over our piece and COIS more broadly that keep cropping up scattered across replies. 🧵🧪

Just realized my 2022 PhD thesis was in the last wave of pre-LLM dissertations

My first foray into systems biology -- this work was led by Boya Hou, a postdoctoral researcher at UIUC, now on the academic job market. She presented an early version of these results at the @nitmb.bsky.social MathBio Convergence Conference in August of 2025.

**Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization** New paper I anticipate will become a classic in neuroscience and a must-read for students at all levels. Understanding brain function beyond brain areas. #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Apparently "spherical linear interpolation" is commonly abbreviated as "slerp" and all is right with this world sometimes en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slerp

Side quest was unfortunately not realized, but I am now a proud owner of this painting

This week I learned that Stephen Smale came up with the horseshoe map on the beaches of Copacabana. Here is my poor rendition of horseshoe and homoclinic tangle, perhaps in some approximate vicinity of where they were first imagined!

This week, arising from a question asked during my talk, I learned about a cool new (to me) type of bifurcation. I think this makes for a successful conference!

Heading to Rio de Janeiro for a conference. Extremely tempted to go on a “meet a capybara“ side quest 🤔

Applications are open for SFI’s 2026 summer education programs, offering research and training in complexity science in Santa Fe, NM: – Undergraduate Complexity Research – Complex Systems Summer School – Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science Info: www.santafe.edu/engage/learn...

A Survey on Centrality and Importance Measures in Hypergraphs: Categorization and Empirical Insights arxiv.org/abs/2512.00107

As a former physics undergraduate, giving a colloquium in a physics department feels like a very full-circle moment ☺️

Read Perich! (lots of others too) www.nature.com/articles/s41... Or his piece in The Transmitter.

“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”

Apparently at work right now, flushing any toilet makes all the other toilets in the building overflow. I don‘t think we could come up with a better metaphor for the end of semester overload/slump if we tried

New work by Emily Oby et al. in Nature Neuroscience demonstrates that neural population activity in motor cortex follows fixed dynamical constraints: monkeys could not volitionally reorder or reverse latent trajectories during BCI control. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Have you heard about the Night Science Podcast, where we talk about the actual creative process of doing science? We explore this with discussions with brilliant scientists & also philosophers and artists, to figure out the tricks of the creative scientific trade. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/n...

Is science too obsessed with metrics, large-scale projects & “blockbuster” outputs? Desai & Jun argued that preserving the "auteur" spirit of individual creativity, exploration and risk-taking is essential for maintaining the creativity that drew us into science in the 1st place.

My co-authors have yet to move to Bluesky, so I'm pleased to announce our latest work has just been published in @nature.com Neuroscience. Amazing work led by Junheng Li, revealing that falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation pattern #neuroskyence #sleep www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How can we design complex computational systems using synthetic biology? Check our paper, where we use space as a computational element, dramatically reducing communication requirements while allowing modularity, reusability, scalability & minimal cell engineering. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

At present my desk is covered with ~10 different books whose titles are various variants of "nonlinear dynamical systems"

Skimming through a signal processing reference turned out to be unexpectedly on-theme for October 👻👻👻