First paper since joining Google DeepMind! We present 🌍ATLAS (Active Theory Learning for Automated Science), a pipeline that generates interpretable mechanistic models from data and optimizes experiments to test them. Thread below

can’t believe a narcissist is being so publicly humiliated by a reflecting pool

The lowly cyanobacteria defeating Trump has such a "War of the Worlds" vibe to it...

People like to dunk on MATLAB now, but it’s hard to overstate how large an advance it was at the time and the impact it has had on scientific computing. RIP Cleve Moler www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/s...

This was only possible because of congestion pricing

Wild times in Harlem. I hope everyone stays safe

Absolute madness in Harlem right now. People are dancing in the streets

Neuroscientist here, who has talked about the US losing science ground to other countries: The biggest problem for generating future cures for brain diseases is the ongoing utter destruction of US basic neuroscience. It’s not about regulation.

This week in Nature Protocols: training yellow-legged hornets to implant #neuropixels probes

New preprint: Random network structure stabilizes neural manifolds We’re excited to share our new work on representational drift. doi.org/10.64898/202... Representational drift poses a puzzle. 👇 A short thread below. In the next days a figure by figure walk through will follow. 1/5 🧪🧠

I remember auditing a math class as a 1st yr md/phd student, and the professor looked like Walt Whitman with one arm covered in chalk dust up to the elbow. He was shouting: “Every open cover has a finite subcover! No holes!” And that was the moment I became an experimentalist

„Rhythmic sampling of decision alternatives through attention“ 🔦 Spotlight of our recent work in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social by Alireza Valizadeh www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

A colleague received bad news from her NIH program officer today: my colleague’s grant got a great score, but NIH still can’t pay it, and my colleague will have to closer her lab. The call ended with the program officer (not my colleague) crying. Awful on so many levels.

What’s interesting to me about this sculpture is that the doctor has excellent form, keeping his chin tucked below his shoulder when using the Muay Thai long guard

People supporting arxiv’s policy on LLM use haven’t thought through the unintended consequences of PERMANENTLY banning ALL COAUTHORS. The 16th author on your 20-author paper didn’t check all the refs on a paper many ago? Now YOU can’t post the preprint on arxiv. Starting a collaboration? Better 1/

Part of me is shocked by this, and part of me feels like of course Kozak sequences weren’t the whole story. Either way, it’s nice to see someone finally nailed it down

Nora Volkow looks taller than Joe Rogan

How does blood flow relate to brain activity? We discovered that it reflects two neural populations affected oppositely by arousal. Together, they explain neurovascular coupling in all brain regions and brain states! Out today in Nature: rdcu.be/fdC2A @uclbrainscience.bsky.social

For nearly a century, we believed the therapeutic effect of ECT is the seizure. Our latest research suggests we may have been looking at the wrong event. A thread on why cortical spreading depression (CSD) might be the driver of therapeutic benefit. Work led by @therehugolad.bsky.social

Sharif University in Tehran was just bombed Founded in 1965, it is one the most elite science and engineering institutions in the world. Alumni include the mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win the Fields Medal Here is the list of other alumni en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Want a dataset to test ideas on neural basis of decision making or how areas interact as we make choices? Check out our data published today @rudebecklab.bsky.social. >16,000 single neurons from 22 anatomically confirmed areas in macaques performing a decision task. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nasa employee: oh hey u guys are back early astronaut: Office365 in spaceship nasa employee: what? astronaut: *loading a pistol and getting back on the rocket-ship* Office365 in spaceship

Coming back from the Molecular Psychiatry meeting I got randomly upgraded to first class, and now I’m chugging free prosecco and taking selfies like a common peasant

Two-photon calcium imaging at 24,000 lines/s, with the resonant axis spanning 4x what other systems can do. Inertia-free. Diffraction-limited. No tradeoffs. Che-Hang Yu developed a 4x angle multiplier for laser scanning. His paper is out today: opg.optica.org/optica/fullt... 1/n #fluorescenceFriday

Keanu Reeves as Tom Bombadil coming out of retirement for one last job

11yo: I’m so sick of the boys in my class. Did you know two of them are named Rexford and Brid? They should be on a lacrosse team, not in my class

I said “oh no” out loud when ryan gosling didn’t balance the centrifuge

Every time my French wife tries to say something along the lines of “things aren’t this dumb in France,” I remind her that Walker, Texas Ranger was the #1 TV show in her country for a long time

Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc. The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic! www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...

Everyone used to think the emergence of life was so astronomically improbable that it was unexplainable. Now we know that asteroids contain all five bases, and 45-nt RNA sequences that self-replicate will spontaneously assemble under the right conditions. Life kind of sounds inevitable, doesn’t it?

Consciousness is just a skill issue. I haven't had subjective experience since I started using Claude Code

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

random question for people with more experience with coding agents than I have: does it make sense to give an agent its own non-admin user account on your system, then give it full privileges? Isn't that easier than dealing with setting all the permissions?

But Joao, aren’t you afraid of being scooped? No. It’s an ultra-rare childhood epilepsy. If you scoop me and the kids get help from it, I will help you scoop me and then move on.

I’m so proud of my 8yo who went to a sleepover last night and adjusted the poses of some creepy Japanese dolls on display, then went to her friend’s mom saying she was terrified because she saw the dolls moving on their own. The mom called my wife last night freaking out

Onboard if, and only if, then reviewers finally have to stop asking for qRT-PCR to validate said NGS.

I will fly to anywhere in the United States on my own dime to talk to people about basic science! I encourage all of you, particularly senior scientists to make this commitment. If you are looking for material ask @karalmarshall.bsky.social She has put together an amazing basic talk!

Brooklyn 8:37 PM

Advice for a young investigator: For figures in Google Docs, insert a drawing, then put both your image and the text box containing the caption inside the drawing For MS Word, insert a text box and put your image and caption inside For Pages, insert image and text box separately then link them

Very excited to post our paper led by @daburke.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... where we uncover a simple mathematical rule underlying how brains learn that a cue predicts a reward. 1/26

We need to raise the bar on research code right now. 1) documentation and tests are dead simple now. 2) creating benchmarks integrating across multiple implementations 3) have agents double check your work / fix broken tests 4) fix outstanding bugs in major scientific packages

Ooooh. Cool new paper on origins of life. A simple 45-nucleotide RNA molecule that can perfectly copy itself. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New paper alert! 🚨 We found that the brain's compass is remarkably stable at two scales 1️⃣ the system maintains its internal organization for weeks 2️⃣ It "remembers" its orientation for weeks, even after a single visit This may be key to how the brain aligns its other maps. Paper: rdcu.be/e3waP

I have been using Claude Code recently, and I’m now convinced that LLM coding agents can solve one of the biggest problems in neuroscience: technical debt. Labs generate tons of low-quality code bc the incentive structure rewards short-term productivity over longer-term concerns like 1/

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks. @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social @flatironinstitute.org @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social 1/14

This is almost as bad as the time I came across a matlab function that I wrote as a rotation student. Literally the worst code ever written, it's a masterpiece of incomprehensibility

The day has finally come! An obscure question arose for which my PhD thesis contains the answer! With barely-contained excitement, I dug up the old PDF to get the answer and realized... that I literally cannot decipher it 🤦‍♂️

People falling in love with LLMs remind me of that guy whose father died when he was 12, so he latched onto Optimus Prime as a father figure. As an adult, he changed his legal name to Optimus Prime and was widely mocked. It's not mental illness or stupidity; it's something much sadder

Just got the summary statement for an R21 resub w/ impact score of 40. Of the 3 major criticisms, the 2 biggest ones were factually incorrect. But there's no meaningful recourse in situations like this. Imagine if applicants could write a one-page rebuttal before the study section meets...

News from central Jersey: I'm running to represent New Jersey's 12th Congressional District. By entering the fray, I hope to bring ideas of repairing our frayed republic. Not only to defend it in 2026, but to build something stronger, for generations to come! samwang.substack.com/p/entering-t...