Adam Marblestone
@adammarblestone.bsky.social
Technologist, scientist. Co-founder of Convergent Research.
OSTP's new report, "Science: A New Golden Age," reaches for extraordinary scientific progress and calls for focused research organizations, X-Labs, and metascience experiments inside federal agencies to help get there. That’s good news!
Marginal Revolution@marginalrev.blogsky.venki.dev · 2w agoAlec Stapp on the new Science report from Michael Kratsios - Marginal REVOLUTION
Previously, Science broke the news that NSF would be clawing back money, and attributed it to the 10-year, 1.5 billion X-Labs initiative. We have an official denial from NSF, and internal budget numbers for the X-Labs account suggest it will only spend $50 million this year, all from TIP's budget.
Exclusive: NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say
Unexpected shift in funds has meant sharp drop in grants this fiscal year
science.org
State adds to funding promises for National Science Foundation X-Labs research groups https://www.nashvillepost.com/tennessee-investing-3-million-into-quantum-teams/article_0504570c-5509-4f7f-bd7c-a5d81018e67b.html
Tennessee investing $3M into quantum teams
State adds to funding promises for National Science Foundation X-Labs research groups
nashvillepost.com
ASM has submitted formal comments urging the White House Office of Management and Budget to withdraw a proposed rule that would weaken the peer review process, limit scientific collaboration and networking and create new barriers to conducting and disseminating research: asm.org/articles/pol...
ASM Opposes OMB Grants Rule | ASM.org
ASM strongly opposes the Office of Management and Budget's proposed rule on federal financial assistance, citing risks to scientific integrity and innovation.
asm.org
We've been checking with contacts inside the NSF and they are saying this is wildly inaccurate. X-labs is not anywhere close to big enough to make up this hole. As far as I have heard, this program is coming out of TIP specific funding
Today we're launching Deliverome Bio, a focused research organization tackling one of the biggest bottlenecks in medicine: getting therapeutics to tissues beyond the liver.
Introducing GLOBE—a new technology for brain-wide, single-cell recording of cellular activity in vivo. GLOBE can continuously record from nearly a quarter million individual neurons simultaneously across a mouse brain. Preprint out on bioRxiv: doi.org/10.64898/202... 🧵(1/6)
Seeking teams to test whether AI-enabled formal methods can make high-assurance cyber defense practical, at scale, through building production-grade software components backed by machine-checked proofs and validated through coordinated red-team exercises. https://bit.ly/49Wif30
Funding | Safeguarded AI
Learn more about funding in ARIA's Safeguarded AI programme.
bit.ly
Agreed re the cortical column Markram targeted, but I think connectomics could be hugely beneficial to study of areas like hypothalamus, where we have evolutionarily wired "artisanal" circuits implementing very specific rules for how different drives interact with each other :)
Full proposals are now open for our Massively Scalable Neurotechnologies programme. Led by Jacques Carolan, we are investing £50m to develop a new class of neurotech – interfaces that reach the brain via the body’s natural pathways. Submit by 11 May: link.aria.org.uk/MSNx
Massively Scalable Neurotechnologies
link.aria.org.uk
Our latest publication grapples with how the brain could implement gradient descent by sending learning targets top-down, gating plasticity with dendritic inhibition, and updating synaptic weights with biologically observed learning rules like BTSP. www.cell.com/cell-reports...
Cellular and subcellular specialization enables biology-constrained deep learning
Galloni et al. introduce “dendritic target propagation”: a Dale’s law-compliant learning algorithm for cortical microcircuits with soma- and dendrite-targeting inhibition and realistic connectivity co...
cell.com
Aaron Milstein@neurosutras.bsky.social · last yr.New #NeuroAI #compneurosky preprint! To better understand how target-directed learning works in the brain, we sought to engineer an artificial neural network capable of solving complex image classification tasks that comprises only experimentally-supported biological building blocks. (1/15)
First whole-brain recording of social sound processing in a vertebrate. Surprises start in the hindbrain; thalamus gates conspecific calls; male and female brains diverge downstream. Work by @joerghenninger.bsky.social, @mh123.bsky.social sky.social and team. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Terence Tao on how math is changing, #formalverification as the enabler of scaled human-AI collaboration: "The reason why scaling and AI and broad participation actually is a net win is because we have formal verification." 📺 www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuTx... #leanlang #leanprover
We've just added a new FRO to our website! In this Essential Technology piece, we share three three principles from CHI-FRO, an engineering-heavy partnership to build out tools for probabilistic programming: www.essentialtechnology.blog/p/the-evolut...
The evolution of CHI-FRO
Three principles from an engineering-heavy partnership to build out tools for probabilistic programming
essentialtechnology.blog
A special opportunity for lovers of mass spectrometry proteomics to join a like-minded team at PTI. Join a collaborative initiative to enable direct protein analysis at unprecedented scale, in partnership with leading instrument developers, academics, and industry leaders. 1/2
So you sequenced a billion+ bases. That don’t impress me much. JERBOA is a toolkit to figure out what genes do at scale. We've used it to unlock 43 non-model microbes across 12 different phyla.
Cultivarium@cultivarium.bsky.social · 6mo agoCheck out our latest work! JERBOA, a toolkit for making genome-wide genetics work in non-model bacteria. blog.cultivarium.org/p/so-youve-s...
Light-microscopy brain mapping was picked as one of 7 technologies to watch in 2026 by Nature! Hear from E11's CEO @andrewcpayne.bsky.social: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
From quantum computing to mRNA therapeutics: seven technologies to watch in 2026
Nature’s round-up of innovations that are poised to make a splash in the year ahead.
nature.com
Synaptic MEMOIR: mapping individual synapses of neurons with protein barcodes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.25.690442v1
It's been an incredibly exciting year in metascience at large, and for us at Convergent. Last week, the NSF announced their Tech Labs Initiative. www.essentialtechnology.blog/p/the-future...
The Future of Focused Research Organizations:
Working with Convergent on the NSF Tech Labs Initiative
essentialtechnology.blog
Dim Red Dot Scientists have just released a photo featuring a dim red dot. It is the light of a single star exploding in a galaxy so far far away that that nothing we do could ever affect it — even in the very fullness of time. It lies beyond the Affectable Universe. Let me explain… 1/🧵
Last Friday, the @NSF released an RFI for a new Tech Labs Initiative, to "build and scale next-gen independent research organizations to advance science."
A Vision of Metascience; How does the culture of science change and improve? We need metascience entrepreneurs, seeking to achieve a scalable improvement in the social processes of science https://pllqt.it/Qg2rOs
To mark the occasion, FAS CEO Daniel Correa spoke with @sgrodriques.bsky.social and @adammarblestone.bsky.social about how best to run a Tech Lab/FRO-style org, what they've learned, and the role federal funding can play: fas.org/publication/...
NSF Wants To Supercharge FROs. We Spoke With the Scientists Who Proposed Them.
We recently spoke with Adam Marblestone and Sam Rodriques, former FAS fellows who developed the idea for FROs and advocated for their use in a 2020 policy memo.
fas.org
