Check out this more detailed rundown on our adapting networks preprint from @rgast.bsky.social!

Richard Gast@rgast.bsky.social · 4d ago

What does adaptation do to globally coupled networks? In our newest preprint, we developed a mean-field theory that predicts when adaptation turns homogeneous connectivity into heterogeneous network structure, and when it doesn't: arxiv.org/abs/2609.22597

Preprint time! This is a cool one. Complex systems, be they neural nets, interacting genes, or power grids, can produce diverse dynamics-- things like point attractors, limit cycles, and chaos. The dynamic landscape you get depends on how elements interact. But those interactions can also change!

We are recruiting an experienced research programmer to drive the next steps of several exciting generative modeling and biotechy projects! (You will see this ad again soon accompanying preprints of said projects, but here's a chance to apply early 🤓) recruiting2.ultipro.com/SCR1003TSRI/...

recruiting2.ultipro.com

💥 SPEAKER SPOTLIGHT: Hear from faculty whose work explores AI and computational approaches in #Neuroskyence. 🔹 James Cotton, Ph.D., Northwestern 🔹 Kristin Branson, Ph.D., HHMI Janelia Research Campus @peabody124.bsky.social @kristinmbranson.bsky.social ⏰ Register soon at jax.org/autobehavior!

Preprint time! This is a cool one. Complex systems, be they neural nets, interacting genes, or power grids, can produce diverse dynamics-- things like point attractors, limit cycles, and chaos. The dynamic landscape you get depends on how elements interact. But those interactions can also change!

There are more submissions to ICLR this year (at least 62,000) than in all previous years of the conference combined.

Comb jellies are ancient marine predators whose hairlike extensions known as cilia refract light as they swim, giving them an iridescent shimmer. They are the largest animals known to use cilia for movement. www.quantamagazine.org/ctenophores-...

First off, these cells are gigantic. This one, for example, has >72 cm of axon! To our knowledge, it’s the longest neuron ever fully reconstructed. I leave it to the reader as an exercise to estimate the length of a human LC neuron. 5

The Effective Gravitational Field of the Ball in Association Football https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20395

Approximating the Lorenz attractor with a chaotic leaky water wheel. The orange dot is the centre of mass of the water. It traces (a projection of) the familiar attractor as the wheel spins seemingly randomly left and right.

New preprint by @shtakasu.bsky.social , Gast & @antihebbiann.bsky.social, showing that local exc/inh connectivity balance can strongly reshape #RecurrentNetwork dynamics, even when the connectivity spectrum remains unchanged. #CompNeuro #TheoreticalNeuroscience #RandomNetworks #PopulationDynamics

Ann Kennedy@antihebbiann.bsky.social · 3w ago

New preprint on our favorite theme: same connectome + different neurons = different dynamics. @shtakasu.bsky.social looked at detail balance (E+I inputs sum to 0) in RNNs w/different activation functions, finding that it stabilized some networks and destabilized others. arxiv.org/html/2608.30...

New preprint on our favorite theme: same connectome + different neurons = different dynamics. @shtakasu.bsky.social looked at detail balance (E+I inputs sum to 0) in RNNs w/different activation functions, finding that it stabilized some networks and destabilized others. arxiv.org/html/2608.30...

Nothing like a cozy afternoon of reverse birdwatching

Fish with electrical senses have unique brain cells specifically to process that information. The real trick they pull is separating the electricity they emit from the ones they sense. 🧪 Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10690-6​

Behold the future of research code from the GPT-6 press release: a notebook that writes an accessory script by string concatenation and inspecting code in a notebook, evals the script in place, and then ignores it entirely to write a hardcoded summary.

more evidence that neocortex and hippocampus are just there to act as cushions for the important bits

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 3w ago

Rapid spatial cognition in mice, with and without neocortex and hippocampus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.30.747945v1

Join me on Zoom tomorrow at 10am PST for a high-level talk on our hypothalamus work, plus a fun preview of our mouse behavior forecasting project. Talk title shamelessly stolen from the most badass Larry Swanson paper pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16254987/ luma.com/pfj56a5v

Ann Kennedy | The anatomy of the soul: neural circuits for flexible and adaptive survival behaviors · Zoom · Luma

Foresight Institute’s Neurotech Group The anatomy of the soul: neural circuits for flexible and adaptive survival behaviors Abstract: The struggle for survival…

luma.com

Come be my colleague!! 🎉 We’re hiring an Assistant Professor in Developmental Biology at UCSD! If you’re doing exciting work in development or regeneration, come join us!! Please spread the word and apply! apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04591

Assistant Professor of Developmental Biology

University of California, San Diego is hiring. Apply now!

apol-recruit.ucsd.edu

💡 Learn to design behavioral workflows, apply ML approaches to behavioral modeling, and connect behavior to neural and experimental manipulations. Register: www.jax.org/education-an... Organized by: @vivekdna.bsky.social @antihebbiann.bsky.social @gordonberman.bsky.social @goldenneuron.bsky.social

the unreasonable thrill of lines overlapping

Experimentalists are the new model organism

Carl Zimmer@carlzimmer.com · last mo.

The lab is a mysterious place--where some people have "magic hands," and some experiments just won't work. Here's my story about the unspoken knowledge of science, and the struggle to share it. Gift link: nyti.ms/3UccF7Z

Check out episode one, where @gauteeinevoll.bsky.social talks with Tatjana Tchumatchenko about her group's mathematical model for exploring how neurons can save energy by optimizing whether proteins are made locally or distally. #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...

How energy determines where proteins are produced in neurons

Tatjana Tchumatchenko explains how mathematical modeling elucidates whether ion-channel proteins are produced locally in the soma or in the dendrites.

thetransmitter.org

There's still time to apply for our Short Course on the Application of #MachineLearning for Automated Quantification of Behavior! Join us October 11 – 16 at #JAXBehavior for expert lectures, hands-on workshops, evening sessions & more: www.jax.org/education-an... #Neuroskyence

Short Course Machine Learning for Automated Quantification of Behavior

This course covers fundamentals of quantitative behavior analysis, machine learning, and data science for neuroscience, genetics, and biomedical researchers.

jax.org

This plan will make peer review less transparent and more confusing to applicants and program staff. Y'all killed it on the OMB proposal, you know what to do here. Comment deadline is October 13.

Jenna Norton@jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · last mo.

Of course this RFI drops late on Friday. NIH proposes to stop providing specific scores and instead bin grants into 3 broad categories: most competitive, competitive, not discussed. A score would be calculated but not provided to the PI (or PO). grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

It's a wrap for this year’s Cajal Advanced Neuroscience Training Programme at @champalimaudf.bsky.social! 👥 We hosted the courses ‘Quantitative Approaches to Behavior and Virtual Reality’ and "The Brain Prize Course – Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience".

AgRP neurons are fascinating. They get called "hunger" neurons, but this and work like the Krashes lab's suggest their activity is more like "motivation to forage". Finding food suppresses them; finding food that's far away/scary to access reduces suppression. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Toggling between food-seeking and self-preservation behaviors via hypothalamic response networks

Motivated behaviors are often studied in isolation to assess labeled lines of neural connections underlying innate actions. However, in nature, multip…

sciencedirect.com

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Hunger neurons track available food locations during foraging and spatial memory recall https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.28.741066v1

Today is the day from “There Will Come Soft Rains” https://users.wpi.edu/~zrbutzke/Docs/BradburyStories(1).pdf

New preprint led by @rgast.bsky.social- part 1 of Richard's ongoing effort to make a better firing rate model: developing mean-field models that can be fit to biological data to capture both the dynamics of neural populations and the underlying physiological heterogeneity that sculpt those dynamics.

Richard Gast@rgast.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The Ott-Antonsen ansatz revolutionized our understanding of coupled oscillator systems with heterogeneous oscillators. We developed a multi-ensemble method that increases the applicability of the OA ansatz to empirical data substantially arxiv.org/abs/2607.09516, as we demonstrate on neural data.

Happy Monday! Come learn how jellyfish swim. In a review led by fluid dynamics maestro Alex Hoover, we outline how neuromechanical modeling will help us understand how modulation of neural activity allows jellyfish to jet and pirouette through fluids www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...