📢Maths in the Brain Workshop 2026 in Melbourne. We will bring together researchers across Australia with a shared interest in understanding the brain from a quantitative perspective. This year's keynote is delivered by Professor James Cole, University College London. 1/4🧵

Mathematical proof assistants like Coq and Lean were made possible by a correspondence that established the equivalence between proofs and computation. Read the explainer from our archive:

The Deep Link Equating Math Proofs and Computer Programs | Quanta Magazine

Mathematical logic and the code of computer programs are, in an exact way, mirror images of each other.

buff.ly

🧵 How do psychedelics shape brain activity? Our new paper presents the largest neuroimaging study of psilocybin to date—revealing how context structures psychedelic brain states. Title: Psychedelics Align Brain Activity with Context Paper: lnkd.in/gt-kMR6d A thread 🧵👇 1/n

ATTENTION (PLEASE SHARE) If anyone has or knows of any positions that might be appropriate for the NIH staff members who were terminated, please post the information in this thread. There are lots of talented and accomplished people who may be looking for new opportunities.

a poster that says if life gives you lemon make lemonade on it

ALT: a poster that says if life gives you lemon make lemonade on it

media.tenor.com

Meanwhile, Australia still leaves in limbo many incoming students (holding PhD offers and funding!) for months on end, esp. from Iran. Waiting a year, two, with no updates — unnecessary and cruel. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/phd-vis... via John Ross (Times Higher Ed). @davidpocock.bsky.social

PhD visa applicants trapped in ‘indefinite waiting period’

‘Endless stress’ confronts Iranian doctoral candidates who worked for a year just to cover the application fee

timeshighereducation.com

So exciting to see MacaqueNet out into the world! 🤩 Learn about our global community & database centralizing standardized affiliative & agonistic data from 61 populations across 14 macaque species: doi/10.1111/1365... Explore >600 networks & request data: macaquenet.github.io/database/

MacaqueNet: Advancing comparative behavioural research through large‐scale collaboration

We present MacaqueNet, a global community of macaque researchers who developed the first publicly searchable, standardised database on affiliative and agonistic behaviour. This cross-species database...

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

1/ Excited to share our latest preprint! 🚀 We introduce Spectral Normative Modeling (SNM)—a novel approach leveraging graph spectral methods to advance brain charting towards personalized precision medicine. 🔗 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Spectral normative modeling of brain structure

Normative modeling in neuroscience aims to characterize interindividual variation in brain phenotypes and thus establish reference ranges, or brain charts, against which individual brains can be compa...

medrxiv.org

Nice best paper talk on methods for fitting time series data to stochastic models by Brock Sherlock at UNSW. Paper 👉 doi.org/10.1007/s115.... @smbmathbiology.bsky.social at #Anziam2025 MBSIG workshop.

Also! The symposium on higher-order interactions, chaired by @manishsaggar.bsky.social and @lordgrilo.bsky.social, was accepted. Absolute must-attend if you're at OHBM 2025, with talks from: @popeme.bsky.social, @andreasantoro.bsky.social, and @novelli-leo.bsky.social! @ohbmofficial.bsky.social

Some thoughts on the confusion and anxiety created by the current freeze on communications, hiring, grant reviews, travel, etc at NIH (gift link):

Trump's NIH Freeze Puts Scientific Research at Risk

America’s best scientific minds are scrambling to determine the impact of the disruption.

bloomberg.com

Pre-print 🧠🧪 Is mechanism modeling dead in the AI era? ML models trained to predict neural activity fail to generalize to unseen opto perturbations. But mechanism modeling can solve that. We say "perturbation testing" is the right way to evaluate mechanisms in data-constrained models 1/8

Panel at #NeurIPS2024, as part of #NeuroAI workshop, with Karl Friston and Yoshua Bengio, moderated by myself. Recordings available after the event: tinyurl.com/39a9xy8x Workshop: tinyurl.com/5aysw5v3 Moein Khajehnejad @foroughhas.bsky.social @noorsajidt.bsky.social @tonyzador.bsky.social

🚨New updates for NotebookLM, including: - A new, optimized interface - The ability to engage with AI hosts during an Audio Overview🤩🤯 - NotebookLM Plus, for universities & businesses Check it out → goo.gle/4guNYt4 It will be a fun end of the year!

NotebookLM gets a new look, audio interactivity and a premium version

NotebookLM is introducing new features, and a premium version called NotebookLM Plus.

goo.gle

Just published🔈 "Structurally informed models of directed brain connectivity" Read: rdcu.be/d3dC4 We review how structural connectivity constrains directed connectivity models 🧠 Lead by @matthewdgreaves.bsky.social w/ @novelli-leo.bsky.social, @sinamansourl.bsky.social and Andrew Zalesky

DAY 6: Advent of Comp Neuro 🎄🤖🧠🧪 This nifty theory predicts how intrinsic timescales depend on network structure, neuron properties and input. A nontrivial task! “Microscopic theory of intrinsic timescales in spiking neural networks” tinyurl.com/43esfrrk By @avm.bsky.social and @albada.bsky.social

Aitor Morales-Gregorio@aitormg.bsky.social · 2y ago

DAY 5: Advent of Comp Neuro 🎄🤖🧠🧪 Heavy-tailed distributions enable smooth transitions to chaos and other biologically realistic activity. “Edge of Chaos and Avalanches in Neural Networks with Heavy-Tailed Synaptic Weight Distribution” journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

Good news everyone! A new version of graph-tool is just out! @graph-tool.skewed.de graph-tool.skewed.de Graph-tool is a comprehensive and efficient Python library to work with networks, including structural, dynamical, and statistical algorithms, as well as visualization. 1/N #networkscience

Since I've been here for a while… here are some useful features on Bluesky that you might not have discovered yet! 🧵

Academic writing — get utilized to it.

Bing Brunton showed a beautiful presentation on reverse engineering bodies + minds: virtual animals in virtual environments controlling virtual bodies. An exciting research program that she also presented for the NeuroAI NMA course: youtu.be/EN89LVVnLbs?... 4/

W1D1- Big Picture - Intro

YouTube video by Neuromatch Academy

youtu.be

Have you ever done a dense grid search over neural network hyperparameters? Like a *really dense* grid search? It looks like this (!!). Blueish colors correspond to hyperparameters for which training converges, redish to those for which training diverges. Even better, a video: vimeo.com/903855670

Do babies pretrain? www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Helpless infants are learning a foundation model

Humans have a protracted postnatal helplessness period, typically attributed to human-specific maternal constraints causing an early birth when the brain is highly immature. By aligning neurodevelopme...

cell.com

6. Random features you didn't know about. If your post includes a link, you can wait for the preview to show up, and remove the url, and the link stays there! This also saves characters from the character limit.

Episode 5 of our podcast is out! We discuss how complicated it is to assess intelligence, whether in humans, animals, or machines. With two fantastic guests: Comparative Psychologist Erica Cartmill and Computer Scientist Ellie Pavlick. Check it out! complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/nat...

Nature of Intelligence, Ep. 5: How do we assess intelligence? | COMPLEXITY

When it comes to assessing intelligence, people have all kinds of tests — the SAT, IQ tests, and so on. There’s controversy over how fairly these tests really measure human intelligence, but at the ve...

complexity.simplecast.com

Do you teach neuroscience? Here’s a list I’ve compiled of mostly free online neuroscience textbooks, simulations and datasets you can use for your course! If I’m missing something, let me know so I can add it! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Free Neuroscience Textbooks and Online Tutorials

Free Neuroscience Textbooks and Online Tutorials (Compiled by Carlos Aizenman, Brown University, Dept. of Neuroscience) Maintaining a current list of digital educational resources is tricky. Softwar...

docs.google.com

Our Centre's seminar series - public talks and conversations, hosted by my friend and colleague Craig Hassed

Monash Centre for Consciousness & Contemplative Studies (M3CS)@monash-m3cs.bsky.social · 2y ago

Check out past episodes of M3CS's seminar series, hosted by the great Craig Hassed and with fascinating guests, conversing about mindful parenting, meditation and morality, consciousness and much more www.monash.edu/consciousnes...

Starter packs are genius, but I was surprised there wasn't a list of them for people to find. So I built it: blueskydirectory.com/starter-pack... The website monitors the packs being shared and adds the ones it finds to the database. Missed your stater pack? Message me and I'll get it added.

All - Bluesky Directory

A curated collection of all things relating to the Blue Sky social media platform.

blueskydirectory.com

Great PhD opportunity here

Maria del Rio-Chanona@maria-drc.bsky.social · 2y ago

🚨Funded PhD position at UCL Computer Science! 🌍💻 Learn how to use and develop LLMs, RL, Networks, and Agent-Based Models to forecast the impact of #AI in society and pathways towards a #net-zero economy. 👉 www.findaphd.com/phds/project... #MachineLearning #ComplexSystems #GreenTransition #PhD

I'm just learning about Starter Packs. Here's a great place to find them! blueskydirectory.com

The Ultimate Directory of tools and applications for Bluesky

A curated collection of all things relating to the Blue Sky social media platform.

blueskydirectory.com

We strongly suggest that academic publishers and other platforms that host research rapidly implement a Share to Bluesky button for their articles. Here's how: docs.bsky.app/docs/advance... #AcademicSky #HigherEd #Altmetrics

Action Intent Links | Bluesky

Authors, websites, and apps can use action intent links to implement "Share on Bluesky" buttons, or similar in-app actions. Logged-in users will be directed to the corresponding action view in the Blu...

docs.bsky.app