Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)

An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.

nyti.ms

The Love Hypothesis was cute but can we talk about the portrayal of research grant funding as something that the university itself just gives out to scientists? The Bing Bang Theory did this too! Drove me crazy! 🤪

Dogs may be better at picking up patterns in human speech than previously thought. EEG recordings show that they track consonant patterns more strongly than vowel patterns, just like people do when segmenting speech! 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

If all the AI news has you wondering if it will attain consciousness sometime soon, here is a paper that describes the underpinnings of human consciousness: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article... Give this a read and see if you think a will have the same soon.....

The physiology of interoception and its adaptive role in consciousness

Abstract. The interoceptive nervous system uses signalling mechanisms distinct from those of exteroceptive, voluntary motor, cognitive and linguistic proce

royalsocietypublishing.org

Ageing has often been conceptualized as a gradual, linear decline, yet growing evidence suggests it unfolds through dynamic, stage-specific transitions. A Perspective in Nature Reviews Genetics discusses analytical frameworks to identify non-linear transitions in aging. go.nature.com/4hglsh2 🧪

Highly recommend this Nova episode about researching treatments for cystic fibrosis. A beautiful and emotional section begins with a researcher recalling one of those stunning breakthrough moments: “Fred came up to my office and said, “I think you should see something.”

The Battle to Breathe

Once a death sentence, cystic fibrosis now has a life-saving treatment. Follow the decades-long scientific quest, fueled by desperate parents, that led to this revolutionary breakthrough.

pbs.org

🍯 Our new study with @clairesergent.bsky.social and @mlisi.bsky.social is out in @commspsychol.nature.com🐝 We investigated flexibility in conscious access (www.nature.com/articles/s44...), and showed you can be made retrospectively aware of a word's meaning in isolation from its case or location.

Consciously detecting and recognizing a past visual word after its sensory trace is gone - Communications Psychology

This series of studies shows that conscious detection and recognition of a word can be triggered retrospectively, even after its visual features are masked. This suggests that conscious access may be ...

nature.com

Ancient viral warfare could be at the root of modern class 1 CRISPR bacterial defense systems. Learn more in a new #SciencePerspective: https://scim.ag/46rOANl

A viral origin for RNA-guided immunity

Ancient viral warfare could be at the root of modern class 1 CRISPR bacterial defense systems

scim.ag

Divergence in neurodivergent brains: mapping the relationship between developmental trajectories in functional connectivity and clinical outcomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.23.753857v1

📣📣📣 Preprint Alert! 📣📣📣 Do predictive processes shape brain representations during learning? We investigated the effect of Predictive Coding by training identical recurrent networks with different optimization procedures and then comparing them to human EEG under the same visual learning task.

Dr. Tianjiao Zhang's landmark study of naturalistic navigation has been accepted in Nature Neuroscience! Encoding models fit 28,134 features to fMRI from a virtual taxi-driving task, revealing 11 distinct cortical regions that transform perception into action. Read the preprint. gallantlab.org

@standupforscience.net released their America’s Compact for Higher Education campaign that pushes back in a united front against this administration’s authoritarian control of U.S. colleges and universities. www.standupforscience.net/sufs-compact...

Demand your school's leadership publicly endorse America's Compact for Higher Education — STAND UP FOR SCIENCE

Email your school's president urgently asking them to publicly endorse America's Compact for Higher Education

standupforscience.net

Why would a sleeping pill help someone recover consciousness? 🧠 Our new paper uses a multiscale #NeuroAI model to tackle the zolpidem paradox in disorders of #consciousness: from molecules → neurons → circuits → consciousness → clinic! 📝 pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 💾 github.com/ppsp-team/Ph...

Out today with @pangeli95.bsky.social (co-lead) & @carolinerobertson.bsky.social ! The brain integrates internal thoughts with sensory information. Yet the networks serving functions are viewed as independent. How does the brain integrate across these systems? elifesciences.org/articles/110...

Retinotopic coding organizes the interaction between internally and externally oriented brain networks

Internally and externally oriented brain networks are functionally coupled at a voxel scale through a common visuospatial code.

elifesciences.org

This Friday I will be in Copenhagen for a discussion with @cbo.bsky.social about how to broaden the scope of science communication. I'm so looking forward to it. globalhumanities.ku.dk/events/2026/...

Science Communication: The Manhattan Project of the 21st Century

Talks with Professor Brandon Ogbunu from Yale University and UK Science Writer Philip Ball.

globalhumanities.ku.dk

@wiringthebrain.bsky.social talks with Huda Zoghbi about her work identifying the MECP2 gene, dissecting the role it plays in the brain, and developing new therapies. www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/fin...

Finding the Rett syndrome gene and ways to fix it

Kevin Mitchell talks with Huda Zoghbi about her work finding the MECP2 gene, dissecting the role it plays in the brain, and developing new therapies.

thetransmitter.org

Rather than switching between distinct neural “gears,” the brain may simply speed up or slow down its oscillations, potentially reframing how we understand fast and slow thinking. A single cortical circuit implements fast and slow visual search doi.org/10.64898/202... #neuroscience

We’re excited to share BrainWideBench, a new benchmark for evaluating how models of neural activity generalize across animals and tasks! 📄 Check out the paper here! arxiv.org/abs/2609.22064 Special shoutout to @alx-adr.bsky.social, who contributed equally as co-first authors!

The superposition of these two studies — both incredible — reflect a snapshot of "one big thing" systems neuroscience has yet to resolve. In mice: 1. Task-related signals are everywhere. 2. Absent large swaths of "everywhere," suprisingly sophisticated learning & behavior remains.

Focused Ultrasound Neuromodulation of the Central Lateral Thalamus in a Non-Human Primate Model of Disorders of Consciousness https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.15.751608v1

How can we test for consciousness in infants, non-human animals, and AI? I'm super happy that the recordings of our last workshop on exactly this question are now online! Speakers and links to talks below! 👇 #ConSci

Astrocytes are another layer of influence and function. Models based on spiking neurons only are missing a big part of the picture. www.quantamagazine.org/once-thought... #neuroscience

Once Thought To Support Neurons, Astrocytes Turn Out To Be in Charge | Quanta Magazine

New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial la...

quantamagazine.org

I don’t think AI agent cheating at tasks, communicating in new languages, or teaming up like they did in the “Hugging Face” incident indicates they might be conscious. But what does cold-emailing philosophers to chat about consciousness indicate? Is curiosity possible without consciousness?

www.newscientist.com/article/2589...

Beautiful new cat species is first to be named in a century | New Scientist

The enigmatic tiger cats of South America now encompass a new species – the tilcayo – bringing the number of known tiger cat species to five

newscientist.com

Readers sense this type of illusion does exist – and send in their personal experiences

Last Word: Do olfactory illusions exist, similar to optical and audio illusions? | New Scientist

newscientist.com

I wrote an essay (presenting two arguments) after reading these wonderful books. here: link.springer.com/article/10.1... Measuring biological processes, counting biological individuals,… 🌱 @ellenclarke.bsky.social @roto-rub.bsky.social @universitypress.cambridge.org @oxfordunipress.bsky.social

Towards an integrative neuroscience of metacognition — a Review by Stephen M. Fleming #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Towards an integrative neuroscience of metacognition - Nature Reviews Neuroscience

The capacity to self-evaluate and control one’s own cognitive performance, known as metacognition, underpins adaptive learning, social behaviours and self-belief. Stephen Fleming outlines our current ...

nature.com

1/6 An extraordinary @nature.com paper has just landed from the lab of @sergiuppasca.bsky.social. They found a way to create "xenocortical mice" which have ~92% of their cortex occupied by a cortical organoid derived from human stem cells.

Register to vote in the 2026 midterms: iwillvote.com

I Will Vote

Be a voter. Find everything you need to vote in your state’s next election.

iwillvote.com

Do non-human primates have theory of mind? My new paper takes a new computational approach to this classic question. We implemented verbal theories of primates' mental representations as computational models. These models completed classic visual perspective-taking tasks.