How do you "see" with electric eyes? How does collective behavior emerge from individual interactions? Nocturnal weakly electric fish evolved to do this, but studying naturalistic social behavior is very hard. Our solution? Virtual 'fish' 🤖🐟⚡ 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2511.08436
Happy #CtenophoreCtuesday! Have you ever wondered how a comb jelly propels itself in the water? They utilize a metachronal rhythm of beating cilia (located on comb plates), which appear like a moving wave! Credit to @kei-jokura.bsky.social. Read more in this original paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... 🦑
Episode #43 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On the computational neuroscience legacy of Valentino Braitenberg - with Ad Aertsen theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn43 The 100th birthday of Valentino Braitenberg was just celebrated in Tübingen. What legacy did he leave in our field?
Replay of procedural memory is independent of the hippocampus 👀👀 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Replay of procedural memory is independent of the hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience
Thompson, Rollik and colleagues show that, during sleep, the brain replays procedural memories in the striatum independently of the hippocampus. Replay content was shaped by prior reward and error out...
nature.com
Post pub peer review seems to suffer similar issues to pre pub: it's all about reviewer 2.
Alejandro Montenegro@aemonten.bsky.social · 2w ago"Here we show, in a large post-publication peer review database, that research assessment is driven more by differences between evaluators than by difference in the evaluated research. " arxiv.org/abs/2607.09783
Great visual illusion, accompanied by a lovely variation on Shepard Tones if you have the sound on Posted on Reddit by bigjobbyx, who is a bit of an artist genius
Absolutely every frame of this video is perfect, I’m dying laughing
badly drawn bee 🐝@soapachu.bsky.social · 2w agoperfect dead drop 10/10 no notes (the shrouds really make this)
Encouraging standards sometimes makes the problem worse:
American Statistical Association History of Statistics @hos-asa.bsky.social · 2w agoFew statisticians know that Frank Yates, pioneer of experimental design, is responsible for the annoying practice of indicating 3 tiers of statistical significance by stars (*p ≤ 0.05, **p ≤0.01, ***p ≤ 0.001). He soon regretted it and “vehemently opposed its unthinking use”. And here we are.
Is raised opportunity cost a bad thing for science? People keep saying we need to publish less by being more selective in what we pursue...
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago12. Here's the key insight though: as labor-augmenting technologies LLMs make researchers more productive and therefore they *raise the opportunity cost of researcher time*. As a result researchers will have incentives to invest less time in polishing a current project before moving on to a new one.
"OpenAI said its AI used stolen credentials and discovered a previously unknown vulnerability to access Hugging Face servers." OpenAI says its AI technology acted on its own in an 'unprecedented' hack of another company apnews.com/article/open...
OpenAI says its AI technology acted on its own in an 'unprecedented' hack of another company
OpenAI has disclosed an "unprecedented cyber incident" where its AI system allegedly hacked into another AI company.
apnews.com
The UK Metascience Unit has launched the ‘National AI in Research’ Survey. We're looking for researchers across all disciplines and career stages to share their views on the use of AI in research. The survey will be published and used to inform national policy on AI in research.
National AI in Research Survey
Please take the time to complete our survey. Your feedback is important.
smartsurvey.co.uk
My heart is heavy that we are making a collective miscalculation in undervaluing the humanities - from my FT piece www.ft.com/content/fbde...
An important paper... 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Prevalence and severity of mental health problems in early-career researchers: a systematic review and meta-analysis - Nature Human Behaviour
Mental health concerns among early-career researchers are increasingly gaining attention. This preregistered systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis quantifies psychological distress among earl...
nature.com
Mathematician Levent Alpöge found a counterexample to the Jacobi conjecture using Claude Fable! This conjecture claims that if F: ℂⁿ→ℂⁿ is a polynomial map whose Jacobian is invertible at each point, F has a polynomial inverse. Open since 1939. But no more! (1/n)
Jacobian conjecture - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
“If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write. And their voice is stolen from them.”
Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’
He called AI writing “pastiche nonsense.”
theverge.com
The "publish or perish" culture must perish. Scientists need time to think. We just published our Slow Science Manifesto, where we argue that huge changes are needed in the way we fund, publish, and evaluate science. Read more and sign here: www.slow-science.com
In my recent Intro Psych lectures on cognitive psychology, I didn’t have time to delve into its history. It’s a fascinating story. Instead, I referred students to my supplemental online lecture on its background and origin, which plays as a YouTube playlist. Check it out here. Feel free to share.
Steve Most (UNSW Sydney) -- The Story of Cognitive Psychology - YouTube
This is the first of 5 lectures on Memory & Cognition for PSYC1011 (PSYC 1B) at UNSW in 2020. Click "PLAY ALL" to view the lecture, which should proceed thro...
youtube.com
Lessons are more effective than practice, according to a new study of 40,000 chess players on Chess.com. @psychscience.bsky.social
Yes folks, the cat is out of the bag. People use AI to write papers. The question is not how we "spot" (or think we spot) these papers, but whether AI was disclosed and used appropriately. That discussion isn't happening with much vigour amongst journal editors or the community afaik.
Ben Williamson@benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 3w agoThe anatomy of an AI-supported academic article is becoming more apparent. I desk reviewed ~70 manuscripts this week for our journal. Reckon 20ish had significant AI assistance. On top of hundreds of others recently I'm starting to see patterns. Are other editors are seeing the same or similar? 1/
I've posted a preprint of a philosophical paper I've written on the relationships between understanding, prediction, and compression, based on a talk I gave at SPAN 2025. Now in press at Synthese. philarchive.org/archive/POLUPA
philarchive.org
I WISH this were true. We increasingly demand rapid progress, steady output and cookie cutter research plans. Students now expect this. Countries with long PhD programs can protect exploration and intellectual growth. Not the UK. And from what I can tell, other countries are moving in our direction.
Itai Yanai@itaiyanai.bsky.social · 3w agoThe PhD is the best point in time to try very dangerous ideas or to try things that don't work. – @odedrechavi.bsky.social, on the Night Science Podcast
I think the difficulty of understanding feedback loops underlies many big debates in science: Origin of life: "genes first" vs "metabolism first" (neither, it's a feedback loop) Development: "nature vs nurture" (neither, it's a feedback loop) Neuroscience: "brain vs behaviour" (you guessed it!)
Will this article age well? Robust, human curated scientific literature sounds a lot like human curated images and text. Do we remember the days when generative AI for images and text was never going to be convincing?
Anastasia Christakou 💙@christakou.bsky.social · 3w ago"The creation of robust human-curated scientific literature has never been more crucial." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
"Lucid dreaming enables us to watch the mind build a world from the inside, with many of its usual ingredients: a body embedded in an environment, often a social one, with a point of view and a sense of ownership over action."
Kevin Mitchell@wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 3w agoWatching the mind build a world: Lucid dreaming as a model for generative perception www.thetransmitter.org/perception/w... - super interesting piece by @magdalena-p.bsky.social!
New preprint (well, very updated). 🤖🧠🧪 We find that an abstract model of neuromodulation lets spiking neural networks perform much better, particularly in challenging noisy environments, using less energy. Relevant to #neuroscience and #neuromorphic computing. 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Neuromodulation enhances the capability and efficiency of spiking neural networks
Spiking neurons underlie the brain’s extreme energy efficiency, and therefore have great potential in neuromorphic computing, although realising this efficiency in practice has proven challenging. We ...
biorxiv.org
Wow. The Department for Education has just published new projections which estimate that the number of pupils in state-funded schools in England will plummet by more than 9% by 2031 amid falling birth rates And yet this issue receives probably 1,000th of the coverage the immigration debate receives
Dear UK: on immigration, be careful what you wish for.
Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · 3w agoThe media seems v unlikely to notice dramatically falling school numbers as they continue to run inaccurate stuff about migration pressures on school places
