New study finds learning makes neurons work better together, not independently. Tracking the visual cortex showed that as skills improve, neurons share more info, blending vision with expectation to build a flexible, inference-based model of the world.
#NeuroSkyence
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Awesome work, using RT modelling to show clear prioritisation of semantic features during WM maintenance! Especially for information that had fallen outside the focus of attention ➡️ more evidence that “silent” WM traces behave like episodic memory.
New preprint 🚨
Across multiple tasks, we show that higher-level info is more readily accessible in WM before evidence accumulation begins. Attention then boosts perceptual detail.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
A lot of fun with my colleagues @ckerren.bsky.social and @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social
This Wednesday at UCL, come by if you’re around!
New paper 🥳 RL relies a lot on an agent’s capability to explore. Our strategy-guided exploration makes the agent find new solutions more efficiently. It learns faster, and in some environments its Pass@1 surpasses the base model’s Pass@128. 🧵 1/6
📄 arxiv.org/abs/2603.02045
If you were interested in the original paper, but no longer have time for reading or just like videos, I recently gave a talk hosted by the kind and erudite @drmichaellevin.bsky.social, which you can now view on his youtube channel.
Thank you enormously for having me!
@jaanaru.bsky.social
Earlier this week, we published an essay by @jvoigts.bsky.social on the consequences of low peer review participation: lnkd.in/edfaWQBW. We continue the conversation on peer review today with a piece by @eblancosuarez.bsky.social about how to teach students how to be thoughtful and fair reviewers!
Peer reviewed academic journal publishing high quality research on how people write and how writing can be effectively taught. Please help us spread the word by following, retweeting and adding us to your starter pack!
@jneurolang.bsky.social
🚨New Paper!🚨 How do reasoning LLMs handle inferences that have no deterministic answer? We find that they diverge from humans in some significant ways, and fail to reflect human uncertainty… 🧵(1/10)
Can large language models *introspect*?
In a new paper, @kmahowald.bsky.social and I study the MECHANISM of introspection in big open-source models.
tldr: Models detect internal anomalies through DIRECT ACCESS, but don't know what the anomalies are.
And they love to guess “apple” 🍎
Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one?
In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵
the human hippocampus receives convergent input from multiple sensory systems, yet we lack a basic understanding of how this structure integrates across senses.
we tackle this problem in our new preprint!
paper: doi.org/10.64898/202...
w/ Aryan Agarwal, @yannanzhu.bsky.social, & Nick Turk-Browne
it's out!
@hazimi.bsky.social and i explore how higher order representations of *one's own first-order representational uncertainty* -- not representations OF noisiness in the world -- can be studied, including how they are constructed in the first place.
philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...
Out now in @plos.org CB: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Neural representations of tasks change over time, even in the absence of changes in task performance. But neurons change tuning at different rates. How does a neuron's stability relate to its interactions with the population?
#compneuro #neuroskyence
Today's evacuation orders in Beirut displace 100,000s - including elderly people, children, people with disabilities, etc. etc., all having to leave in a hurry with no idea what will happen to their homes. This kind of mass forced displacement is illegal under international law.
www.bbc.com/news/article...
- Lebanon's government sovereignty has been on the ropes for a long time, but it's now essentially dead
- The Hezbollah disarmament process has been completely discredited
- Electricity in Beirut is already unreliable and the economy near-shambles
I saw a joke tweet saying "grep is the most important agent tool" so I decided to benchmaxx a faster grep tool in Rust.
It worked lololol
I think one of the most staggering industry shifts in my 16 years as a tech reporter is that it’s not become a question of “should our product help the government kill and/or surveil people?” but “to what extent?”
www.anthropic.com/news/where-s...
It’s not disingenuous to point out that the NYT did not run a single front page story of the Minab bombing. You don’t dispute this claim because it’s true. And the story that you reference on your webpage does not attribute blame to US/Israel and frames it as an allegation by “Iranian state media”
DART's impactor shifted asteroid Dimorphos' velocity by 2.7 mm/s.
Based on an asteroid density of 1500 to 3300 kg/m^3, that means the momentum enhancement factor is 2.2-4.9x thanks to kinetic energy ejecting additional debris upon impact:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The view from the ground in Iran - people running away from the US/Israel regime's bombs.
This new cycle of violence was all too predictable. For months, Israeli officials had signalled an escalation of their campaign against Hezbollah. Despite a ceasefire that ended a devastating 13-month war in 2024, Israel had continued with its bombing of Lebanon almost every day, saying the group was trying to rebuild its capabilities. Hezbollah, however, had remained quiet, aware that any move would inevitably be met with a powerful retaliation.
Interesting admission by BBC
A cochlea imaged in light-sheet microscopy (right) with staining for spiral ganglion neurons (red) and inner hair cells (blue). You will develop AI-based methods to analyze these structures, for example via segmentation of the individual cells (right) that will support gene therapy development for hearing loss and a better overall understanding of the anatomy of hearing.
Looking for a PhD position at the intersection of AI, imaging, and gene therapy? Apply for this position in my lab: tinyurl.com/2a2v6tvx
Part of sfb1690.uni-goettingen.de to study hearing, vision, and more.
Plus, you can create pretty pictures as the one below :).
Feels a bit late now that all of the South and southern suburbs have been ordered to evacuate. As well as 3 major towns in Bekaa.
But I’ll take all the help we can get. I don’t expect Macron to come thru but if he can put this into action, I will take it
Chickpeas were able to grow, flower and produce seeds in fake lunar soil that had been treated with fungi and compost.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chickpeas-moon-dirt-seeds-space-farming
Hey science people you might like this
Drawing of the "Aeon" project, an open-source platform to study the neural basis of ethological behaviours over naturalistic timescales.
Are you a neuroscientist with great coding skills, or a software engineer interested in the brain?
We are recruiting for a research software engineer to help us build pipelines to process weeks of neural and behavioural recordings from freely moving animals.
More details: bit.ly/rse-2026a
Out in PNAS:
Repetitions trigger illusory awareness in implicit statistical learning
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
We find that the presence of repetitions in sequences that follow a hidden, complex regularity makes participants think they consciously figured out the real regularity... 1/n
Excited to share the latest Olmo model: Olmo Hybrid. This is a model with gated delta net (GDN) layers in a 3:1 ratio with full attention. It follows lots of other developments like Qwen 3.5 and Kimi Linear.
A photo of Doc Brown from Back to the Future holding jumper cables labelled "Deranged Activist" with a grant of NIH funding curves below it.
My weekly update on NIH funding
This includes awards made through 2/27/26
Warning: This thread contains data compiled by a known deranged_activist™. Do not read while operating heavy machinery.
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