marathon @marathon0@qoto.org

"The vaccine, called Qdenga and developed by the pharmaceutical company Takeda, headquartered in Tokyo, is particularly significant because it is the first for people who have not been exposed to dengue. The virus infects up to 400 million people a year. The Indonesian drug regulator approved use of the vaccine without testing for previous exposure in August. Europe’s drug regulator is also considering approving the vaccine without testing."
#Dengue

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03546-2

Approval of a vaccine against Dengué fever without requiring pre-testing is a dramatic step forward. Dengué fever is, at present, confined to the tropics but with global warming, one of the primary vectors of the disease, the Asian Tiger mozzie, has been found in some areas of Europe. If it can establish itself here, so surely will Dengué fever.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03546-2

I have spent a few years developing a #microresponsive web site design and management system called #ecoWeb. It results in much smaller site code, which is thus more #sustainable (less energy & resource) and much faster - google #PageSpeed Insights conclude up to 99% speed.
Altogether a good thing I suspect?
Examples are:
https://operabrava.com &
https://sailscorpion.co.uk
I am interested in talking with others who have an interest in this area of better engineered performant web sites?

Golden temple

#Buddhist #Temple #Wat #Architecture #GooglePixel #Travel #Google #Pixel #Photography #Pixel6 #TeamPixel #Pixelfed #Asia #Buddha #Thailand #ShotOnPixel #Yaowarat #Chinatown

Some people think Mastodon is too weird to become popular:

I joined Twitter in 2008. We had to put a "d" in front of a tweet to convert it to a direct message and every other day you had some embarrassing private moments exposed because someone forgot about the “d”. Hashtags were just a community hack, introduced by Chris Messina to somehow tag content. Search? Hah, you wish! Tweets via SMS were supposed to be a thing. Oh, and the daily meet and greet with the failwhale. Totally not weird.

Now that I have the opportunity, let me #introduce our quality-diversity #compchem algorithm to Mastadon. It's based on @janhjensen 's generative algorithm. We avoid stagnation issues, and illuminates opportunities across chemical space, and outperforms #deeplearning approaches!

Code: https://github.com/Jonas-Verhellen/Argenomic

Paper: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/sc/d0sc03544k

#drugdesign #optimisation #algorithm #chemistry #generative

Less than 45 minutes, including preparation, and the rice is done in parallel

EU talks a lot about Free Movement of Goods + People but it only applies to Goods. In 2004 #EU was in a rush to get Eastern Europe countries into EU - Why? To access a cheap pool of Labour for Western Europe and to get them into #NATO - And now look where NATO expansion got us..?

🐦🔗: https://nitter.eu/wallacemick/status/1590010749400756224

Anyone on #Qoto or the wider #Fediverse attending #nodes2022 #neo4j conference next week? Maybe doing some live-tooting?

https://neo4j.com/blog/nodes-2022/

I've got Graph Pattern Matching and Bootstrapping Your Graph Project on my agenda for Day 1 so far... but I'm tossed between the "Fashion Retail Recommendations Using Neo4j Graph Data Science and Apache Arrow" and "Graph Modeling: The Shadow Graph" for the next session...

Is there any kind of dedicated group mechanism on here for people to share notes and comments live while attending a conference together online? Or maybe there is a dedicated Discord (or similar) for this already?

Do you have any photo of the #LunarEclipse? I'm from #italy and I missed it!

We read this very cool paper from Ayelet Sarel, Shaked Palgi, Dan Blum, Johnatan Aljadeff, Liora Las & Nachum Ulanovsky in our lab meeting today.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05112-2 (open access!)

They recorded from two bats flying back and forth in a 135m tunnel. They wirelessly recorded from the hippocampus of one of the bats and recorded the position and ultrasonic vocalizations of the bats. As the bats approach each other, they dramatically increase their vocalizations (presumably to avoid collision).

Hippocampal place cells are modulated by the relative position of the animals in complex ways, and this modulation is very rapid (turns on and off within a few seconds) as the bats approach each other.

I think the paper is quite a beautiful demonstration of how we can use ethological phenomena (like the sudden appearance of a conspecific) to better understand neural dynamics.

That said, I have a substantial concern with the paper. Hopefully, this toot might find its way to the authors - encourage them to join mastodon and reply :)

The authors analyze the neural activity relative to the tunnel , which they call "position" and with respect to the other bat which they call "interbat distance". However, the measure that they call "interbat distance" is not distance. Euclidean distance along a line is defined as +√((x₂-x₁)²). **It is always positive**. The authors _redefined_ distance to be the signed value x₂-x₁. This quantify is the position of x₂ relative to x₁, not the distance.

You might think that I'm being pedantic. Maybe the authors just thought it would be clearer to talk about "position" and "distance" instead of saying "tunnel position" and "position relative to other bat". However, they claim that "hippocampal neurons can rapidly switch their core computation to represent the relevant behavioural variables." If we change their wording to my wording, then what they have shown is that hippocamal neurons can rapidly switch the reference point that is being used to represent their current position, including using a reference point that is moving.

This is still a cool result. But is less novel. There is extensive work examining how hippocampus remaps or "reregisters" place cells when animals have to monitor multiple reference frames. A nice example is from [André Fenton's lab](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1000403). The authors cite Fenton's work but say that Fenton "reported switching between two position maps, whereas here we found switching from position representation to distance-by-position representation." And that, i think really underscores how their redefinition of distance influenced the way they think about their results.

#neuroscience #bats #hippocampus #journalclub

Here, internet, have more dog photos!