New species of flea-toads discovered in South America: adult Brachycephalus dacnis can be as small as 6.95mm. Unclear about brain size but probably well below cubic mm. New connectome project @albertcardona? :)
More evidence -- this time with audio tapes from the original experiment -- showing that the Stanford Prison Experiment was rigged to encourage terrible behavior by the guards
In Medium: https://gen.medium.com/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62
Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/K7gMN
Talking about this with my son, I was struck by how many pieces of major science/theory/culture in the mid-20th-century insisted that they "proved" humanity was inherently, natively selfish -- but turned out to be much less true
1/x
@eric_normandeau @jonny @LudoWaltman @eLife
It's all too clear, isn't it. #WebOfScience would like the status quo to not change at all – they are profiting enormously from it. Whereas scientists would like the status quo to change – our grants are being drained dry from publishing fees, our libraries are also drained dry from subscription fees, and academic administrators spend countless moneys on bibliometrics supplied by Clarivate to "evaluate" academics for their "throughput" – in quotes because using these words for what they actually do (counting papers and citations) is a perversion.
By the way #Clarivate owns #EndNote, #Publons and #ScholarOne – we really ought to not use *any* of these. It's in our power.
The previous government spent £40.1k per person on a 5-country round trip last year...
I had some snarky remark on how I have to take a 3h bus to the airport, fly coach for 12h (chicken pasta, yum!) and then give a 40min talk at a conference the next morning but I'm actually really grateful I get to do that sort of thing!
What does drive me up the wall is that we have to watch every penny of grant money while ex home secretary Cleverly got to spend £1.4k per head on the in-flight catering (no joke) and nobody even batted an eye. Banana republic...
Their whole trip cost around £561k total which could have paid for e.g. road resurfacing in the order of 47,000m^2 or around 5 miles. I'll remember that when I dodge the manhole-sized potholes on the way to work tomorrow morning.
The NeuronBridge website, for matching #ElectronMicroscopy and #LightMicroscopy data for #Drosophila #Neuroscience research, now includes EM data from FlyWire. Getting it working was a great effort by @neomorphic, Cristian Goina, Hideo Otsuna, Robert Svirskas, and @konrad_rokicki. Here is a screen capture of looking up a neuron on FlyWire Codex, finding its match in NeuronBridge, then viewing the match in 3D with volume rendering in the browser.
Interesting feature of the Apple LLM reasoning paper. I always tell my students that exams include no irrelevant information, which gives you a clue as to the answer. LLM's have learnt this too well, and can't ignore irrelevant info (perf drops 17-70%).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05229
In other words: exam-style questions have massive leakage that many students don't pick up on but that LLM's find impossible to ignore. I suspect this tells us more about the way we write exam questions than anything else. They're not a good measure of LLM performance, nor human!
Cabel Sasser is my new hero. His talk at XOXO Conference is absolutely EPIC and a must see that you should watch till the very end. I cried my eyes out (and I have 20 minutes to recover my composure before a conference call): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df_K7pIsfvg
Follow Cabel here: @cabel
My little one is only 3 years old but I will make sure to save this video and show it to her when she's a bit older.
For now, I'll encourage her to follow Cabel's advice: appreciate everything, endlessly ✨
very happy and proud to finally share our work on the evolution of feeding preference in flies! @TomAuer @dahaniel @RibeiroCarlitos and support from many beautiful people (@Benton lab, @Arguello lab, @Simon_Sprecher lab)...hope you like it!
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.11.617601v1.article-metrics
Whole adult fly brain connectome for FAFB (female adult fly brain) – last year in preprint form, today as an immersive feature in Nature.
140,000 neurons, over 50 million synapses – organised into over 8,000 cell types. (VNC not included.)
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d42859-024-00053-4/index.html
The whole connectome: Dorkenwald et al. 2024 (Seung, Murthy) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07558-y
Cell types: Schlegel et al. 2024 (Jefferis) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07686-5 by @uni_matrix
Network statistics: Lin et al. 2024 (Murthy) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07968-y
Visual system: Garner et al. 2024 (Wernet, Kim) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07967-z and Matsliah et al. (Murthy, Seung) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07981-1
Seung also put out a solo paper on predicting visual function from the connectome: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07953-5
Control of halting in walking: Sapkal et al. 2024 (Bidaye) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07854-7
FAFB imaged by @davi 's group back in 2018: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)30787-6
We are looking for exceptional #AIScientist|s to join our AI@HHMI initiative at @hhmijanelia. We want to uncover fundamental principles underlying complex biological systems that are inaccessible without new innovations that combine #AI with experimental design. We are strongly committed to #OpenScience and interdisciplinary collaboration.
https://hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External/job/Janelia-Research-Campus/AI-Scientist_R-3065
If you are interested in how #AI methods can be applied to #model biological systems, this should be interesting for you: https://alleninstitute.org/events/data-driven-discovery-ai-and-modeling-in-biology/
. Presentations and discussions will be live-streamed.
For #SciArtSeptember: 50 EPG neurons from the #Drosophila, segmented from electron microscopy images, rendered in #Blender3d driven by neuVid. This ring of neurons forms part of the fly’s internal compass. As the fly changes its heading, neuronal activity moves around the ring, as shown by the false color gradient. Imaging and reconstruction by #HHMIJanelia and Google Research (www.janelia.org/project-team/flyem/hemibrain); function described by Hulse et al (doi.org/10.7554/eLife.66039).
Can we observe how the injured leg of an animal is regenerated?
We have figured out how to do this in the crustacean Parhyale. Over the course of a week, we can record the entire process of leg regeneration at cell-by-cell resolution.
Our latest preprint describes how we do this and what we see:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.11.612529v1
More info/links on https://bsky.app/profile/michalis-averof.bsky.social/post/3l3xonnzt6u2n
Enjoying the fruits of my labor now that I finished my 12-legged 'Carpentopod' table project. See
https://decarpentier.nl/carpentopod for project info. (Or come see it live at Maker Days Eindhoven this 13 & 14 Sept.)
Discovery of spiking network model parameters constrained by neural recordings, using simulation-based inference https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.21.608969v2 #neuroscience
Brains! Brain! Brains! 🧟♂️
Postdoc in Cambridge, UK working on connectomics.