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• Post #4496292

  TO YOU. «STRANGER! if you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?» Walt Wiltman #fediverse #poetry

• Post #4338339

  I'm reviewing a grant proposal. Someone I know said "just use an LLM, then read what it says, use what you like, send it in." That is many things but above all irresponsible, and here is why. I read the grant and wrote my own evaluation. The grant is not exactly in my field of research, so there was quite some looking up of papers, techniques, and jargon in the process. What I wrote is my perspective (what I have been asked to provide) and makes sense to me only because of the leg...

• Post #4324658

  Proper water management. Shocks me that it sounds too good; everything written here is rather sensible and down to earth: "Labour MP Helena Dollimore said Burnham should “end the era of extraction” in the water industry" Turning failed companies into cooperatives: "Companies that come out of a SAR [special administration regime] would be required to do so as not-for-profit cooperatives, rather than being sold to the highest bidder" "Coppard said: “Water is an essenti...

• Post #4293568

  “AI is taking over the world”, meanwhile, a recently updated “AI” detected a person … If AI is the future, then millions of spiders out there are bound to earn personhood. #AIFail

• Post #4121907

  Map of ongoing wildfires, world wide. https://firemap.live/ #NoPlanetB #GlobalWarming #EcosystemCollapse #FireMap

• Post #4106572

  A student was telling me, they haven’t read some papers I asked them to read because it takes them a very long time. Well, let me tell you: it took me 20 days (with 2-4 hours per day) to read a single large paper in my field, to understand the multiple years of work that went into it with its many implications for my own research and for the broader field. 20 days. And it was worth it. There are no shortcuts. #academia

• Post #4007074

  English language as a poor choice for training language models [*you don't say!*]. David Eichler proposes Basque, a language with very explicit consistency rules in its sentence structure that double as constraints for correctness. "The hypothesis predicts the Basque-first model will show superior performance on tasks that require robust predicate-argument reasoning, independent of surface language fluency." "We propose treating English — and any other natural language — as...

• Post #4005629

  Primer: "Neurons generated shortly after birth encode the scent of early-life happiness", by Chloé Guillaume and Elisa Galliano, 2026. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3003890 #neuroscience #olfaction

• Post #3608774

  Hi Raspberry Pi experts, I can't sort out this error: 'GPIO not allocated' for a HyperPixel 4.0 rectangular touchscreen connected to a pi 4B. Here is the full report I filed at the support forum: https://forums.pimoroni.com/t/gpio-not-allocated-error-for-hyperpixel-4-0-on-a-raspberry-pi-4b/28950 What can cause this error if no other devices are using the pins? How to overcome it? #RaspberryPi #RaspberryPi4B #HyperPixel4

• Post #3604082

  We live when we support each other. As summarized by @manlius@mathstodon.xyz : "the strongest predictor of a long, healthy and fulfilling life is not wealth, intelligence, talent or professional achievement. It is the quality of close relationships." Commentary on the Harvard Study of Adult Development: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/02/work-out-daily-ok-but-how-socially-fit-are-you/ The longitudinal study project page: https://www.lifespanresearch.org/harvard-study/ #...

• Post #3583997

  "Precise, individualized foraging flights in honeybees revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking", by Rachael Stentiford et al. 2026 (Andrew Straw's lab) @strawman@sciencemastodon.com https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)00084-9 "Although bees could choose from multiple routes, we discovered that individual bees follow idiosyncratic paths with striking and repeatable precision." "The level of precision exhibited by their flight paths exc...

• Post #2552332

  Postdoc position open in my lab (UK) to study a disease model in #Drosophila with comparative connectomics: https://mrc.tal.net/vx/mobile-0/appcentre-int/brand-3/spa-1/candidate/so/pm/1/pl/3/opp/2765-Postdoctoral-Scientist-Neurobiology-Dr-Albert-Cardona-LMB-2765/en-GB My lab: * our page: https://syn.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/ * institutional page: https://mrclmb.ac.uk/research-leaders/albert-cardona/ #neuroscience #PhDJobs #Parkinson

• Post #2110124

  Scandal at Elsevier, *again*: https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/third-editor-fired-in-elseviers-citation As revealed by Chris Brunet. #ScientificPublishing #RELX #Elsevier

• Post #2092584

  So much talk about data, but no funder wants to support databases. FlyBase is in trouble, yet a key reference in biology research. Raising funds to support curating connectome datasets, including their large, nanometer-resolution volumes, is hard. Yet then evaluators point out that we aren't doing enough to make it easy to access – yet with what funds? And likewise for every scientific dataset ... either there is an internally funded institute behind it (and even then) or it is hell....

• Post #1831855

  An editor from a Springer Nature journal, a company that posted $2.1 billion in revenue in 2022 [1], from an industry with double-digit percent profits (~30% [2]), kindly asked me, an academic in the UK where salaries continue to plummet [3], whether I would be pleased to review a paper for them, for free ... so I kindly asked whether they would consider paying me. It is only logical. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springer_Nature [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitabl...

• Post #1779248

  For UK university admissions: "GCSE science attainment was a consistently strong predictor of success across both STEM and humanities subjects, suggesting broader academic utility than typically acknowledged." "These findings challenge prevailing policy- and school-level emphasis on maths and English as the priorities for post-16 readiness" In plain language: https://theconversation.com/why-science-gcses-matter-more-than-we-think-in-a-post-truth-age-276306...

• Post #1779242

  Remembering this and related reports of the distribution of article-level citations in Nature ... Riikonen P, Vihinen M. National research contributions: A case study on Finnish biomedical research. Scientometrics. 2008 Nov 1;77(2):207-22. https://akjournals.com/view/journals/11192/77/2/article-p207.xml Nature sells impact (factor), hence there is a bias towards publishing papers that will accrue more citations in the next two years than its current impact factor times 2, since that is (or it...

• Post #1776784

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@brembs/116488494512795198 If you are getting started in academia and publishing in general, and don't know much about the impact factor, this is a great place to start: #ScientificPublishing

• Post #1708662

  "Feeding decision-making by a single neuron via disparate neurotransmitters", Savas et al. 2026 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69443-8 LK: leucokinin SELKs: subesophageal LK neurons "Our study uncovers a mechanism whereby strong activation of SELKs results in LK release, leading to feeding suppression, while weak activation results in acetylcholine-dependent feeding promotion. Thus, our results reveal that a single pair of neurons, SELKs, differentially c...

• Post #1708068

  Loren Looger, legendary protein wrangler, who always generously shared their genetically encoded calcium indicators and more while still in development and unpublished, is asking for labs to co-write grants with him: "Dear science world, I need help, please. If you like the tools and data we generate, and our shareware attitude, can you please co-apply for funding with us? It turns out that I'm terrible at writing grants, and we need $$ or else we can't make more GCaMPs...

• Post #1708063

  Hi #infosec community: any recommended practices for preventing a personal blog webpage from being dominated by crawlers? The robots.txt seems largely ignored. Crawlers presently consume ~75% of resources according to the access logs. I don't mind not being listed on any web search engines. Would a basic auth work? Can one make the basic auth dialog show a message that provides the password hint in it, like "What is my first name?" #blogging

• Post #1663893

  2+2 years position for a software engineer / data scientist with serious programming chops in my lab at the #MRCLMB to develop tech for #connectomics and #neuroscience : https://fa-evzn-saasfaukgovprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperience/en/sites/UKRI-Careers/job/2250 Please do share with suitable candidates, and feel free to reach out via email to discuss details. Deadline for application: May 10th. Starting date: any within 2026. Requires Masters plus industry experience, or...

• Post #1593485

  "A bidirectional brain-fat body axis for pathogen avoidance", Wang et al. 2026 (Grunwald Kadow's lab) https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(26)00217-5 #Drosophila 1/2

• Post #1593484

  "A simplified High-Pressure Freezing Workflow in Autogrids", Weber et al. 2026 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.18.719352v1 #HighPressureFreezing #HPF #ElectronMicroscopy

• Post #1593483

  The "ERC President explains stricter application measures amid rising demand for funding" [1] and then scientists say, in an open letter, that's nuts, what you should be doing is increasing the overall funding of the Horizon program [2], because right now funding stands at a tiny fraction of the e.g., annual NIH budget in the US. Compare ~€2.5 billion/year for Horizon (for all disciplines) compared to over $45 billion/year for the NIH alone (NSF and Darpa would add even...

• Post #1593474

  "How to Stop A Data Center in Your Backyard" https://lataco.com/stop-sgv-data-center-building

• Post #1545233

  1. Invent an illness; 2. Put up a couple of preprints about it; 3. See AI companies' web crawlers swallow it hook, line, and sinker whole; 4. LLMs start telling users that the condition is real. WTF. 5. See published papers cite them, likely from authors using LLMs to write them. WTAF. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y #LLMFail #LLMs #chatbots #Bixonimania

• Post #1409958

  "Rapid temporal processing in the olfactory bulb underlies concentration-invariant odor identification and signal decorrelation", Karadas et al. 2026 (Dima Rinberg's lab). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02250-y Circuits in the mouse olfactory bulb implement a rapid filter: "Animals who rely on smell need to identify and discriminate odors despite fluctuations in concentration, yet odor receptor activation is strongly concentration dependent. [...]...

• Post #1409957

  The lab of Anne Carpenter is moving to Purdue and hiring postdocs: Postdoctoral position: machine learning for drug discovery Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R5kSSUX4A3x0CZYsTUdUtxPJYHRwZ04SIl5G06_MrlQ/preview?tab=t.0 #PhDJobs #MachineLearning #DrugDiscovery

• Post #1409955

  Manta ray egg, dry, on a sandy beach. http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/350617710 #iNaturalist #LongIsland #MantaRay