Douglas Adams' birthday, time to launch my new business.
Cappuccinome, the coffeeshop of today. On entry you spit in a tube, the barista (a skilled bioinformatician) analyses the DNA, derives your innate taste preferences & delivers a cup of liquid that's almost but not quite entirely unlike coffee.
Almost half of Gen Z uses AI for dating advice.
@mpi-nl.bsky.social publicly tested this with social robot Olivia, Chinmaya Mishra and Tila Pronk. Fascinating experience.
I wrote a longread about it for TalkLing:
www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl?p=2867&lang=en
#AI #LLMs #dating #scicomm #neuroskyence
a drawing of a monk wearing dark glasses and rolling dice at a table
gambling monk, germany, 15th century
Last week, InScience Film Festival visitors could dive into a showcase in humanβrobot interaction by Chinmaya Mishra and Tila Pronk to a fascinating talk by Koen de Reus on seal communication, and Selim SametoΔluβs discussion on 'doomscrolling'.
Read the full wrap-up here www.mpi.nl/news/mpi-res...
Follow up on the genetics of chills from art and poetry. This time, including chills from music too 𧡠β¬οΈ
βIt would be foolish to suppose that black box AI can save us from the daunting task of understanding how genomes work. But who would want to forego that anyway, given the intellectual richness & beauty that, for all its messiness, modern molecular biology is revealing?β @philipcball.bsky.social ππ―π§ͺ
God duikt Γ³Γ³k op in je hersenen π§
Welke rol speelt ons brein in onze geloofsbeleving?
AndrΓ© Aleman heeft een helder en nuchter overzicht geschreven over wat de huidige stand van zaken is in de neurowetenschap van religie. Ik besprak zijn boek met veel plezier
www.theologie.nl/god-duikt-oo...
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
May your mating be assortative,
With traits well matched to you
Our multi-ancestry GWAS of EXTernalizing conditions (ADHD, substance use...) in ~4M people reveals neurodevelopmental risk, drug-repurposing targets, and yields one of the strongest psychiatric polygenic indices yet! π§¬π doi.org/10.64898/202...
Cartoon showing a street in the rain. A man on a bike is delivering food, while another courier is delivering packages from Amazon. Two other workers are collecting garbage. Inside one of the houses on the street, we see robots labeled 'AI' sitting dry and warm, engaged in making a paining, playing the violin and writing.
The robot apocalypse hasn't happened yet, but still I can't escape the feeling that something has gone horribly wrong... Cartoon for Dutch newspaper @trouw.nl.
More of my work for Trouw: www.trouw.nl/cartoons/tje...
#ArtificialIntelligence #creativity #work #GenerativeAI
Why did consciousness evolve at all? A superb special issue of @royalsocietypublishing.org brings together experts across disciplines to explore the functions of consciousness and why it emerged in some species but not others. @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...
Why does life explore so few of the forms it could possibly take? Using fractal descriptors, this #scienceadvances paper shows that Earthβs biosphere clusters around simple shapes, reflecting deep evolutionary constraints. @artemyte.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
Critiques of AI are valid; but many climate-based arguments reveal our bias toward small individual actions over real systemic change.
e.g. β¬οΈ
An LLM query = running a microwave for seconds
An hour of Netflix = enough to make popcorn
Yet few are boycotting their fav shows.
Interested? Read more:
Last week, our new paper on indirect assortative mating was published.πΎ Letβs take a closer look at what this means, why it matters, and what we found (π§΅/32):
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
While stories of singular DNA changes that drove evolution of human brain/behaviour remain seductive, advances across multiple fields of biology cast doubt on such simplistic narratives of our origins. A new paper from my lab shows how biobanks may speak to this fundamental question.π§ͺ
Explainerπ§΅π1/n
Integrating brain structure and function for the neurobiology and genetics of language www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... New study in which @jsamelink.bsky.social examined brain data from >32,000 people from @ukbiobank.bsky.social ... 1/4 β¬οΈ
I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short π§΅
Super proud of this fabulous team for challenging old comparative frameworks and rethinking what makes language language.
Read more in the thread below π or here ππ: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
Origins of language, one of humanityβs most distinctive traits, may be best explained as a unique convergence of multiple capacities each with its own evolutionary history, involving intertwined roles of biology & culture. This framing can expand research horizons. A 𧡠on our @science.org paper.π§ͺ1/n
If you're interested in how advances in human genomics are transforming our understanding of the biology of spoken & written language abilities, please do check out my new peer-reviewed "tutorial" article, just published.
π£οΈπ§¬π§ͺ
[Will also make a Bsky explainer 𧡠on it next week when I get some timeπ.]
Better schools can compensate for dispositions
As the single most important news story this year, I can't wait to see the detailed and central coverage this will get in every media outlet we have
OPEN PHD POSITION - Come join our group! The IMPRS at @mpi-nl.bsky.social is offering an PhD position on modelling structured meaning in the brain, supervised by me and Helen De Hoop at the Centre for Language Studies in the @dondersinst.bsky.social -
www.mpi.nl/imprs-phd-fe... #NeuroJobs #cogsci
Honestly, highly recommended! Very nice and diverse environment, excellent facilities!
Photograph of researchers at their benches in the custom-built molecular biology labs of the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, with green trees of the forest outside visible through large windows in the background.
Come join us for a 4-year PhD on effects of rare gene disruptions involved in speech disorder, investigated in human neuronal models (via gene-editing, tissue culture, brain organoids, high-res microscopy, transcriptomics, epigenomics).
More info: www.mpi.nl/imprs-phd-fe...
#AcademicJobs #PhDJobs
π§¬π§ͺ
Philosopher of mind John Searle has left the building
dailynous.com/2025/09/28/j...
He was best known for his Chinese Room Argument on artificial intelligence and wide-ranging work on the mind and consciousness
Ode to the original language model, or:
Give me literally Anything* instead of Large Language Models (LLMs)
*(no predictive coding either!)
By Lady Byronadrea LLMartin 1/n
At points of our evolutionary history multiple Homo lineages coexisted. Insights into these depend mainly on rare fossil crania, damaged & deformed by age. Removing such distortions, new reconstructions of a 1-million-yr-old cranium from China suggest a surprising mix of primitive & derived traits:π§ͺ
New paper alert! Systematic epidemiological analyses of up to 39,000 people illuminate biological/clinical links between impaired musical rhythm abilities & disorders affecting speech-language development. International collaboration led by @drsrishtin.bsky.social, out in @natcomms.nature.com. ππ§ͺ
