First whole-brain recording of social sound processing in a vertebrate. Surprises start in the hindbrain; thalamus gates conspecific calls; male and female brains diverge downstream. Work by @joerghenninger.bsky.social, @mh123.bsky.social sky.social and team. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Exciting! Looking forward to reading 🙂
This is a very important story. Thank you @science.org for covering it.
Two critical points: 1. SIMPLE INVESTIGATION! 2. Notice how not being desperate for money leads people to use good judgement? This is why philanthropy isn't going to fix what Trump has done to our scientific ecosystem.
I have a male friend who spent some time in Axel's lab. About the 3rd conversation he had with Axel, Axel broke the ice with "So, have you fucked [a female postdoc in the lab] yet?"
My friend was horrified...
Breaking:
Richard Axel, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and professor, just announced that he was resigning as a co-director of a flagship neuroscience institute at Columbia University because of his friendship with Jeffery Epstein.
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/n...
The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.
Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.
This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.
Mia Valentina Paz Faria A 7-year-old from Venezuela who was living in Austin, Texas Detained for 70 days “I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”
UPDATE: Staff at the ICE concentration camp in Dilley, Texas have begun raiding the dormitories of kids and their parents to confiscate and destroy letters from the children. This is in response to the ace reporting by @micarosenberg et al for ProPublica:
“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”
- 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas.
Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children.
www.propublica.org/article/ice-...
Excited to launch Principia, a nonprofit research organisation at the intersection of deep learning theory and AI safety.
Our goal is to develop theory for modern machine learning systems that can help us understand complex network behaviors, including those critical for AI safety and alignment.
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"Moderna's CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: 'You cannot make a return on investment if you don't have access to the U.S. market. Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.” 9:12 AM Feb 12, 2026 604.8K Views
In terms of what cures are being lost:
- Epstein-Barr virus is perhaps the major trigger for multiple sclerosis
- herpes simplex virus causes cold sores, genital herpes, infections in babies, deadly meningitis
- shingles virus causes an intensely painful disease
Really nice work from the Holmes lab looking at amygdala astrocytes in fear memory and extinction!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
To be fair, Ed Boyden wrote this in 2020: www.media.mit.edu/posts/commen...
Still curious what he discussed with zuck, elon etc at this meeting: www.justice.gov/epstein/file...
No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.
Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
“The human body is an obstacle to efficiency — the limited head, the distracted heart, the tired limbs. Taking things inside saps energy and time, retaining them takes up space; and all for occasional use, if at all.”
The only surprise is they admit it
hahahaha what
Save the date for the annual "Neural Circuits and Behaviour" satellite conference at the Canadian Association for Neuroscience annual meeting, cohosted by @franklandlab.bsky.social and myself on May 18, 2026. We have a great speaker lineup and will be selecting 4 trainees talks from our registrants!
Fair enough. So we teleost people get beatings from up and down the evolutionary tree.
HD system is in the zebrafish DTN & IPN, habenula gives visual input
Defending PhD student, looking over their thesis: “If I knew then what I know now, I could’ve done all of this in like 9 months.”
A thread about my favorite pioneering cave explorers and why I don’t think AI will ever “solve” biology.
How does the brain control locomotion? In our new preprint, we uncover a brain circuit in Drosophila that controls forward walking independently of turning. This dedicated locomotor circuit enables flexible motor control and might reflect a shared principle across species. doi.org/10.64898/202...
What in the Gestapo is going on in Grand Rapids?
Watch this activist get arrested *mid-interview* for speaking out against U.S. action in Venezuela.
Carolin Warnecke together with Hanna, Dennis, Bene & Kerstin from my lab show that re-exposure to reward diminishes multiple associated olfactory memories.
We’re hiring 2 postdocs—DM/email me for details. #Postdoc #Hiring
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
📢 Please help spread the word: We’re hiring a Head of Student & Postdoc Affairs to coordinate our international PhD program, provide guidance & career counseling, lead training programs, collaborate on EDI initiatives, and manage alumni relations. Apply at www.fmi.ch/education-ca...
1/n: A new collaborative preprint from the lab to start the year: "A multi-ring shifter network computes head direction in zebrafish" together with Siyuan Mei, Martin Stemmler and Andreas Herz from the LMU, Munich.
That’s quite the pivot from LeCun who disagreed vigorously (let us say) with @garymarcus.bsky.social on this issue for quite some time…
"40 percent of MRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity"; "Since tens of thousands of fMRI studies worldwide are based on this assumption, our results could lead to opposite interpretations in many of them.”
www.tum.de/en/news-and-...
If the Romans had simply deported woke baby Jesus to South Sudan, a lot of trouble could have been avoided
This is exactly why people claiming "it came up with a new set of experiments/ideas/concepts" are carrying water for the weasels trying to put genAI on everything. This is how we get science defunded. This is how your colleagues lose their jobs 🧪
I wouldn't describe Jay as "man in the middle" unless I were making sort of human centipede analogy.
Landing and takeoff sensorimotor pathways illustrated alongside fly drawings showing behavioral responses.
How do animals channel sensory information into motor pathways to generate flexible behavioral output? Excited to share a new preprint addressing this question by leveraging the new #maleCNS connectome, behavioral experiments, and in-vivo recordings: doi.org/10.64898/202.... A long🧵...
