Janel Le Belle

Why the Brain Consolidates: Predictive Forgetting for Optimal Generalisation Standard accounts of memory consolidation emphasise the stabilisation of stored representations, but struggle to explain representational drift, semanticisation, or the necessity of offline replay. He...

Really neat work by Fountas and colleagues at UCL:
arxiv.org/abs/2603.04688
They propose that consolidation reflects a form of "predictive forgetting" that aids generalization.

Startup is building the first data centre to use human brain cells

Cortical Labs is building two data centres that will house its neuron-filled chips. The technology is still in the very early stages of development

Intestinal interoceptive dysfunction drives age-associated cognitive decline - Nature Age-related microbiome changes increase medium-chain fatty acid-producing bacteria, driving GPR84-mediated myeloid inflammation, impaired vagal signalling and hippocampal dysfunction; targeting this g...

Intestinal interoceptive dysfunction drives age-associated cognitive decline www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Could I ask for a copy as well? It’s the last week of my undergrad Neurophilosophy class at UCLA & I fear that I may bias the students towards PP because I work on sensory perception in autism & the possibility of PP contribution to sensory over-responsivity. Would love to share your critique of it.

Reality is not a controlled hallucination <p><em>The idea that 'reality is a controlled hallucination' has been recently popularised by figures such as philosopher Anil Seth. But this claim, which purports to be hard, down-to-earth science, i...

"Reality Is Not a Controlled Hallucination" by yours truly iai.tv/articles/rea...

The reviews for it have been insanely good so that doesn’t seem to be the case. 🤷🏻‍♀️

There’s actually a reason for that in the story.

Project Hail Mary Review: Lord & Miller’s Transcendent Jewel Brings The Joy Of Discovery Back To Science Fiction Ryan Gosling turns in a career-best performance in Phil Lord & Christopher Miller’s new film, which is headed straight for the sci-fi pantheon.

Project Hail Mary Review: This Transcendent Jewel Brings The Joy Of Discovery Back To Science Fiction buff.ly/6vqwMeO

Releasing March 20th, here's a very engaging review of the eagerly anticipated adaptation of Andy Weir's novel.
#ProjectHailMary #SciFi #ScienceFiction #Film #Movies

‘Project Hail Mary’ Was Filmed Without a Single Greenscreen, Directors Reveal Project Hail Mary directors reveal zero greenscreen used - full practical sets and Rocky puppet make sci-fi feel real. Hits theaters March 20.

The wildest thing about 'Project Hail Mary' is not just Ryan Gosling in space. 👀 It is that the whole movie was filmed without a single greenscreen shot! 🔥🎥

Read more here: https://www.rfr.bz/b094c36
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#ProjectHailMary #RyanGosling #VFX #PracticalEffects

Read Project Hail Mary first—the movie is out next week and the reviews have been insanely good!

I’ve studied MAGA rhetoric for a decade, and this is what I see in Hegseth’s boasts, action-movie one-liners and gloating over dominance Why does Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brag and gloat in his statements about the Iran war? In the MAGA media world, war is a game, a test of masculine fortitude.

"The anti-institutional ethos of far-right media explains why these officials refuse to conform to “elite” expectations and instead speak in a manner that is bombastic, outrageous and perverse." #MsReads via @us.theconversation.com

Hegseth gutted offices that would have probed Iran school strike The number of Pentagon employees who focus on mitigating civilian casualties has dropped from 200 people to less than 40.

Politico is recapping Pro Publica's reporting here, but it's essential stuff. Hegseth gutted the Pentagon offices that would have investigated the strike on an Iranian girls’ school. The Civilian Protection Center went from 200 employees to 20, with only 1 left investigating civilian casualties

Consciousness may be more than the brain's output — it may be an input, too A new framework suggests that bursts of neural chaos could be the fingerprints of a conscious mind at work.

“A radical new theory suggests something different: The brain doesn’t only generate #consciousness; rather, consciousness itself can influence the brain’s physical dynamics — and it leaves physical traces when it does.”

bigthink.com/mind-behavio...

‘Project Hail Mary’ Review The most perfectly crowd-pleasing movie I’ve ever seen.

"Any resistance I had to the picture crumbled when I realized it was, maybe, propped up by something quite foolish: I simply haven’t felt joy like this in the theater in years."

He owns & runs Twitter/X. Everything on it, including you, benefits him. How can you possibly be using *his platform* and have nothing to do with Musk?

Oh FFS. So glad to hear Jared “I read 25 books on it” Kushner is involved. What position does he actually hold in the government again?!

People are losing their healthcare but they spent money on this

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Is Stepping Down Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will take over as interim CEO as Bluesky’s board of directors hunts for a permanent replacement.

Exclusive: Jay Graber is stepping down as head of Bluesky. Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will be the interim CEO until a permanent replacement is found.

OpenAI and Google Workers File Amicus Brief in Support of Anthropic Against the US Government Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean is among the AI researchers and engineers rushing to Anthropic's defense.

More than 30 employees from OpenAI and Google, including Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, filed an amicus brief on Monday in support of Anthropic in its legal fight against the US government www.wired.com/story/openai... via @mzeff.bsky.social

The ability of the US to even pretend we have the moral high ground in any situation is pretty much gone for a generation, at least

Guess What Moderate Democratic Voters Aren’t Anymore? Moderate. Two new polls suggest that moderate Democrats, too, want higher taxes on the rich and some measure of economic populism. Moderate isn’t what it was in 1992.

Moderate Democrats with columns in newspapers are constantly saying the Democratic Party is way too liberal on "social" issues. Moderate Democratic voters in real life do not feel this way. With some polling data from @gelliottmorris.com and @dataforprogress.org. newrepublic.com/article/2074...

We are a very stupid country

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/o...

She's not taking any excuses and neither are we. Georgia, the state is on the line. Tuesday, March 10th-no "I forgot," no "my vote doesn't matter," no "I was busy." None of that! Get up and VOTE for Shawn Harris. On March 10th, you can make a difference! #GA14

AI error or not, Iran school bombing is a permanent stain on America’s soul | Will Bunch A debate on AI in warfare obscures the truth about an Iran school bombing. U.S. humans are to blame for this war crime.

They had names. They had beautiful faces. And they had the same dreams as your kids - crushed when American "precision" bombs slammed into their Minab elementary school, killing 175

Don't blame AI for this. Blame the sick humans who see war as a game

My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/iran...

Open PhD/Postdoc position (start: Oct 2026). Topic: AI/LLMs and child language/communicative/cognitive development. The exact project will be shaped with the candidate. Join our team @univ-amu.fr at the intersection of computer and cognitive science (& right next to the Calanques!). Send me your CV!

In an Intense Election Year, New Post Office Rules Could Trip Up Voter Registration A change in how mail is postmarked could lead some voters to miss key deadlines, including voter registration. Advocates worry the people most affected will be those already facing voting barriers.

Many states require that mail ballots be postmarked by a specific day. But due to new USPS rules, voters may need to put their ballot in a mailbox days in advance.

There's something deeply obscene and broken about the fact that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are bombing elementary schools in an illegal war of aggression, and there's still a sense among the opposition that it has to be explained in terms of gas prices in order to get American voters to care.

Compact deep neural network models of the visual cortex Nature - Parsimonious deep neural network models can be used for prediction of visual neuron responses.

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico?

In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony.

It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small!

rdcu.be/e5H8G

Here is the "effective payline" for each institute, estimated (by Claude) as the percentile where one can expect 80% probability of funding from a logistic regression fit. The effective payline has gone from a historic ~12% to 6% in 2025.