Roberto Toro

Disconnect | Paris Marx | Substack How the tech industry is shaping the world we live in — without the boosterism and bootlicking. Click to read Disconnect, by Paris Marx, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

also www.disconnect.blog

@parismarx.com has been actively investigating what it entails to get rid of that type of closed american tech. Check this for example: bsky.app/profile/pari...

Oxford Mathematician @alaingoriely.bsky.social awarded the 2025 LMS/IMA David Crighton Medal for his deep and influential insights into mechanical and biological processes, support of early career mathematicians, and commitment to the public understanding of maths.

www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/72714

‘Bird Brains and Behavior,’ an excerpt In their new book, published today, Georg Striedter and Andrew Iwaniuk dive deep into the latest research on the neural mechanisms of avian behavior. This excerpt from Chapter 2 explores how birds…

How can birds keep enough control to fly while drifting in and out of sleep? In an excerpt from their new book published today, @evoneuro.bsky.social and Georg Striedter explore this and other questions about neural mechanisms that regulate bird sleep.

bit.ly/45mfwgn

#neuroskyence

Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species

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To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

YouTube video by Euro-BioImaging Communication Towards a nationwide core facility offering bioimage analysis services| Image Analysis session

A few months ago @eurobioimaging.bsky.social organized the 'Image Data Community Days 2025' during which I could present our work within @france-bioimaging.bsky.social, creating a nationwide, remotely operating core facility for Bioimage Analysis.

youtu.be/xtLHiio8RF0?...

Dancing Samburu were included in a MasterCard commercial. Samburu runners were famously portrayed in a late 1980s Nike commercial, in which a Samburu man's words were translated into English as the Nike slogan “Just Do It.” This was corrected by anthropologist Lee Cronk, who seeing the commercial alerted Nike and the media that the Samburu man was saying, “Mayieu kuna. Ijooki inamuk sapukin” which actually translated as “I don’t want these. Give me big shoes.” Nike, in explaining the error, admitted to having improvised the dialogue and stated “we thought nobody in America would know what he said."

Wikipedia posting comme si j'etais @maitre-poulard.bsky.social

Out today in Phys. Rev. Fluids, our 'Arrested development and traveling waves of active suspensions in nematic liquid crystals'. The bend instability in active suspensions pairs off against bending resistance in LCs to tell quite a story! 1/20

people.math.wisc.edu/~spagnolie/P...

Federal agencies hiding out in a bunker

New layer-fMRI post doc position for methods development of high-res fMRI in the human Hippocampus.
In Tübingen with Klaus Scheffler, Jonas Bause and Svenja Brodt
layerfmri.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...

Working on a new book!
Basic intro to the brain for general readers (not a textbook).
The amazing thing about writing is learning part and realizing that the brain is way cooler than you thought. And so much more complex. How are we ever going to make sense of it??
Will take a few years to write...

kermit the frog is using a typewriter in a messy room . ALT: kermit the frog is using a typewriter in a messy room .

I’m very excited to announce that I’ve just signed a contract with @princetonupress.bsky.social for a new book, tentatively titled “The Genomic Code” 📖 😊

My favourite kind of worm - wiggly and palpy! A Spionidae polychaete (bristle worm) from last week.
#plankton 🦑

yes, that's what we meant. We often use as example a bow setting a Chladni plate into vibration. The patterns require the bow to appear, but are not encoded in the bow. Similarly, unspecific genetic control of growth is required, but it doesn't encode the neuroanatomical/behavioural outcome

Light Sheet ❤️

This amazing image obtained in our Light sheet🔬, shows a chick embryo injected by Jesus Juarez with a fluorescent dye to label its vascular network.

CUBIC-based tissue clearing and 3D reconstruction by David Arancibia.

#southamericanlightsheet
#lightsheetmicroscopy

that's a very good question. Plus, there's the genes, and then there's the other 99% of the genome, and there's the whole range of effect sizes, from Mendelian to infinitesimal...

Anyway, I'd be very curious to know what you thought about our paper. We had this discussion before about what counts as a 'mechanism'; micro-scale genes and GRNs providing a clear one. But what about emergence as a macro-scale mechanism?

in our data it really doesn't show up, and our sample of primates is not ridiculous (n=70). BM is clearly favoured over OU or EB. We should team up with @ornellabertrand.bsky.social for adding fossil data 😁

plus, you can always add genetic specification on top of this very rich mechanical morphogenetic process (or some sort of Waddingtonian "genetic assimilation"?)
2/2

thank you! What's cool is that just a single mechanism – a growth-driven buckling instability - could explain a lot of the observations without need for region-specific changes (and specifying connectivity would be more exponentially complex)
1/2

we do have capybaras, though ! If some Uruguayo were able to get us a Carpincho we'd love to get that brain 3D reconstructed!! 😉 (they have a nicely folded cortex)

wow! that's a good looking fellow

and now that you're here @ebablab.bsky.social, what's your take on the directionality of brain size changes among primates? You'd say increases are favoured?

I think the only thing it'd be fair to say is that evidence for BM is not evidence for selection. Evidence for OU, on the contrary, would suggest evidence for selection.
BM could mean fast tracking of random selective pressures, or drift, or anything that would keep variation random, right?

oh, that's very interesting! We'll read it. So your intuition would be that larger brain volumes are favoured? Mice, for example, would be an exception?

Additionally, the very diverse ones show strong allometric patterns: larger cortex, larger bodies, larger gestations, hinting at infinitesimal genetic architectures.
2/2

Another observation, which we think is important, is a clear difference between strongly conserved phenotypes (cortical thickness, which means the basic neurogenetic programs), and extremely diverse phenotypes (cortical surface area extension)
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however, we observe many cases in which this is not the case, and species show super similar neuroanatomies despite having a very distant common ancestor, and we highlight one case where there's good evidence for that ancestor being almost fully lissencephalic
2/2

Hm... I don't think it's a strawman, but happy to discuss. If the idea is that a species-specific neuroanatomy is produced by a genetic pattern, and we admit descent with variation, the more you wait, the more variation you'd have, and the more the species would be different
1/n

Importantly, no matter what are the sources of the cortical expansion – which are likely polygenic – the same mechanical structures will appear, even in separate branches of the phylogenetic tree, and without need for specific genetic programs
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