Steven Phelps

A field biologist will put on dirty clothes to go in the field -- because worrying about keeping clean keeps you from doing your work.

A serious softball player will keep a ball in their glove when storing it to maintain a loose pocket. They will not use the game bat at the batting cage, bc the density of the dummy balls can deaden a bat.

It's from a paper estimating mood as a weighted function of certain reward (CR), expected value (EV) and reward prediction error (RPE). Basically your mood depends a lot on RPE - going up when you receive more than expected, and down with receiving less than expected.

The secret to happiness.

Dryad partnership brings easier data sharing to bioRxiv bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

bioRxiv partners with Dryad to enable easier, better linking to curated datasets connect.biorxiv.org/news/2025/09...

Very excited about our new preprint, led by @gkafetzis.bsky.social /w @mikebok.bsky.social & @denilsson.bsky.social. We suggest that the vertebrate 'duplex' retina emerged from interconnecting two ancient median-eye microcircuits. Say goodbye to the 'simplex' retina - it probably never existed!

Holy shit…You can’t make this up: a plane is circling Soldier Field before the Bears home opener with a banner that reads—

“HEY ICE, MASKS ARE FOR CUCKS.”

Also the trolling is incredible for those that told us to stop wearing masks during the pandemic.

Whether it's Obama wearing a tan suit or Trump declaring "Chipocalypse Now" and pledging to unleash "the Department of WAR" on America's third largest city, leaders of both parties have shown disregard for presidential norms.

600k neurons, 700 probes, 140 mice, 12 labs. "visual stimuli transiently represented in visual areas at stimulus onset, spread to ramp-like activity in mid- & hindbrain regions that encoded choices. Responses correlated w impending action almost everywhere. Responses to reward also widespread."

600k neurons, 700 probes, 140 mice, 12 labs. "visual stimuli transiently represented in visual areas at stimulus onset, spread to ramp-like activity in mid- & hindbrain regions that encoded choices. Responses correlated w impending action almost everywhere. Responses to reward also widespread."

Wow. Reward and planning everywhere.

Lars and ABS President, Emily Duval, stand smiling and facing the camera. Lars is holding his shiny plaque honoring him with the Exemplar Award

Big time congrats to @larschittka.bsky.social on receiving the Exemplar Award this year! Lars and his team has discovered several previously unimaginable cognitive capacities in the itty bitty brains of bees giving us new insights into the evolution of learning.

chittkalab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk

From Wikipedia, the cover of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, by Steve Silberman. Author: Steve Silberman Language: English Genre: Narrative nonfiction Publisher: Avery Publishing Publication date: August 25, 2015

10 years ago today, Steve Silberman's groundbreaking book NeuroTribes was published. It changed how the world discussed autism and inspired many autistic people to write their own books.

Stay tuned for information on a 10th anniversary edition coming very soon.

I wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it!

Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

They think it's a gay neighborhood.

How charming.

"The choice before us is fundamental: Do we believe that knowledge should serve the common good? If so, we cannot treat this assault on science and research as someone else’s problem." thehill.com/opinion/whit... By @alondra.bsky.social

Biological Science Administrator (Program Director) <p>The National Science Foundation is seeking qualified candidates for a Biological Science Administrator (Program Director) position for the Population and Community Ecology Cluster within the Direct...

NSF is seeking a permanent Program Officer in the Population and Community Ecology cluster, Division of Environmental Biology.
If you are a mid-career academic ecologist still in love with science, but not so much with academia, this could be a great position for you! 🌎
www.usajobs.gov/job/759052000

Just to give the TL;DR on this one:

*The* main purpose of the EO is to move funding priorities and decisions away from experts and career professionals over to political appointees. With the ultimate power held by Vought / OMB.

In grad school I read a paper where a research team explored the functions of wolf calls by howling to an unseen wolf pack across the landscape. I couldn't shake the idea that there were competing teams of researchers just howling back and forth to each other, frantically taking notes.

In grad school I read a paper where a research team explored the functions of wolf calls by howling to an unseen wolf pack across the landscape. I couldn't shake the idea that there were competing teams of researchers just howling back and forth to each other, frantically taking notes.

Anyone who is 50 today was 9yo in 1984. We were, most of us, terrified by HIV and resolutely safe-sexers. Too many of us died, but the true victims, the people really wiped out, were the gay boomers.

The process for either involves a book proposal and 1-3 sample chapters. Find colleagues to share theirs to use as models. I've seen friends have success by writing a crossover book aimed at both expert and broad audiences for an academic press, then get an agent and do a trade book after that.

Many academic presses are interested in reaching popular audiences. The advances from academic presses are small enough that agents may not be interested. You can also work directly with editors. A "trade book" however, it is almost impossible to do without an agent.

I do think the mechanical forces are very interesting though, and I do like (most of) this paper quite a lot. It's a huge amount of work and a very cool finding. I'll try to elaborate a bit later.

It's not very complicated: I mean nucleotide sequences that shape the likelihood of the phenotype. It doesn't matter if they are coding or noncoding, if the effect sizes are big or small, or if their effects depend on interaction with the environment.

Oof. This paper, with so much beautiful work, is written with a fundamentally mistaken view of evolutionary processes. Heartbreaking, but fixable. @r3rt0.bsky.social

#MartyMakary is a peddler of misinformation. A study came out on Monday saying: "In this nationwide cohort study, no increased risk of 29 adverse events was observed after vaccination with the updated COVID-19 mRNA vaccine [...] in approximately 1 million adults." Trust the data, not this fool. 1/

The one thing I would add is that the predominance of behavior or brain size over phylogenetics in prediction doesn't argue against genetics at all. It argues against neutral genetic forces, like drift. It is entirely consistent with a genetic cause that evolved convergently under selection.

🤯