Timothy O'Leary

From nociception in aneural animals to human suffering: toward a comparative biology of pain Summary: The biology of widely shared and unusual features of human pain is informed by functional and mechanistic comparisons of nociception and pain-like aversive states across vertebrate and invert...

If evolution, comparative #neuroskyence & #PainResearch are your thing, here's a great review from Terry Walters: journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Yeah but the return will be a bus replacement that's cancelled

Reaffirming the value of model organisms in training scientific minds - Nature Cell Biology As biomedical research prioritizes human models and translational promise, classic model organisms are increasingly dismissed. Here we argue that they have a lasting value, both in enabling discovery and in cultivating scientific thinking, by training researchers in systems reasoning, integrative thinking and independent inquiry.

PREACH!

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

What problem is explainability/interpretability research trying to solve in ML, and do you have a favorite paper articulating what that problem is?

Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time One of the most devastating diseases finally has a treatment that can slow its progression and transform lives, tearful doctors tell BBC.

New cures feel sudden, but the seeds were planted decades ago by basic scientists.

Which seeds will turn into cures? Unpredictable looking forward, a straight line looking back. 🧪🧬 🧵

Interested in doing a Ph.D. to work on building models of the brain/behavior? Consider applying to graduate schools at CU Anschutz:
1. Neuroscience www.cuanschutz.edu/graduate-pro...
2. Bioengineering engineering.ucdenver.edu/bioengineeri...

You could work with several comp neuro PIs, including me.

Bluesky needs polls:

🔘 agree
🔘 disagree
🔘 show me the results

British students lack ‘drive’ of their American peers, says Business Secretary | LBC The Business Secretary has defended comments he made at a meeting with investors where he said British students lack the ‘drive’ and ‘vigour’ of their American peers.

“Too often people go to university to ‘explore research and knowledge’.”
- business secretary, Peter Kyle.

What do they want knowledge for? Heaven forbid that students go to university to learn something!

It's almost as if some top tier civil servants and ministers are in the thrall of a handful of tech evangelists who made careers making promises they can't keep.

AI ‘hit squad’ set up to drive Whitehall efficiency struggles to hire top talent The Incubator for Artificial Intelligence unit spent less than half of its budget last year because of recruitment delays

UK guts public spending, wrecks research training, exits largest economic bloc on Earth, adds red tape to talent-based visas, wonders why it can't recruit "top AI talent" to help cut even more costs:

on.ft.com/3Kl9tBJ AI ‘hit squad’ set up to drive Whitehall efficiency struggles to hire top talent

Except they are purchasing a product, because of the way the US university system has defined its role in society.

I read the paper. It is just a simple observational study showing that signs of distress in babies tend to cause skin temperature to raise, with no controls for other stimuli. No evidence concerning higher order cognitive processes. It's basically clickbait and journalists, as usual, can't tell.

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
Harvard Funding Cuts Endanger the Massive Fruit Fly Database That Powers Genetic Research

Brain chauvinists: here's the signalling, control and computation that really matters most of the time :)

Congratulations Ginny - this is not only a technical tour de force, it brings systems neuro to the rest of the body.

Pffff. It was the 50s. An inevitable stiff drink and a cigarette would have cleared that right up.

LLMs are coming for us

BBC coverage of Reform is becoming increasingly problematic. And goes beyond the usual white noise. Continuous soft balling is not balance, it is a fundamental abdication of duty. Farage's tax issues, cranks given platforms at their conference, climate change denial. All need coverage. Most haven't.

Clinical statistical meta analysis making the same grade school statistical error that the original studies make?

What do we call this? Meta effect size effect size inflation?

A sad truth is that big chunks of "legit" peer reviewed ASD research, especially translational work, is BS. This puts the quacks and the scientists on equal footing in the minds of non-experts - and this an entirely rational heuristic. So we need to get our own house in order too.

We're going to see a lot of bullshit in the coming days and weeks about "causes of autism", and most will be based on flawed, over-interpreted observational studies (1/n)

Yes, the media should ask these questions. They don't. They can't. They lack the training and work inside rigid rules about how to capture attention and storytell. They have mantras for "what the public understands" that don't include science or data.

Politics runs on media, hence our world today.

The Reform UK conference gives a standing ovation to "special guest" Lucy Connolly, who pled guilty to stirring up racial hatred after she called for asylum hotels to be set on fire with people inside them.

Why is it difficult to accept that our awareness of having made a decision can only follow in the wake of our decision-making apparatus having done its job?

And that the same order of events must therefore hold for any coherent thought?

You can easily predict actions before they happen. But actions vs the decision to act are different things. The signals in the brain *are* the choice. Whether the mouse it aware of committing to a choice is another question.

An optical brain-machine interface reveals a causal role of posterior parietal cortex in goal-directed navigation Relating neural circuitry to behavior is challenging due to closed loop interactions between neural activity, actions, and sensations. Sorrell et al. present evidence for a causal role of mouse PPC in...

In case link doesn't work:

An optical brain-machine interface reveals a causal role of posterior parietal cortex in goal-directed navigation: Cell Reports www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Only if the inputs are measured. And when the inputs are strong, chaotic dynamics are often irrelevant anyway.

Universities ‘poisoning student minds’, says Farage Populist leader takes aim at higher education in speech on first day of the Reform UK conference in Birmingham

Having lied to congress earlier in the week, Farage flew back to the U.K. to lie to his party conference. Populists don’t like having to deal with reality and truth. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/univers...

The THE would be doing itself and the UK a favour if they gifted this article. You won't find Farage's propaganda behind a paywall.

UK academics, be aware that what's happening to universities in the US is coming to us in a few years, in the (unfortunately quite likely) event that Reform wins.

Labour needs to get it's act together and give people a reason to vote for them.

Hmmm.