Draft Fantasy VI was as originally envisioned - featured "Detective Joe" and his hard-boiled adventures. I played that one in my head but couldn't finish it.

I was struck when he said Obama's biggest misstep was saying Travyon Martin could have been his son. I'm not super enthusiastic about identity politics, but Obama's meaning was clear and touching. We'd like to be on the mountain top w/ MLK, but racial animus is making that impossible, not Obama 🙄

Why are AIs involved in peer review? I guess I could understand asking for a summary (but I still wouldn't do it, as I get all my best peer review ideas WHILE doing deep reading in the weeds). But on the DECISION making level? Literally zero justification for that.

It's great - not the follow-up to JS&MN that I wanted, but still fantastic. I didn't know until recently that Clarke's writing is limited by health struggles, so it makes sense she's not writing doorstops anymore. Great example of capitalizing on your limitations.

Yes -- a breathing behavior that draws air over the vomeronasal organ (also called Jacobson's), which is an accessory olfactory region on the roof of the mouth in many mammals specialized for detecting pheromones. It's social "smelling" more than "super" smelling though!

House GOP Accused of 'Waging War on America's Wildlife' With Proposed Spending Cuts | Common Dreams Conservationists and congressional Democrats warn that House Republicans' FY26 Interior bill jeopardizes wildlife, public health, and national parks.

⚠️ House Republicans’ new FY26 bill would slash EPA & Fish & Wildlife funding and gut the Endangered Species Act, stripping protections from gray wolves, grizzlies, wolverines & more.

This is a direct attack on wildlife, ecosystems, and public health. We must speak out.

🔗Read more: bit.ly/4mgexFx

Donald Trump’s signature legislation would menace the American economy for at least a decade. It is a showcase of fiscal incontinence and ideological exhaustion https://econ.st/4kvmdT2

Illustration: Ricardo Tomás

Umm, Democratic Socialist, he's not like a Stalinist. Also, I find it a little odd that one very liberal city electing a very liberal mayor is framed as a crisis for an entire party, but the election of unqualified kook after kook after kook in red district after red district is just local politics.

1/4 Use of tools (for allogrooming) in orcas

They have been recorded (Salish Sea) using kelp, cutting it (technically the first documentation of toolmaking in cetaceans) and using it to groom others.

(paper) www.cell.com/current-biol...

To the extent that AI is still predominantly creating word patterns that are statistically emblematic of likely human language in the same context, this is wholly unsurprising. Humans whose existence is threatened will attempt to resist, including w/ language. AI too - but with INTENTION?

Yup - rhe kind of narrative setup the series hasn’t managed since VII, really. Interesting characters in dire straits, super efficient world building, mysteries, fist pumping moments, all within two hours.

In OG at least he just does a regular weak physical when he doesn’t catch scratch

I believe in PR evade now works for physical and mblock for magic only so you can’t get invincible

Right forgot the imp halberd gau set up! But relies on him getting off cat scratch (1 in 3 chance I think?) or being imped for max damage. Atma and Valiant only weapons that don’t have damage nerfed by Offering. Still a great choice!

I cannot play VI casually 😅

And of course I forgot the offering for Locke and you can of course quick Locke Cyan and Mog too which in theory makes them higher damagers than mages with gem boxes.

Sorry Quadra slice I meant…

Lv 99 Locke with genii glove, atma weapon and valiant knife is the hardest hitter. 79,992 every attack. Gem box ultima and quick combo gets 49,995. Leveled Cyan with slash gets 39,997. But you have to wait for his meter to charge… Mog with best spear and dragoon boots hits 2-4 times for 9,999.

Never a wrong choice to jump into FF VI again. Hmm, maybe I’ll fire it up just to watch the magitek march through the snow to the poignant swell Terra’s theme.

The rubber-hand illusion was translated to the mouse model. Just like in humans, embodiment in mice can be achieved by brushing the real forelimb of the mouse and the artificial limb (yellow) in synchrony to generate matching visual and touch percepts. This study suggests that as the mouse looks at the artificial limb, it perceives it as its own limb, and feels threatened if the artificial limb is threatened. Image credit: Luc Estebanez.

The "rubber hand illusion" in mice... @lucestebanez.bsky.social &co use automated videography to show that mice display quantifiable behavioral markers of the embodiment of an #ArtificialLimb, opening the door to future research into human #BodyOwnership disorders @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4jHsESn

Precon_all is finally citeable! I’m relieved, pleased, thrilled and all other superlatives to present to you our preprint describing the inner workings of the precon_all pipeline for semi-automated non-human cortical surface reconstruction! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/10

Nice work Austin! Looking forward to getting our very wrinkly sea lion cortex extracted/inflated!

"role" not "roll" 🙄

Biggest differences were in cerebellar projections, which were hypertrophic in the toothed (echolocating) whale brains. We suggest this indicates a strong roll for predictive, non-volitional sensorimotor integration in echolocation. Think Gibsonian signal "tuning" -- touching with sound, not seeing.

Lateralized cerebellar connectivity differentiates auditory pathways in echolocating and non-echolocating whales We report the first application of diffusion tractography to a mysticete, which was analyzed alongside three odontocete brains, allowing the first direct comparison of strength and laterality of audit...

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
New paper from my grad lab at New College's Marine Mammal Science Master's program - @marmamsci-ncf.bsky.social - Grad student Sophie Flem did heroic work examining ascending and descending auditory pathways in baleen and toothed whale brains.

Egocentric value maps of the near-body environment - Nature Neuroscience Some neurons act like body-proximity sensors. The authors show that these neurons reflect the value of contacting or avoiding objects. Together, these neurons compose a flexible predictive model for i...

Some neurons act like body-proximity sensors, and in fact reflect the value of contacting or avoiding objects, composing a flexible predictive model for interacting with the world near the body

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

This photo by Alejandro Solis shows a Sea lion resting on a rocky outcrop in the Galapagos Islands, surrounded by calm ocean water with a blurred shoreline in the background.

Today is World Sea Lion Day! 🦭

Physical control: A new avenue to achieve intelligence in soft robotics Physical control embodies motion intelligence in soft robots via self-regulating oscillations, sequences, and reactions.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Love this - "soft assembly," that is, the ability for physical systems to organize/function in complex ways/based on physical structure and how it interacts with the environment, is understudied in neuroscience and biology and underused in robotics. Dynamic systems!

Fig. 2 Whole-body estimates of sea otter metabolism scaled to body mass. Estimated scaled whole-body metabolic rates include predicted [BMR; predicted on the basis of scaled rate for eutherian mammals], sea otter resting metabolic rate, and whole-body skeletal muscle leak capacity.

Several mammal species live in cold-water environments thanks to adaptations like blubber and large size. A notable exception is the sea otter—so how does it stay warm?

A 2021 Science study found an answer: skeletal muscle thermogenesis.

Learn more on #WorldOtterDay: scim.ag/4jjvMDL

Overview of the experimental design and exemplar results.

By playing rhythmic audio to comatose patients, then skipping a beat, researchers could elicit changes in heart rate—but only in patients who went on to have favorable outcomes. The phenomenon could be used to predict patient outcomes. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Looks like if I tried to draw Texas on an etch-a-sketch - makes me think of random walk neural activity breaching threshold for bereitschaft potential….