Brian DePasquale

“The bad review will come from your list of suggested reviewers”

Three panel thing. In the left panel we use error bars. In the second, we take statistical significance as the biggest number but still have error bars. In LLM science, we just have the biggest number

What if we did a single run and declared victory

Meme featuring two well coifed, intellectual looking Wojacks reading: PEOPLE WHO READ Beneath them are two disheveled, sick looking people with black circles under their eyes reading: PEOPLE WHO WRITE

Ouch. This one cuts to the bone.

The chemistry community should ban drawing chemical structures with generative AI, chemists warn AIs like Microsoft's Copilot, Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT still make serious errors rendering structural formulae

Chemists call for ban on generative AI for chemical structures: "serious errors could damag[e] the next generation of scientists"

As ever, the problem seems to be not AI but lazy application of it and lack of checks. Whether _that_ problem is solvable...

www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-che...

I friend pointed out that Penderecki isn’t alone because you can see a leg on the bottom right of the picture.

Perfume scientists tweak cells into having ‘sense of smell’ A study could transform the lab study of olfaction—and may challenge a Nobel-winning hypothesis

www.science.org/content/arti...

"the quickest way to get a collaborator to return edits on your manuscript is to write down their affiliation wrong" (ancient academic proverb)

Can one bring together Reinforcement learning and Drift Diffusion models to understand collective foraging ?

Congrads to Jonathan Marienhagen , Lisa Blum Moyse and Dominik Deffner on this new study. Very happy that I was part of this collaboration.

Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

PLOS Comput. Biol.: Stochastic activity in low-rank recurrent neural networks
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013371

“NeuroAI should not remain limited to learning statistical relationships, but should also help in building mechanistic and causal models of neural activity. These models will incorporate biological properties of neural circuits, including cellular characteristics and network properties.”

💯💯💯

Recurrent connectivity supports carbon dioxide sensitivity in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes The mosquito Aedes aegypti′s human host-seeking behavior depends on the integration of multiple sensory cues. One of these cues, carbon dioxide (CO2), gates odorant and heat pathways and activates hos...

New preprint from @darbly.bsky.social‬ @briandepasquale.bsky.social‬ and my labs! If you love (or hate) mosquitoes, have a look:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

We used TEM to describe the circuitry used for CO2 detection by mosquitoes. As usual with mosquitoes, nothing is as expected! 🌬️🦟

Congrats to the 2025 cohort of McKnight Scholars!

www.mcknight.org/news-ideas/2...

How do brain circuits evolve? We started looking for some answers by using synapse-resolution cross-species comparative connectomics on an entire olfactory circuit 👇

bit.ly/44aVm9E

The fifth era of science: Artificial scientific intelligence Can AI become a true scientist? This Perspective explores how new technologies are reshaping scientific discovery, and why human expertise remains essential as we enter a new era of research powered b...

Can #AI become a true scientist? @ninamiolane.bsky.social ‬explores how new technologies are reshaping scientific discovery, and why human expertise remains essential as we enter a new era of research powered by intelligent algorithms. 🧪‬
plos.io/4kZi0aB

Tired of your boring old DDM? Check out recent work by grad student @ryguy.io that introduces a *state-dependent* DDM using an underlying HMM. We find mice change their speed-accuracy strategy from trial to trial! Code provided! (in Julia of course!)

90% of doing science is being open to new ideas.

Unsurprising, but nevertheless tragic. Makes it very hard for integrators and multidisciplinarians to exist in academia. #academicsky

Hivemind, what's the best approach/tool to aggregate neural data across sessions (and animals) in dimensionality reduction analyses, particularly when it's not known how overlapping the pool of neurons are over different sessions?

"The core strategy is to slow NIH spending to generate surpluses...then use surpluses as justification for slashing the budget...unspent [$] won’t be because NIH doesn’t have good science to spend on [but] because the administration has blocked spending" donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...

Using pretrained vision-language models to align neural signals from different modalities:

arxiv.org/pdf/2407.14020

Cool stuff, though I would still love to see if we could align different neural modalities without the pretrained VLMs...

🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

“Science is a smart, low cost investment. The costs of not investing in it are higher than the risk of doing so… talk to people about science.” - @kevinochsner.bsky.social makes his case to the field #sans2025

Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience The mission of the Simons Collaboration on Ecological NEuroscience (SCENE) is to understand how affordances offered by the world shape representations in the mind and the brain.

First big new @simonsfoundation.org neuroscience collaboration launches - exciting!! The product of a HUGE competition among the best minds and teams.

Congrats to this group:

www.simonsfoundation.org/neuroscience...

Try Julia!

Smell studies often use unnaturally high odor concentrations, analysis reveals It’s time to fashion olfactory neuroscience stimuli based on odor concentrations in the wild, say study investigators Elizabeth Hong and Matt Wachowiak.

Olfactory neuroscientists have known for a while that their stimuli stink. A new analysis illuminates the extent of the problem.

By @callimcflurry.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/olfaction/sm...

Would love to be added. Developing StateSpaceDynamics.jl

screenshot of a figure from the paper. a linear dynamical system with time-varying inputs and dynamics reproduces mouse foraging behavior

Cool project led by Victor Geadah, fitting smoothly time-varying (and condition-varying) linear dynamical systems to neural activity.

arxiv.org/abs/2502.18347

Page for passport showing a US student visa stamp from 1986

I feel compelled to acknowledge the dread and dismay that many international students in the US are feeling at the moment - we see you, even if we feel rather powerless for now. Here's the very first visa stamp on my Indian passport ~40 years ago to come to UW Seattle for an MS in Bioengineering.

📣 Grad students and postdocs in computational and theoretical neuroscience: please consider applying for the 2025 Flatiron Institute Junior Theoretical Neuroscience Workshop! All expenses are covered. Apply by April 14. jtnworkshop2025.flatironinstitute.org

🙋‍♂️