Kevin Mitchell

The Ruler Lady at Berkeley was the bogeyman of all us poor grad students! 😅

The Old Irish Goat : a living piece of ancient heritage. New research has revealed that the Old Irish Goat shares a 3,000-year genetic link with goats living in Ireland during the Late Bronze Age. The findings suggest the rare indigenous breed represents…

Stop scrolling IRISH GOAT NEWS

“New research has revealed that the Old Irish Goat shares a 3,000-year genetic link with goats living in
Ireland during the Late Bronze Age.
The findings suggest the rare indigenous breed represents a continuous Irish lineage stretching back millennia.”

Super interesting work - congrats! So what happens in persons or animals that lack a cerebellum?

The cortex generates invariant dynamic primitives; the cerebellum reconfigures them to drive distinct policies.

Huge congrats to first author Martha Garcia-Garcia for leading this tour de force, and @somnirons.bsky.social & Michal Wojcik for a great collaboration!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We simultaneously imaged premotor cortical output (L5PT) and cerebellar granule cells during VR & reaching tasks.

The cortex reused manifolds. But the cerebellum didn't shatter them—it reoriented them, rotating them apart while perfectly preserving their geometry! 🤯

How does the brain generalize past experiences without confusing memories? 🧠

Our lab's newest preprint reveals a fundamental division of labor between the cortex and cerebellum that solves this problem. (Check out the cortex-cerebellum video below! 👇) 🧵

One third of the way through may be optimistic, if he has his way...

A very large juvenile diamond squid - this one measuring in at a whopping 3” - perhaps the 2nd largest I’ve ever seen!

Shot in the wild, using scuba, while out over the deep abyss, several miles offshore from Okinawa

#diamondsquid #thysanoteuthisrhombus #blackwaterdiving #gug #gugunderwater

The quantum world reveals reality is made of relations, not objects <p><em>We assume that objects are more fundamental than the relationships between those objects. However, philosopher <strong>George Webster</strong> argues that quantum mechanics upends this common-s...

I enjoyed putting together this article for @iai.tv

#philosophy #philsci

Finally out in @natmicrobiol.nature.com: Prediction of eukaryotic cellular complexity in Asgard archaea using structural modelling. Great work by @stephkoe.bsky.social @kassipan.bsky.social @jvhooff.bsky.social

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

Rasmussen Retorts | Substack More pandemics and fewer vaccines are not indicators of a healthy democracy. Click to read Rasmussen Retorts, by Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

Bhattacharya is the New Lysenko - Starving the NIH through ineptitude, bitterness, and thirst for revenge rasmussenretorts.substack.com?utm_source=n... - an accurate, unflinching assessment by @angierasmussen.bsky.social

Yup, especially when it comes to RFK Jr’s most important ally, Jay Bhattacharya—the parallels with Lysenko are uncanny

This piece by virologist @angierasmussen.bsky.social, one of the Editors in Chief of the journal Vaccine is 🔥🔥🔥

geneticliteracyproject.org/2025/08/28/v...

Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News The world is far safer after President Donald J. Trump’s highly successful, decisive precision strikes against the Iranian regime’s key nuclear

Amazingly, this White House page from Jun 2025 continues to be live.

"Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News"

Diversity, ecology, cell biology and evolution of the Asgard archaea - Nature Reviews Microbiology The Asgard archaea have become a cornerstone of archaeal research, particularly for studies aiming to unravel the origin and early evolution of eukaryotes. This Review outlines the current state of th...

Just over ten years after the discovery of the first Asgard archaeal genomes, we revisit the rapid expansion of this remarkable archaeal lineage. From diverse genomes and metabolisms to eukaryotic signature proteins and the first cultured representatives.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A painting of Voltaire

Happy #WorldBookDay2026. The French writer and philosopher Voltaire once said 'Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.' 📚

He also drank up to 50 cups of coffee a day, often mixed with chocolate.

I think we're onboard with this.

A drawing on the cover of the journal Neuron. Each section of the fan has a drawing of a mouse. Each mouse has a slightly different pose. The tassel of the fan resembles a neuron.

My first cover of 2026
"Spontaneous behavior is a succession of self-directed tasks"
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
#sciArt #Scicom #illustration #neuroskyence

I'm someone who spends a lot of time thinking about LLMs, and I have no idea how they would improve the selection of targets in a war. Except for one obvious affordance - they offload accountability.

DODJT is disappearing many of the trump/epstein files while we are talking war. That tells me there are many people in his cabinet that are afraid they will go down with trump if the truth comes out. They are now fighting for their own freedom as well as trump's. We need those files NOW.

Corpus Callosum Dysgenesis impairs metacognition: evidence from multi-modality and multi-cohort replications www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... - very interesting, but how to exclude wider neurodevelopmental effects in CCD patients?

On the existential risks of artificial intelligence The impressive progresses in machine learning have revived the fear that humans might eventually be wiped out or enslaved by artificial superintelligences. This is hardly a new fear. For example, t…

The alignment problem is not between anthropomorphized AI and humans. It is between powerful profit-seeking organizations and the common good. Let's start worrying about real threats before we care about hypothetical threats.

(some thoughts here:
romainbrette.fr/on-the-exist...)

Quietly, calmly and forensically, BBC just dismantled the Trump communications shitshow on Iran.

No hyperbole, just laying out an unprecedented military, diplomatic and reputational shambles.

Worth a watch.

(🎥 BBC News/BBC Verify)

AI can write genomes — how long until it creates synthetic life? The Evo2 genomic language model can generate short genome sequences, but scientists say further advances are needed to write genomes that will work inside living cells.

Ewen's writeup of the new Evo 2 paper in Nature is reliably good. I can imagine this foundation model will be useful for doing synthetic biology in microbes.
But it's important to recognize that making this work for eg humans is not just a scaling-up issue...
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

First preprint from the lab! Using intracellular recordings & analysis of 2-photon imaging data, we show that spiking & neuromodulatory input during experience drive a reorganization of visuomotor inputs in V1 layer 2/3 neurons, consistent with enhanced visuomotor cancellation - bioRxiv link below.

It’s looking increasingly likely that Kristi Noem and Lewandowski funneled almost 200 million in government money to a company that is run by her friend and that nobody can give an address for.

Oh, and it was 8 days old when it was awarded the contract.

The film follows an Irish refugee girl and a Choctaw boy who meet in 1847 New York and journey across America together, drawing on the real historical bond between Ireland and the Choctaw Nation.

Cartoon Saloon Reveals Trailer for ‘Kindred Spirits’ Feature Tomm Moore was at Cartoon Movie to tease his upcoming animated film about an Irish refugee and a Choctaw boy on a magical journey across 1840s America.

EXCLUSIVE: Watch the first teaser for Cartoon Saloon's 'Kindred Spirits,' the new animated feature in development from studio co-founder Tomm Moore ('The Secret of Kells,' 'Song of the Sea'). www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film...

Corpus Callosum Dysgenesis impairs metacognition: evidence from multi-modality and multi-cohort replications https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.02.709173v1