Nathan Insel

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Amazing! Congratulations!

There are certainly other good solutions to multi-animal tracking that DIPLOMAT does not yet implement--like finding visual differences between animals. All code is open source (github.com/TravisWheele...) and these features could be easily incoporated or used alongside the algorithms packaged here.

How it works: instead of finding body parts within frames and then knitting these across frames, DIPLOMAT applies a hidden Markov model (Viterbi algorithm) that traces body parts through a video. We use the same movement and skeletal information as other tools, but as HMM transition probabilities.

Perhaps most useful is that DIPLOMAT is designed to make manual edits much more efficient: multiple body parts can be corrected with a single click and, once corrected, re-traced across frames.

With DIPLOMAT, you can still use models trained in DeepLabCut or SLEAP!

But the algorithms also improve tracking (fewer body-swaps, better recall and precision)--even when body parts are occluded.

DIPLOMAT: multi-animal tracking with efficient manual editing Recent advances in computer vision have enabled the development of automated animal behavior observation tools. Several software packages currently exist for concurrently tracking pose in multiple ani...

New preprint:
There are some decent tools for multi-animal tracking, but it can still be difficult to track interacting animals without mixing them up. Isaac Robinson (with @wheelerlab.org and others) have developed a software solution that we are now using full time: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

More biomed in Canada

"Emotion" vs "affective state" sounds like a fun example of how psychological constructs are clustered hierarchically. Would be interested if anyone takes this up in an articulate and compelling way.

Not an expert, but I take this issue up in my intro neuro course. We walk through ~8 definitions and examine where they fail. We then put these together into our own, including "usual" causes (perceived valence) and "typical" consequences (visceral, also facial/vocal expressions).

New strategy for grant and paper rejections

Lemborexant ameliorates tau-mediated sleep loss and neurodegeneration in males in a mouse model of tauopathy - Nature Neuroscience Parhizkar et al. show that lemborexant, an orexin receptor antagonist, protects against neurodegeneration in male tau transgenic mice by preventing tau protein build-up and inflammation, highlighting ...

Notable paper on sleep aid lemborexant (putting aside caveats of mouse models of Alzheimer's). I have collected 2 1/2 years of data on myself and can confirm even small (2 mg) doses add sleep hours.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks for this!
On writing: I remember Tulving saying that he admired and was inspired by Hartline's paper on lateral inhibition for its writing. From all the written history about Tulving and his influences, this isn't something one might easily guess.

Oh so now we are in a parasocial friendship?

Cool!

Didn't catch that, thank you.

Will add "toothpaste related crime" to the landscape of imagined futures

Earnest question: can't kids get their fluoride by regularly eating a small amount of their toothpaste?

To borrow from Alan Moore "Uglier than death backin' outta the outhouse readin' mad magazine and crazy as a football bat."

Differential Activation of Fast-Spiking and Regular-Firing Neuron Populations During Movement and Reward in the Dorsal Medial Frontal Cortex The medial prefrontal cortex is thought to be important for guiding behavior according to an animal's expectations. Efforts to decode the region have focused not only on the question of what informati...

Awesome!!
(Incidentally, one of my favorite topics!
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
)

My university is accepting applications for the Visiting Researcher - Scholars at Risk Program, established to support scholars who are facing threats to their life, liberty or academic career, &/or have been forced to leave their academic position because of such threats. www.wlu.ca/academics/re...

I did that. Cured the boredom. Aged twice as fast but tripled life meaning--overall win.

I appreciate the debates about machine intelligence, and how LLMs are forcing us to review our constructs. But I also think it's fun to think of LLMs as a mirror we've put in front of animals that don't have a concept of mirrors (image from @theonion.com)

My 12 yo after I told him that "datum" is singular for data: "Once my generation gets into the Miriam-Webster office, there are going to be a lot of changes"

Norepinephrine-mediated slow vasomotion drives glymphatic clearance during sleep Norepinephrine oscillations during NREM sleep drive synchronized changes in cerebral blood volume and cerebrospinal fluid, promoting glymphatic clearance. Optogenetic and pharmacological manipulations confirm that vasomotion, regulated by norepinephrine, acts as a pump for brain fluid transport.

www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

Linking neural population formatting to function Animals capable of complex behaviors tend to have more distinct brain areas than simpler organisms, and artificial networks that perform many tasks tend to self-organize into modules (1-3). This sugge...

New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior?
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧠👩🏻‍🔬🧪🧵
#neuroskyence
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I enjoyed this, thank you!

Also speaks to Bluesky's "love-to-hate Musk" audience:
"Instead of the bundle of Neuralink electrodes, Musk could just use a telephone, whose data rate has been designed to match human language, which in turn is matched to the speed of perception and cognition."

An indubitably indelible individual

You got me to read this 23(?) years ago. The part I remember, and cite with some regularity, is how the character deals with freezing-up in public bathrooms. A well articulated "animal social cognition" phenomenon.

I think this is it! Or some minor twists on it. Thank you so much for the link--and thinking about/publishing this in the first place! It captures a very deep question of how mind/subjective state depends on the specific casual interactions within the mechanisms.

@jaanaru.bsky.social : maybe you know where I can find this?