Nishant Joshi

"Science is a bind on unrestricted power. It confronts those with a certain worldview with an obstacle to the progress of their aims."

Think Galileo ... think inquisition.

How can biological systems anticipate future events? In our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social, we show how a simple genetic circuit can predict future trends through a simple (and perhaps widespread) mechanism @drmichaellevin.bsky.social @koseskalab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Should I return to my home country after my PhD abroad? A graduate student from southeast Asia, now based in a European country and missing her homeland, agonizes over her next career move.

This is the story of so many of us. Totally worth a read. The struggle to choose a path after PhD is so much more complex for people from middle to low income countries.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

You’re only human: a six-step strategy to surviving your PhD Graduate students are not machines. Behaving like one during your programme will leave you frustrated and unfulfilled, says Gauthier Weissbart.

Don’t let your PhD be an excuse to neglect personal relationships and meaningful activities. We often think we’ll have more time afterward — but the next steps in your career might be just as busy . www.nature.com/articles/d41...

What is the nature of individuality? Is there a mathematical theory to define an "individual" at all levels of organization? Check this Information Theory approach by David Krakauer
@c4computation.bsky.social and co. @sfiscience.bsky.social
link.springer.com/content/pdf/...

Enough internet. Time to cheer myself up by writing about how dark energy will eventually destroy the universe.

You already know the Ship of Theseus, but do you also know the Ship of Thesis? It was constructed out of 3 loosely related papers which tell the tales of heroic quests and mythic psychodrama. It was only constructed once and then allowed to sink into oblivion.

NeurIPS participation in Europe We seek to understand if there is interest in being able to attend NeurIPS in Europe, i.e. without travelling to San Diego, US. In the following, assume that it is possible to present accepted papers ...

Would you present your next NeurIPS paper in Europe instead of traveling to San Diego (US) if this was an option? Søren Hauberg (DTU) and I would love to hear the answer through this poll: (1/6)

1/ Still digesting the success of yesterday’s Donders Session on 𝘉𝘳𝘪𝘥𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘊𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘈𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘮! 🌍

It left us no option but to use our knowledge & influence as scientists to tackle the #climate emergency — not just in researching it but also in leading by example and advocating for change 🧵

❌𝐃𝐎𝐄 𝐇𝐄𝐓 𝐍𝐈𝐄𝐓!
❌𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐝𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐳𝐮𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐧 𝐨𝐩 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐧.

Een deel van onze medewerkers doet vandaag mee aan de estafettestaking tegen de bezuinigingen van het kabinet op onderwijs en onderzoek. Dit heeft geen gevolgen voor onze patiëntenzorg.

www.radboudumc.nl/nieuws/2025/...

A quick preview!
Official launch Sunday March 16th, Huygensgebouw (Heyendaalseweg 135) in Nijmegen. During the yearly Dutch Brain Olympiad (www.hersenolympiade.nl) and the #BrainAwarenessWeek

There have been people less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, bc I know I am not unique in this experience. No thank you to the physics study assoc that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a stripper name within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of computer girl. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to apologise months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so no hard feelings remain hopefully And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was surprising that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with you should consider it. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists don't know how to design an experiment. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the exec board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted. ... You have made me feel like I do not belong in science & I cannot forgive you for that.

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.”
Absurd we still need to go through this
🧪👩‍🔬

I am very proud to announce that my PhD paper finally came out in Cell! In this *very* collaborative study, we develop and release a deep-learning approach to predict neuron type identity from their electrical signature. doi.org/10.1016/j.ce... 1/16 🧵

We are thrilled to host a tutorial on biophysical modeling with Jaxley & DendroTweaks at #CNS2025! 📍 Florence, July 5 — looking forward to seeing you there! www.cnsorg.org/cns-2025 @cnsorg.bsky.social

We scientists would love to be left alone to do our work, but powerful people won't give us that option. Science, as the pursuit of truth, however imperfect, is fundamentally challenging to power. If we want to keep the option to do the science we want, we have to work at making science resilient. 🧪

Atypical hippocampal excitatory neurons express and govern object memory - Nature Communications Pyramidal cells are classically thought to comprise the excitatory output of the subiculum. Here, the authors show the existence of “ovoid cells”, excitatory subiculum neurons with specialized gene ex...

delighted to share our work revealing a new type of excitatory hippocampal neuron we call the "ovoid cell", which has really exquisite properties relative to adjacent pyramidal cells! superb work of first-author @adriennekinman.bsky.social and many others in the lab

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

My lab is looking for a computational neuroscience postdoctoral researcher:
www.ru.nl/en/working-a...
Come join us at the @dondersinst.bsky.social!

🚀 Celebrating Our Soon-to-Graduate PhD Candidates from SmartNets! 🎓🎉 I can’t wait to see where your journeys take you next, and I honestly will miss you!

#NIH accounts for 47 billion = 25% of US federal research funding, essential for their world-leading position in bio-medical research.

Trump just shut it down.

No foreign adversary in their wildest wet dream could achieve such a devastating act of traitorous sabotage with a stroke of a pen.

Most neurons in mouse cortex defy functional categories The majority of cells in the cerebral cortex are unspecialized, according to an unpublished analysis—and scientists need to take care in naming neurons, the researchers warn.

Who likes categories anyway?
I wonder what this means for the concept of "areas"...
#neuroscience
www.thetransmitter.org/neural-codin...

IF we make that simplifying assumption, sure. But everything we know about neural cell type diversity, diversity at the level of what proteins are in a synapse etc, suggest that assumption is missing a lot.

Hinton is not a great source on neuroscience.

The Dimensions of dimensionality Cognitive scientists often infer multidimensional representations from data. Whether the data involve text, neuroimaging, neural networks, or human judgments, researchers frequently infer and analyze latent representational spaces (i.e., embeddings). However, the properties of a latent representation (e.g., prediction performance, interpretability, compactness) depend on the inference procedure, which can vary widely across endeavors. For example, dimensions are not always globally interpretable and the dimensionality of different embeddings may not be readily comparable. Moreover, the dichotomy between multidimensional spaces and purportedly richer representational formats, such as graph representations, is misleading. We review what the different notions of dimension in cognitive science imply for how these latent representations should be used and interpreted.

The Dimensions of dimensionality
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
#neuroscience

Entropy is one of those formulas that many of us learn, swallow whole, and even use regularly without really understanding.

(E.g., where does that “log” come from? Are there other possible formulas?)

Yet there's an intuitive & almost inevitable way to arrive at this expression.

I have done this frequently and agree it is very valuable. Removing the presumed quality imprint of the journal name opens up the discussion dramatically in my experience.

OK If we are moving to Bluesky I am rescuing my favourite ever twitter thread (Jan 2019).

The renamed:

Bluesky-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests)

How the layer-dependent ratio of excitatory to inhibitory cells shapes cortical coding in balanced networks The cerebral cortex exhibits a sophisticated neural architecture across its six layers. Recently, it was found that these layers exhibit different ratios of excitatory to inhibitory (EI) neurons, rang...

Let's try a Bluesky tweeprint (skyprint?)! Here we explore how the excitatory to inhibitory number of neurons ratio affects the dimensionality of the resulting network activity and its capacity to perform a discrimination task.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hello Bluesky!

Uniform manifold approximation and projection Nature Reviews Methods Primers - Uniform manifold approximation and projection is a dimensionality reduction technique used to visualize and understand high-dimensional data. In this Primer, Healy...

I recently wrote a primer on UMAP for Nature Reviews Primers. If you are looking for an overview of the method, a getting started primer, or best practices it is a good place to start.

rdcu.be/d0YZT

𝗜𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘆 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗸𝗲𝗽𝘁 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗿𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻?
"Recurrent systems naturally implement many-to-many mappings between their units, leading to inherent plurifunctionality and many irreducible high-order mechanisms."
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...
#neuroscience

Word of this morning is ‘procaffeinate’: to put everything on hold until you’ve had sufficient amounts of coffee.