Ricard Solé

What does physics bring to neuroscience? As discussed by @wbialek.bsky.social, the 2024 Physics #NobelPrize was awarded to John Hopfield & Geoffrey Hinton for the discovery of new classes of emergent phenomena where collective dynamics give rise to neural information processing. @brigan.bsky.social

How can scientists compete with pseudoscience in algorithmic ecosystems?

This comes after several discussions with colleagues and friends, such as @ricardsole.bsky.social

I have just dropped this post on Linkedin (see the attached image, in case): www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Ideas? Answers?

Just 30 years ago, we didn’t know of a single planet beyond our Solar System. Now we’ve found thousands, and we know that almost every star has worlds of its own. The next great leap is proving that some of them harbour life. I wish Carl Sagan were here to see this cosmic golden age.

How to deal with the multiscale nature of evolution, which displays different time scales of change? We need to replace classic genotype spaces with multiscapes. Here's a great paper by my friend Susanna Manrubia and coworkers @mncn-csic.bsky.social rsob.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royo... …

How do combinatorial evolution processes lead to singularities? Check our paper with @svalver.bsky.social & Dani Amor on a general formulation of combinatorial growth and its relevance for understanding innovations in evolution and technology journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... @leecronin.bsky.social

How predictable are complex systems? What is the time horizon for predictions? This is a central issue within CCSS and nonlinear science. A new paper in @pnas.org shows how a data-driven approach can provide answers. See a comment by @manlius.bsky.social here: manlius.substack.com/p/complexity...

I think the honest answer (but a sceptical one) to this question is: probably not (we can't know right now). But I can answer two other questions. (1) Is Avi Loeb's late alien work serious and honest? NO. (2) Is this damaging science when Loeb uses his authority as a Harvard academic? YES.

A warning to the young: just say no to AI The substitution of Large Language Models for genuine thinking is a generational threat. At stake is no less than the life of the mind.

I don't agree with everything in this article, but I do agree with this:
"The act of writing the thing is the same thing as the thinking of it. If you can’t write it, you haven’t actually thought it." And AI allows us to 'not' think.
engelsbergideas.com/essays/a-war...

#academicsky #ai #teaching

How do fleeting experiences become lasting memories?
Initially, your hippocampus and cortex work together, but over time, the cortex assumes control. Check this excellent @cshlpress.bsky.social paper on Memory Consolidation
cshperspectives.cshlp.org/content/7/8/...

Sure. He was an important pioneer in the study of social insects (he has a fantastic book, "Ants") and soon realised that emergence was a crucial concept. He published a paper in Science in 1926, "Emergent evolution and the social"—a visionary work.

What do you mean?

Are there universal principles for the structural limits of living organisms? How can physics provide a theory? Check this @pnas.org paper that derives Kleiber’s law from 1st principles, capturing geometric differences and predicting life forms between plants & animals. www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

To me, part of this is that these “billionaire geniuses” are so bought in to the myth of their own brilliance that their ego can’t acknowledge how they just happened to be standing next to a money making machine at the right moment in history, and that their contributions rest on the work of others.

What is complexity? Complex Systems made of many interacting units display "emergence", i.e. global properties that cannot be reduced to the properties of the units. A new idea? WM Wheeler was one of the advocates of emergence, back in 1927 @sfiscience.bsky.social
books.google.es/books/about/...

What drives the self-organization of life? By linking three major ecological theories, we show that ecosystems maximize power at intermediate efficiency close to bifurcation points. Energy flux meets life's organizing principles. @sfiscience.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Systems and circuit neuroscience need an evolutionary perspective To identify fundamental neuroscientific principles that generalize across species, neuroscientists must frame their research through an evolutionary lens.

To identify fundamental neuroscientific principles that generalize across species, systems and circuits, neuroscientists must embrace an evolutionary perspective, argue Karl Farrow and @katjareinhard.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

How does collective complexity in an organism emerge from individual cells? How does cognition arise in brains, tissues or ant colonies? How does the self persist despite constant regeneration? Check this discussion between @davideagleman.bsky.social & Mike Levin www.youtube.com/watch?v=-isM...

Amen to that.

What can be predicted when dealing with the real world? What are the limits of prediction? Watch this fantastic talk by @evamirandag.bsky.social on the nature of undecidability. With Turing, fluid turbulence, computation, chaos theory and ... rubber ducks www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsJ8...

Microbe with bizarrely tiny genome may be evolving into a virus With DNA focused almost entirely on replication, newly discovered organism blurs the line between cells and viruses

The newly discovered microbe provisionally known as Sukunaarchaeum isn’t a virus.

But like viruses, it seemingly has one purpose: to make more of itself. scim.ag/4e6y0W2

How do we know that a physical system is "computing"? What do we mean by that? This is an important question within complex systems science, and here's a great research @royalsocietypublishing.org paper that explores the problem royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

How does the brain allow mental time travel? How is the past used to predict the future? This is one of the most fascinating problems in neuroscience and the evolution of minds (and is nowhere in AI systems). Check this excellent review @manlius.bsky.social thedanplan.com/blog/wp-cont...

👍

How did human language emerge? A key step was combining sounds into words, shifting from analog to digital to overcome error thresholds. Fascinating paper with deep ties to Shannon’s coding theory. @sfiscience.bsky.social
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10....

Steven Rose obituary Neuroscientist, author, political activist and advocate for social responsibility in science

Steven Rose was a neuroscientist and critic of genetic determinist views of human behaviour; he was also a founder member of the now defunct British Society for Social Responsbility in Science (which perhaps needs to be resurrected…) www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Is there an ecology of genomes? Can we see ecological communities of genetic elements behaving like species in a rainforest? In this @plosone.org paper, the authors show how genetic elements (like transposons) occupy chromosomes as species fill space in in the wild journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

How do ant colonies perform computations? What kind of dynamical state allows them to do it? It has already been 30 years since my colleague, Octavio Miramontes, and I suggested that they, as liquid neural networks, might exploit critical states. Check: hal.elte.hu/~vicsek/down...

Can we build a science for chess? That has been an old dream shared by great scholars, including Turing, Shannon and Ulam. In this paper, Marc Barthelemy shows how to define a measure of network Fragility that allows detecting tipping points in the game www.researchgate.net/profile/Marc...

The climate science predictions from 30 years ago are becoming a reality, and we are running out of time. While we should be investing in this, a handful of billionaire bullies are pushing us in the opposite direction. We need to stop them, starting from challenging the disinformation they create.

Why did cephalopods develop intelligence? And why, being so intelligent and cognitively complex, do they die so young? In this @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social ‪paper, the authors explore this paradox from an ecological and evolutionary perspective. www.cell.com/action/showP...