Sara A Solla

Biological neurons cluster dynamical stimulus trajectories to predict what’s coming and infer what just happened. If you’re at NeurIPS, stop by our poster #2107 — on display now until 2pm

Interested in algorithmic neuron models and learning rules at the intersection of neuroscience, AI, dynamical systems, and control theory?
Have a PhD in neuroscience, physics, EE, or math? Consider joining us: apply.interfolio.com/173400
If you’re at NeurIPS, feel free to DM me.

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I send money to @wikipedia.org every year.

This is something you can do to make a difference and fight against AI slop.

Photo of the entrance to an outdoor classroom at a nature center

Sign at an outdoor classroom for a nature center: “Think outside. No box required.”

It feels like the converastion about manifold dimensionality is back, so I thought I'd share a paper that explains nicely why measuring the "embedding dimensionality" of a manifold (e.g., counting PCs) can be very different from its actual "intrinsic dimensionality (DoFs)

doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

One thing I feel strongly about:

The NIH peer review system is the beating heart of the agency and the whole US biomedical research agency. It is the worst system for assigning grants but no other system has been developed that is better. It draws democratically from the scientific community.

An example, here asking to recreate in LaTeX the definition of a pseudorandom number generator

In case you aren't already aware of one of the nerdiest, nich-est online games: TeXnique, where the goal is to type LaTeX formulae as quickly as possible. texnique.xyz

It is "fun."

PSA to academics posting threads about your paper here: you can (and should) post the link to the paper in the first post. Your X/Twitter brain rot have have you thinking otherwise, but please free yourself of that. (Also you can call them 'blue-prints' if you want).

We've seen some remarkable outcomes in people with advanced, refractory cancers, including pancreatic, melanoma, and renal, with personalized neoantigen mRNA vaccines.
But this work is now endangered.
www.scientificamerican.com/article/pers...

Today over Chicago's Lakefront

SIMA 2: A Gemini-Powered AI Agent for 3D Virtual Worlds Introducing SIMA 2, the next milestone in our research creating general and helpful AI agents. By integrating the advanced capabilities of our Gemini models, SIMA is evolving from an instruction-foll…

Can't tell you how great it is to finally be able to release and talk about this work, SIMA 2, the next step toward embodied intelligence in rich, interactive 3D worlds!

deepmind.google/sima

Four shots of a baby giant pacific octopus bouncing around

It’s baby octopus season 🐙🦑

Saw this little guy last night with the Salish Sea School in Anacortes, WA as part of their free community dock walk I volunteer as an interpreter for.

We can tell it is a giant pacific octopus from the single line of chromatophores on each arm.

Day 2 of the #NaturalPhilosophy Symposium concluded with a panel discussion featuring the day's speakers: Alan Guth, Jennifer Nagel, David Albert, Simon DeDeo, Emily Riehl, and Anil Seth.

Stay tuned for the exciting final day of the Symposium!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Apnv...

Yet another epic fascinating bluetorial from @jeremymberg.bsky.social

3 Postdoctoral Research Fellows Champalimaud Foundation (Fundação D. Anna de Sommer Champalimaud e Dr.

🚨Job alert🚨

The lab has up to *3 postdoc openings* for comp systems neuroscientists interested in describing and manipulating neural population dynamics mediating behaviour

This is part of a collaborative ARIA grant "4D precision control of cortical dynamics"

euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/383909

For children and teens, heart and blood vessel complications of Covid overshadow the very rare and short-term risk of vaccinations, a new report from nearly 14 million kids
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Do you have what it takes to win Science’s #DanceYourPhD competition?

We want you to top last year’s food-themed frolic from the Helsinki chemist who dressed up as a chili pepper. Or maybe you can get #AI to dance on your behalf? Learn more: https://scim.ag/3LuVObX

🧪⚛️Max Born won the Nobel Prize in Physics for giving the correct interpretation of the wave function in a footnote to his paper in 1926. The rest of the paper incorrectly states that the wave function amplitude gives the probability. The mind boggles about what Nature's bot would say about that.

So my reviewers were bots before we knew bots existed?

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Born #OnThisDay in 1815 was George Boole FRS. Boole was a mathematician, logician and philosopher who helped establish modern symbolic logic and whose algebra of logic, now called Boolean algebra, is fundamental to the design of digital computer circuits: https://bit.ly/3g1qY9c

Why fundamental research is fundamental to progress, seeding major breakthroughs
Editorial @nature.com this week
And 7 basic science discoveries that changed the world
nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com/articles/d41...

Applications for Fellows-to-Faculty Awards Now Open Applications for Fellows-to-Faculty Awards Now Open on Simons Foundation

Applications for our Fellows-to-Faculty Award are now open! This program supports early career scientists in #autism or #neuroscience research by facilitating their transition into tenure-track faculty positions. Apply by 1/14/2026: www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/10/31/a... #science

The amount of AI generated art in slides at this conference, primarily used by older scientists, is killing me. Scientists please. Don’t use these ai platforms to make your figures or slides. They look bad and I have yet to see them meaningfully improve the message of talks.

Fixing my typo on myocarditis
1-3 cases per 100,000 male adolescents!
Sorry I messed it and still no editing function here