Sara A Solla

Fellows-to-Faculty Awardee Sama Ahmed Studies the Neuroscience of Multitasking Simons Foundation Fellows-to-Faculty alumnus Sama Ahmed spoke with the foundation about his experiences with the fellowship.

At @uwpsychology.bsky.social, former Fellows-to-Faculty awardee Sama Ahmed studies the neurobiology of multitasking: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/fellows-to-faculty-awardee-sama-ahmed-studies-the-neuroscience-of-multitasking/ #neuroscience

Americans still have more confidence in scientists than many other groups in society

Full survey results show American public have high levels of confidence in scientists while revealing some partisan differences (including on how to fund science), but statements asserting lost trust should be read instead as intentional efforts to degrade trust.

www.pewresearch.org/science/2026...

US Senate passes bill to boost federal science spending after White House sought major cuts The U.S. Senate voted on Thursday to approve billions of dollars in funding for federal science agencies, rejecting deep cuts proposed by President Donald Trump in space and other areas.

Wow! Yay! The Senate just rejected Trump’s proposed science cuts, voting 82–15 to boost funding for NOAA, NASA, and the NSF. The bill already passed the House 397–28. Strong bipartisan support for science still exists.

Thank you Vishal Mathur for choosing “What Is Intelligence?” as your favorite read from 2025! I really enjoyed our conversation for @hindustan-times.bsky.social last October on how prediction is fundamental to intelligence.

Brain Balls Scientists can now grow tiny, human brain balls. They’re useful, but are they alive?

I talked to @latif.bsky.social at @radiolab.bsky.social about brain organoids for their new episode. Listen here: radiolab.org/podcast/brai...

Are you a journalist looking to deepen your understanding of complex systems?

Join the 2026 CSSS Journalism Fellowship at SFI, offering a space to study complexity alongside researchers and reflect on science communication from within the field.

Apply by Feb. 4, 2026
santafe.edu/journalism-f...

Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato

Gift link.

A Network of Biologically Inspired Rectified Spectral Units (ReSUs) Learns Hierarchical Features Without Error Backpropagation We introduce a biologically inspired, multilayer neural architecture composed of Rectified Spectral Units (ReSUs). Each ReSU projects a recent window of its input history onto a canonical direction ob...

Move over ReLU 🚀
Meet **ReSU** (Rectified Spectral Unit): a biologically inspired, self-supervised unit for learning from dynamical data. A backprop-free multilayer ReSU network learns predictive features and recapitulates *Drosophila* vision.
To appear at AAAI: arxiv.org/abs/2512.23146

Thanks for the invitation to participate in your lively Computational Neuroscience Podcast! It is followed by so many of us in the community.

Episode #36 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On low-dimensional manifolds in motor cortex – with Sara Solla @sasolla.bsky.social

theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn36

Manifold analysis has changed our thinking on how cortex works. One of the pioneers of this modelling approach explains.

Applications open for SFI’s 2026 GWCSS program, a 2-week workshop for Ph.D. students and early-career scholars to explore complex systems and computation, collaborate on challenges, and advance their research with support from SFI faculty.

Apply by Feb 4, 2026
www.santafe.edu/gwcss

Portrait of Marina Vance, a scientist, sitting in a Colorado grassland.

The @nytimes.com Lost Science series continues. Here's my Q&A with a scientist who was studying how wildfire smoke threatens human health when the EPA decided that her research was no longer a funding priority. Gift link: nyti.ms/4jhpw14

Easy action to do right now 👇 You don't need to be in earth sciences; just let them know you value high quality research and recognize how important it is to the country.

YouTube video by Brown University CCBS Seminar: “What does the neuron do? A self-supervised dynamical model for neuroscience and AI"

Delighted to talk at Brown about our self-supervised neuronal algorithm for modeling biological circuits—and challenging backprop along the way. Thanks to @leokoz8 for the kind invitation! youtu.be/AF3Uhrm__U4?...

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.

I send money to @wikipedia.org every year.

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

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.

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

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.