Andrew Tan

brain = virus 😱😁

"When synapses strengthen, they release a virus-like particle that weakens the surrounding cells’ connections, the new work shows. This novel form of plasticity may aid memory by helping some synapses to shout above the background neuronal hubbub, the researchers say."

Actually another cool thing that came out of teaching the drosophila lab was that I got to share info about my research and theoretical/mathematical work in neuroscience to undergrads who a lot of the time hadn't been exposed to any of that yet! I taught them about moment generating functions, (1/2)

A slide titled “Summary Hallucination-Like Perception (HALIP)” with four bullet points on the right: “HALIP increases after hallucinogenic manipulations in mice,” “HALIP correlates with hallucinations in humans,” “Striatal dopamine causally mediates HALIP,” and “Expectations link striatal dopamine and HALIP.” On the left are four icons illustrating each point: a mouse hearing a sound, a human wearing headphones, a dopamine D2 receptor graphic, and a schematic of Bayesian inference with overlapping prior and likelihood curves. A large magenta arrow points toward the Bayesian schematic.

I somewhere heard the term #Bayesplaining 😂

I confess: guilty as charged. Exhibit A: my slide.

It was a pleasure to review this recording of Hindemith and Shostakovich violin concertos for this month's Gramophone. Alexandra Tirsu's performance of the superb Hindemith concerto is even finer than the recording Oistrakh made with the composer.

😱😂

That reminds me of Nikolai Ivanov's comment that

"Proofs are more important than theorems, definitions are more important than proofs."

owl-sowa.blogspot.com/2013/04/

A 24-year-old Stanford Ph.D. dropout shares how she lured Meta's top AI researchers and raised $64 million for her math startup 24-year-old Axiom Math founder Carina Hong wooed top Meta researchers in a competitive AI talent market.

This startup, Axiom Math, seems to be trying to automate the "puzzle solving" aspect of math. I'll be glad if they transfer some money from investors to mathematicians. But I've got a bit to say about this.

(1/n)

www.businessinsider.com/axiom-math-s...

Disappearing Sounds, by winter echoes 56 track album

Disappearing Sounds
Presented by Winter Echoes

All proceeds go toward The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led initiative working to supply emergency shelter and aid to displaced families in Gaza

winterechoes.bandcamp.com/album/disapp...

RETURN HOME x The Sameer Project "GIVE WARMTH TO GAZA" this Winter season...

I've been told Sameer Project is the "gold standard" for sending aid to Palestinians. Of many projects, this one is to keep Gazans warm this winter: shelter, warm clothing, blankets. Now they're in tattered tents w nothing, w/ Israel blocking aid entry despite ceasefire.
chuffed.org/project/1491...

Can your AI beat a mouse? This is happening Sunday! robustforaging.github.io NeurIPS workshop 11 to 2 California time on Zoom!

@mbeyeler.bsky.social
@sinzlab.bsky.social
@ninamiolane.bsky.social
@crisniell.bsky.social
@mariusschneider.bsky.social
J. Canzano, Y. Hou, J. Peng, et al.

#NeurIPS2025

Episode #35 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On modeling metabolic networks in the brain – with Polina Shichkova

theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn35

How are nutrients in the blood converted to usable energy in the brain (ATP)? A new comprehensive network model aims to explain.

People speak up in the fora of their choice.

Bethlehem 🇵🇸 is celebrating Christmas for the first time in two years

Some of my favorites from #NeurIPS2025

more neg max Lyapunov exp => faster parallelized RNN convergence
Gonzalez, X., Kozachkov, L., Zoltowski, D. M., Clarkson, K. L., & Linderman, S. Predictability Enables Parallelization of Nonlinear State Space Models.

Tenured US professor fired over pro-Palestinian protests contests dismissal Sang Hea Kil is first tenured faculty member fired from a public university in connection to the protests

Universities will keep sexual predators on the faculty because their "hands are tied by tenure." Turns out protesting genocide is all it takes to loosen those unshakable chains.

Sharpened visual memory representations are reflected in inferotemporal cortex Humans and other primates can robustly report whether they've seen specific images before, even when those images are extremely similar to ones they've previously seen. Multiple lines of evidence sugg...

Excited to share a new article, led by Barnes Jannuzi. Here we tried to pinpoint something about visual familiarity that isn't reflected in visual cortex via something putatively hippocampal. Nope! Per the theme of this era, the brain is not so simple. /1

www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Screenshot from The Onion, originally published October 9, 2002. Headline: Frank Gehry No Longer Allowed To Make Sandwiches for Grandkids Below it, a photo of a plate with multiple deconstructed sandwiches balanced precariously, vaguely resembling a Frank Gehry building.

Frank Gehry, 1929–2025 www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/a...

"The 21-year-old American [Ilia Malinin] landed a jaw-dropping seven quadruple jumps, including a quadruple Axel - a jump only he has landed in competition"

Symphony No. 5: I. Allegro moderato

Born on 7 December 1912, Welsh composer, Daniel Jones. His 5th Symphony was premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the composer's baton at the Royal Festival Hall in London on 18 February 1959. open.spotify.com/track/5d5ydY... #britsymphyear

Although very distinguished, the Wykeham Professor is required to fight Mike Tyson, a fact that is strangely omitted in the job description. #philsky philjobs.org/job/show/30445

Sex differences in BNST signaling and BNST CRF in fear processing Critical differences in how the BNST responds to different types of fear across male and female mice.

In @elife.bsky.social: Sex differences in BNST signaling and BNST CRF in fear processing doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Official version finally out. Thank you to reviewers, made it better!

Autism’s Confusing Cousins A differential diagnosis for the weird and the awkward

Autism’s Confusing Cousins

A differential diagnosis for the weird and the awkward

www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/autisms-co...

A photograph of Gaza Luna: Antologi Fiksi Spekulatif Palestina. The book cover is green with an illustration of a floating astronaut holding a Palestinian flag. There is a smaller illustration of a woman with keffiyeh headscarf digging on a soil.

Read Palestine Week 2025, day 7: the Indonesian translation of "Thyme Travellers", an anthology of speculative fiction short stories by contemporary Palestinian authors. "Gaza Luna" is also my favorite story: about a failed astronaut who worked to bring a Palestinian flag to the moon. #Booksky

We used rabies virus 👾 to map how #psilocybin modifies long-range circuits 🧠, revealing network-specific reorganization that we didn’t expect.

The full study is now online at Cell. @cp-cell.bsky.social

Paper 👉 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Thread for a synopsis 👉
bsky.app/profile/alex...

Virologe Drosten im Interview: „Wie lange geht diese Quälerei noch weiter?“ Die Inzidenz ist hoch wie nie. Doch der Coronavirus-Experte Christian Drosten von der Charité Berlin macht Hoffnung: Das Änderungspotenzial von Sars-Cov-2 ist grundsätzlich begrenzt, sagt er.

It's interesting Irene Petersen was accused of advocating "speeding up the pandemic" in early 2022, given Christian Drosten likened covid infection to a moving train which one has to jump on "otherwise you won't get anywhere. The good news is: At the moment, the train is running pleasantly slow ..."

A rough watercolour painting of a misty forest scene. A number of tall tree trunks appear darker in the foreground and fade away with loose foliage showing at the top of the picture. Beams of sunlight appear to break through the mist to the right and illuminate a blurry figure, what appears to be an elderly person with a stick, slightly bent over. The figure appears to be trying to find their way, drifting towards a brighter light that can just be seen in the distance.

I’m somewhat nervous sharing this painting as I created it just after my mother passed away in July this year.

A ‘loose’ watercolour of a misty wood. As I watch on in the stillness I see a familiar figure drifting away to a peaceful place 🤍

Happy Friday everyone 🕊️

#ArtAdventCalendar #Scape

These are just petty, cruel people.

And although Tracy Høeg joined the anti-vaxxers, she and Vinay Prasad have critiques worth taking seriously.

School Mask Mandates and COVID-19
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39374524/

How methodological pitfalls have created widespread misunderstanding about long COVID
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37748921/

Dr. Anthony Fauci Shares Moving Tribute to Larry Kramer and Their 'Love for Each Other' Dr. Fauci, director of NIAID, explains how Larry Kramer changed the relationship between activism and the scientific community.

Fauci became friends with somone who likened him to Adolf Eichmann.
www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

There was crying wolf such as the smears against Irene Petersen in sciencebasedmedicine.org/panel-stacki... for co-authoring criticism of a consensus that included Feigl-Ding and Bar-Yam.

It seems Vinay Prasad, among those elsewhere similarly unfairly criticized, decided to join the real wolves.