Albert Cardona

How does the brain work? Someday, we'll figure it out. 
Group Leader, MRC LMB, and Professor, University of Cambridge, UK. 
#neuroscience #Drosophila #ScientificPublishing #academia #TrakEM2 #FijiSc #CATMAID #connectomics #connectome #vEM #iNaturalist #entomology
Born at 335 ppm. 
Brains, signal processing, software and entomology: there will be bugs.

Personal website: https://albert.rierol.net
Lab: https://syn.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk
iNaturalist: https://www.inaturalist.org/lifelists/albertcardona?view=tree&details_view=observations
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4941-6536

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albertcardona_at_mathstodon.xyz@momostr.pink

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Published at

2026-04-24T15:20:09Z

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Last Notes

2026-04-07 11:30:41 UTC

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I have a jacket made for a friend of my dad, that then was given to him when he was 15 ... that was over 60 years ago. Looks like new. The only unfortunate bit is that my shoulders are a bit wider than my dad's and I can't wear it well. But my teenager son can.
The fashion industry is among the worst offenders. People in the Western world should know about what happens to clothes they reject. The Atacama desert [1] in Bolivia and Chile, and in Nigeria [2]. The Textile Mountain film does a good job at stating the dire consequences clearly: https://www.textilemountainfilm.com
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/chile-fashion-pollution
[2] https://climateaction.africa/fas-the-challenges-of-textile-waste-in-africa/
#FastFashionTrash #NoPlanetB #EcosystemCollapse

2026-04-07 10:51:55 UTC

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Now imagine a company that said, «yes, after 5 years of intensive in-house use, we can assert with confidence that this is a good laptop. We are now pushing it out into production, is available for purchase.»
Now imagine that was mandated by law as part of both repairability and durability requirements, sending "planned obsolescence" into oblivion.
Frankly, that's how it should be. For clothes, washing machines, cars, anything that is manufactured and has a limited lifetime, yet shouldn't, or, its lifetime should be counted in decades, even in generations. Consumer society is only consuming ourselves and the planet we so dearly depend on.
Would the cost raise? On paper, no: would only be pushed some years into the future. In practice, the lack of a short-term incentive would prevent any laptop from being manufactured at all, so the cost might as well be infinite.
One wonders what can be done that is practical and implementable now to tame the madness and bring into the cost all the externalities – the latter should be the only source of additional costs, and would be minimized the longer the lifetime of a product is.
#ConsumerSociety #PlannedObsolescence #ConsumerMarket #externalities

2026-04-06 22:36:47 UTC

A lot is said about the repairability of a laptop, but few consider its durability too.
I have a Thinkpad X1 yoga first generation from 2016 that continues to run like the first day. Fan doesn't make any noise, doesn't get hot, hard drive (an NVMe) works the same. The battery keeps less charge, but not that little either. Computing-wise, I only feel it's old when opening Blender; can't do live textured rendering. With a touch screen and an outstandingly good keyboard, it's a pleasure to take notes in, to write.
I also have an Apple macbook M1, first generation, from 2020, which continues to work very well. Recently got upgraded to latest OS version (26), in addition also runs Asahi Linux. No issues at all with anything, not even the battery. Only the hard drive feels small, but that's not much of an issue.
In my office there are a number of old macbooks, from 2012 and 2015. They all boot, into Ubuntu, which is what they always have run from day 1. Work well as far as I can tell; one feels their age in that their compute capacity seems comparatively small. Good keyboards, in working order despite having been used intensely for about 3 years each.
Then I have my current laptop: a Framework 11 1st gen from late 2021. I only configured it in mid 2022; was too busy to switch laptops. Screen hinges are floppy, they've been since day one but now more notably so. Various keys peeled off. More serious, it has blacked out twice, possibly because of overheating; the fan does go very noisy at times. It's bendy, not stiff. Feels powerful still, but goodness, the laptop as a whole gives the impression of senescence. Incomparable to the sturdy feel of the Thinkpad or the ethereal, eternal feel of the macbooks.

2026-04-05 20:02:04 UTC

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In the UK alone, every person, adult or child, subsidizes car drivers to the tune of £800/year, whether they themselves drive or not. That's the current cost of infrastructure and public services used by cars and their drivers.
Reads cheap until one thinks, suppose that was allocated to cycling infrastructure and public transport instead ...

2026-04-04 14:42:30 UTC

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I'm in. Is there an implementable plan in offer by any political party? The UK Green Party seems to be making noises in this direction but I haven't found anything concrete yet.

2026-04-02 08:34:09 UTC

"We demonstrate that multilayer ANNs comprised of separate excitatory and inhibitory cell types, and neuronal units with separate dendrite compartments, can be trained to accurately classify images using a fully biology-compatible deep learning algorithm called dendritic target propagation."
"Cellular and subcellular specialization enables biology-constrained deep learning", Galloni et al. 2026 (Aaron Milstein's lab).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211124726002378
#neuroscience #BioinspiredComputing #ANNs
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/116/334/178/809/035/075/original/771439d29cf42ce7.png

2026-03-29 09:39:40 UTC

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The government is the representative of a sovereign state. Doesn't need to justify severing ties with a company, much less one known for its exploitative practices. If anything, the government ought to emit a public apology for having contracted out work to Palantir in the first place.

2026-03-28 08:42:55 UTC

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While surely the war is stressing the supply chain, the UK by design is always weeks away from shortages of one kind or another. The UK's is not a self-sufficient society in any shape or form. Likewise for most if not all Western countries.
The shock to me was when the UK voted for Brexit when 50% of its food – I mean, its FOOD – came from the EU. How far can manipulation go to make people not know where and how their food comes from, and to then vote against their very own interests.
There are good reasons why, e.g., France heavily subsidises its farmers.
#UK

2026-03-26 23:08:40 UTC

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But back to humans ...
"Women used to dominate the beer industry – until the witch accusations started pouring in" (2021)
https://theconversation.com/women-used-to-dominate-the-beer-industry-until-the-witch-accusations-started-pouring-in-155940
«Humans have been drinking beer for almost 7,000 years, and the original brewers [1] were women. From the Vikings to the Egyptians, women brewed beer both for religious ceremonies and to make a practical, calorie-rich beverage for the home.»
«From the Stone Age to the 1700s, ale – and, later, beer – was a household staple for most families in England and other parts of Europe. The drink was an inexpensive way to consume and preserve grains. For the working class, beer provided an important source of nutrients, full of carbohydrates and proteins. Because the beverage was such a common part of the average person’s diet, fermenting was, for many women, one of their normal household tasks. [2]»
[1] https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/women-and-beer-forgotten-pairing#:%7E:text=Women's%20involvement%20in%20brewing%20beer,in%20Mesopotamia%2C%20and%20possible%20earlier.&text=Historically%20women%20were%20involved%20in,also%20brewed%20their%20own%20beer.
[2] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/women-making-beer
#beer #fermentation

2026-03-26 23:04:16 UTC

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Not only human's:
«Yes, there are very real dangers to drunkenness among animals, yet there seems to be no shame attached to it. Except perhaps for honeybees. They are nature's hardest drinkers capable of knocking back 100% proof, or as one researcher remarked: "I know of no other organism that drinks pure ethanol, not even a college student."»
«In Australia, the summer heat ferments nectar and, according to the entomologist Errol Hassan, bees all too easily slip into alcoholism. "The bees can't find their way back to the hive, bang into trees or simply fall to the ground," he says. A drunken bee often faces disgrace back at the hive, ostracised by its teetotal fellows. "They are not allowed in by the guard bees at the entrance to the hive," Hassan says. "They are pushed away from the landing platform or attacked." And with good reason. If their fermented nectar was turned into alcoholic honey, it could end up paralysing the entire colony.»
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2001/dec/13/research.highereducation1
#honeybees #alcoholism #alcohol

2026-03-26 14:40:36 UTC

Biological Laboratory – a Lego set proposal, created by one of our lab members, Chu-Cheng.
https://beta.ideas.lego.com/product-ideas/ab52d2c2-0688-48e7-a7d1-77ae54a6aa4b
In his words: "The playability, esthetics of this design, together with the most important, educational value, make it a perfect set for Lego ideas product."
Still some days to support it, needs to gather a lot more support beyond the present 2,100 to reach manufacturing. How many scientists are there in Mastodon?
#Lego #science #laboratory

2026-03-25 08:35:15 UTC

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Except, US citizens can and do travel through Europe with Meta's glasses on ...

2026-03-24 11:54:57 UTC

Postdoc position: Career Returner Fellowship
"The LMB is proud to launch a three-year fully funded fellowship for scientists who have had a career break of 12 months or more."
"At the LMB, we understand that stepping away from research – even briefly – can affect career progression. That is why we have created a dedicated postdoctoral fellowship to support researchers who have taken a career break of 12 months or more, for any reason, for example parental leave, health reasons, caregiving, a career change or other personal circumstances."
https://mrclmb.ac.uk/careers-and-people/postdocs/career-returner-fellowship/
Happy to discuss applications to our lab in #Drosophila #connectomics, #ElectronMicroscopy or #ComputerVision applied to #BioimageInformatics.
#MRCLMB #PhDJobs #neuroscience

2026-03-19 22:41:52 UTC

Reflecting on eLife's new publication model, 3 years in: "the most important thing we have learnt is that our new approach to publishing works. Authors, reviewers and editors routinely tell us that they have had a more constructive experience with the new approach."
https://elifesciences.org/articles/110392?_hsmi=98220609
Proud to be an eLife editor. eLife's publication model gets the best from everyone:
* from authors, who remain in control and can reply to reviewers without fear and without being overly apologetic or sycophantic;
* from reviewers, who engage constructively in a semi-anonymous way (they aren't anonymous neither to each other nor to the editors, all practicing scientists in their field), knowing that their comments are suggestions, not mandates for authors;
* and from editors, who don't have to deal with any nastiness from any party, everybody being far more relaxed that I've seen in any other journal, concentrating their efforts in the scientific content.
1/3
#eLife #ScientificPublishing

2026-03-19 21:06:37 UTC

For fruit fly and vision enthusiasts and specialists:
"Electrical synapses mediate visual approach behavior", Frighetto et al. 2025 (from Mark A. Frye and Larry Zipursky's labs)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.14.682373v1
"Our findings reveal mechanisms underlying visual approach, and highlight the interplay between electrical and chemical neurotransmission for rapid object detection and action selection."
#neuroscience #Drosophila #vision #GapJunctions

2026-03-16 21:45:53 UTC

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Indeed, a focus on growth is the definition of cancer.

2026-03-07 18:19:07 UTC

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There hasn't been a left wing party in power in England for decades (since before Tony Blair, who certainly wasn't a lefty). Corbyn tried but failed. The Green Party is the breath of fresh air with the best chance to clear away the stuffy malaise that pushed all other parties into the one-upping downward spiral of right-wing extremist policies that delivered the present predicament.

2026-03-05 07:45:58 UTC

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What a prospect: most of the western world doesn't mind their thoughts anchored and nudged by an automated statistical language generator providd by companies that are currently losing billions and soon will want to recover revenue and profit ... what could possibly go wrong.

2026-03-05 07:01:28 UTC

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"AI assistants are now embedded in our daily lives" – really? That's quite the opening premise. I must be a dinosaur.

2026-03-03 22:31:29 UTC

Zebra jumping spider, Salticus scenicus, predating upon a fly.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/341067635
#iNaturalist #Aranea #spiders #entomology

2026-03-03 15:38:38 UTC

I keep hearing about the "slopocalipse" coming to scientific publishing, and I can't but think: it was already happening before LLMs became "good enough" at writing academic prose. What hasn't been addressed is the root cause: the incentives. The publish-or-perish approach to science evaluation, for grants and positions.
Want a solution? Limit publications to one per author per year. You can publish more when in collaboration, i.e., make it fractional. The end goal: make people think what brick they want to supply to the edifice of science. As a bonus, *reward* scientists when they publish *less than* one paper per year.
And the business models based on journal APCs can all die a sudden death now.
#ScientificPublishing #academia #slopocalipse

2026-02-23 21:14:45 UTC

2 PhD student positions available in Koen Vervaeke's lab in Oslo:
1️⃣ Systems Neuroscience: Investigate hippocampal spatial memory & addiction mechanisms. (Tools: In vivo 2P imaging, ephys, optogenetics).
2️⃣ Neuro/Cancer Biology: The GLIOFORCE project. A unique collaboration with the Campsteijn Lab to track Glioblastoma invasion in vivo using mesoscope 2P imaging.
https://vervaeke-lab.org/Hiring
#neuroscience #PhDPositions #SystemsNeuroscience #glioblastoma

2026-02-17 14:43:47 UTC

"What thoughts do these men have about women if this is the stuff they are saying out loud?"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/17/men-push-abuse-women-street-stranger
After the Brexit vote there were reportings of increased racist and hate crimes. What's going on in the US and what spills beyond its borders is now on the streets.

2026-02-10 21:29:40 UTC

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There's always a small group who doesn't. As always, the novella "Profession" by Asimov comes to mind ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)

2026-02-10 20:09:57 UTC

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Some of us still understand the machine, still read the code of the dependencies, still know how to fix it all when it breaks, and can write code to save the day – in my everyday, to handle hundreds of terabytes of data with enough efficiency to derive sensible results with an average annual compute budget smaller than the purchase price of a single H200 GPU.
I understand the sentiment, but, there was always such noise. Frameworks du jour, abstractions upon abstractions. Some of us still learned to write low-level code and to care about the inner workings and difference between registers, CPU caches, round-trips to RAM, and disk caches. The analogy of the food in the fork, in front of you in a bowl, in a box in the fridge, in the market, and sowing the seeds for harvesting 6 months later still rings true and makes sense, to many of us.
What has perhaps happened is that those who never cared much now can code, or rather, are vibe coding, which are entirely different things but lets them get stuff done. Good for them, if only it wasn't boiling the oceans over for mundane stuff like writing a school essay or crafting an email reply.

2026-02-04 21:40:10 UTC

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The photo-Keynesian is also ... rather physics flavoured! Proto?

2026-02-03 11:41:32 UTC

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Thanks, indeed, a nice summary of key takeaways from Anil Seth's essay https://www.noemamag.com/the-mythology-of-conscious-ai/ There's a lot to agree with there, including all the assumptions and bad metaphors that those who equate brains with computers repeatedly fall into.
A few points that come to mind:
* The software/hardware separation isn't as clean in computers either, from the CPU microcode to the OS that it runs. In humans, I don't have an analogy for microcode, but languages change the way we perceive the world, and those of us who speak multiple languages do feel sometimes that we express a different character when speaking in a different language.
* On time, computers operating under real-time constraints are a lot closer to what brains do. The optimal outcome is not the best possible one or a designated one, but rather, that which can do the job in the time and resources allotted.
* Operating systems, and broadly most software, operates on an event dispatch loop, whereby the system awaits an event and then reacts, followed by a restart of the loop body. Having the loop not stop is a key characteristic of our cerebral cortices, where most inputs to any one neuron arrive from other cortical neurons, with as little as about 6% of inputs to some select neurons (in layer 4) arriving from external sensory stimuli via the thalamus (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cne.22133 ) . A recurrent neural network is not that different, conceptually, bridging the huge distance of self-driven input seeking.
* Biological systems are entropically favored https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08374
* The latest technology is never a good metaphor for the brain, as Matthew Cobb's book details over and over: https://profilebooks.com/work/the-idea-of-the-brain/
#neuroscience

2026-02-01 10:08:25 UTC

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If that's the desirable action, what will create the conditions for it? Because anyone in power will only move if they see it as a win for themselves.

2026-02-01 10:02:32 UTC

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So how do we create the necessary circumstances of available information and public opinion to shift government policy towards reinstating professional schools? How can that be made acceptable and desirable to those in charge of now called universities that used to be polytechniques? And to the government to supply the funding?

2026-02-01 09:52:38 UTC

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And more than that, a change in perceptions. For when I ask undergraduates here at Cambridge University why are they here, to learn or to get a credential, almost all say the latter. None of them should be here, they should be in a professional school where the credentials will match the jobs they seek.

2026-02-01 09:46:13 UTC

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What's more, without the earlier UK policies that enabled anyone from a EU country to immigrate to the UK regardless of Schengen status the UK's trades like plumbers, electricians, and much more would be in tatters. Now that innane politics have closed that avenue, there's a time bomb awaiting.

2026-02-01 09:41:43 UTC

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Indeed, the comparison in professionalism and abilities of the workforce between the UK and countries that have kept their work schools vs universities separate is stark.

2026-01-30 16:04:42 UTC

Postdoc position open in my lab (UK) to study a disease model in #Drosophila with comparative connectomics:
https://mrc.tal.net/vx/mobile-0/appcentre-int/brand-3/spa-1/candidate/so/pm/1/pl/3/opp/2765-Postdoctoral-Scientist-Neurobiology-Dr-Albert-Cardona-LMB-2765/en-GB
My lab:
* our page: https://syn.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/
* institutional page: https://mrclmb.ac.uk/research-leaders/albert-cardona/
#neuroscience #PhDJobs #Parkinson

2026-01-29 16:54:46 UTC

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Laughed out loud at the bottom text box …

2026-01-29 08:42:55 UTC

"Should professors be forced to retire?"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00055-4
The data points to retirement age limits not resulting in new faculty positions at the same rate as faculty posts become available. A pungent point, since retirement age limits were justified on this basis. Further, non-academic posts (i.e., administrative and support posts) are increasing at universities. Plus:
“In many disciplines, your abilities don’t fall off a cliff at the age of 69”, says Oliver Linton.
That is true, but: our abilities often fall off a cliff *far before* that. Sometimes, even decades before that. In particular, our ability to perform research work with our own hands, and to pivot into new research lines, or entirely different fields when the present one is exhausted.
While retirement per se doesn't matter, what matters is the capability of the system to engage in new research approaches, and to explore so far unexamined questions or newly opened fields of research.
How to square the circle? Grant emeritus status to any academic who wants it, at any age. Salary stops being the university's problem; laboratory space frees up for others; and if any grant body wants to provide support funds to the emeritus, by all means; or if the research is engaging enough that other faculty members want to support it in collaboration, absolutely. The relief in voting power while retaining talent, experience, a no-fucks given attitude to questions in seminars, and often the willingness to lecture, at essentially no cost, is a no-brainer.
#academia

2025-12-27 16:01:49 UTC

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I wonder what came out of the DARPA "Fundamental Laws in Biology" program with which Jack Morava was involved:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070714091107/http://www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/math/funmath/fundamental/index.htm

2025-12-25 22:06:17 UTC

Last light. Cambridge, December 24th, 2025.
#sunset #WinterSolstice
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/115/782/472/136/606/376/original/63388bd3c6c61934.png

2025-12-22 11:06:17 UTC

Hi cyclists of Mastodon. I am looking for a laptop/messenger bag, with these characteristics:
1. Small, thin and 100% waterproof.
2. Shockproof: strongly padded for protection.
3. On one side, with clips to attach to a pannier rack.
4. On the other side, with two straps like a backpack.
5. One long across-the-chest strap like a handbag.
Does anything like this exist? Thank you!
#cyclists #MessengerBag #cycling

2025-12-05 08:56:48 UTC

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"In Germany, 90% of people living in large cities have access to a tramway or underground train system. In France, it’s 80%. In the UK, the figure is less than 20%, a similar level to the US."
Considering how small the UK is, it's beyond embarrassing. There's no excuse whatsoever other than incompetence or worse, wilful ignorance or even a deliberate policy.
#UK #PublicTransport

2025-11-27 15:51:30 UTC

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Can't agree more. Scientific publications are the means for scientists to talk to each other in a formalised way, and not at all as a way to accrue points towards career advancement or funding. Let's retake that original purpose from the choking grasp of the bean counters.

2025-11-27 15:43:16 UTC

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The paper:
"The inevitability and superfluousness of cell types in spatial cognition", Luo et al. 2025
https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/99047v2
Quite the poster child for why at @npub1ru6…9el5 we support publishing papers that we consider important and yet nonetheless label as incomplete: the questions are worth asking, the discussion has to happen, the suggested experiments need to be voiced out and aired, to prompt someone to take them on to the lab.
#ScientificPublishing

2025-11-15 14:43:19 UTC

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The surprising bit is that the (lack of) health of the general population isn't counted as part of the cost or return. The returns of the NHS are not in the daily business but in supporting a healthy population to live fulfilling lives.
It's like measuring the return from public transport on the amounts collected from bus or train tickets. That's not it either. Enabling economic activity and removing expenses across the board elsewhere are the point.

2025-11-12 22:28:40 UTC

"Epstein-Barr virus reprograms autoreactive B cells as antigen-presenting cells in systemic lupus erythematosus", Younis et al. 2025
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.ady0210
With this and the prior discovery of the relationship between EBV and multiple sclerosis, and with various cancers, we are late already at developing an effective vaccine against EBV.
#EBV #EpsteinBarrVirus #lupus

2025-11-12 09:18:01 UTC

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Possibly. I haven't found specific ROI for scientific research in the UK, unlike for e.g., the genome project for which there are very specific figures.

2025-11-12 08:31:48 UTC

"It pays off to pay artists"
"An Irish pilot scheme offering workers in the creative industries a basic income found that for every euro invested, €1.39 made it back into the economy."
And everyone's lives got better for it. Let's keep it up!
https://europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/it-pays-off-to-pay-artists
#ShareGoodNewsToo

2025-11-09 22:55:37 UTC

"High concentrations of DDT found across vast swath of California seafloor" (2018)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/24/california-pacific-ocean-ddt-high-concentration
WTF.
#DDT #California

2025-11-05 10:47:29 UTC

"Blow fly larvae socially integrate termite nests through morphological and chemical mimicry", by Schär et al. 2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.01.007
#biomimicry #entomology #Diptera

2025-10-29 09:57:28 UTC

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It's a kind initiative, yet misses the underlying dynamic: beyond climate change exacerbating the magnitude of seasonal downpours, the underlying proximate cause is that a lot of housing and roads were built on flood plains.
A major culprit is, then, the corrupt government that emitted housing construction permits for these areas, that have been known to be flood plains for times immemorial and were officially designated as so in modern times.
While immediate relief is appreciated, what is needed is a longer term plan to (1) prosecute the corrupt politicians; (2) prosecute the construction companies that knowingly built on flood plains; and (3) fully fund the relocation of those who live in the impacted buildings.
#València #29O #DANA29O #PaísValencià

2025-10-27 12:23:06 UTC

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I think that @npub1s5c…8mlm meant OnlyOffice instead.

2025-10-24 15:56:20 UTC

Our lab member Chu-Chen Lin has designed a beautiful LEGO Education set to showcase a Biological Laboratory.
If you'd like to see this LEGO set become something you can gift to middle school students, please sign – needs to reach 10,000 signatures:
https://beta.ideas.lego.com/product-ideas/ab52d2c2-0688-48e7-a7d1-77ae54a6aa4b
It's amazing. Lots of thoughtful details on actual scientific experiments in biology.
Via Miranda Robbins' post in a corporate network.
Please help boost for reach.
#LEGO #LEGOEducationSet #biology #science

2025-10-24 15:45:58 UTC

Tenure-track assistant professor position in neuroscience at Brandeis University:
https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30961
For further info, email Prof. Gina Turrigiano.
#PhDJobs #academia #neuroscience

2025-10-14 19:35:24 UTC

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Let’s hope that famous IBM slide makes the rounds a few million times.
#IBMslide
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/115/374/193/595/451/683/original/1ff4eca007bc1bce.png

2025-10-05 10:40:13 UTC

Interested in running a bakery in a small village in Catalonia? Then owner has to step down for health reasons.
https://mastodon.social/@repoblem/115320211488672172

2025-10-04 20:08:53 UTC

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The sky and the Earth, two eyelids closing, the dwindling light now a mere slit of fiery colours. Nightfall.
#nightfall #UK #sunset #StormAmy
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/115/317/698/126/104/326/original/33e9c4f85b7f9ac2.jpg

2025-10-04 20:04:58 UTC

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... and the clouds parade, shadows against the still bright blue sky.
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/115/317/682/032/640/653/original/5e6a651da0ca49d4.jpg

2025-10-04 20:02:27 UTC

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Opposite, the Moon rises ...
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/115/317/673/625/821/007/original/44864637229fb778.jpg

2025-10-04 19:59:59 UTC

Sunset with all the colours of the wind.
Cambridge, UK.
#StormAmy #sunset #SunsetSaturday
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/115/317/662/411/843/170/original/9167dc4e5217d0e1.jpg

2025-09-28 21:26:48 UTC

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Can't seem to find a link to The Nerve anywhere, not even in the Beehiiv main site.

2025-09-28 10:34:57 UTC

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Asking an LLM to fix a poorly written scientific manuscript is also a failure: makes the language smoother, even grandiloquent, but the content isn't clearer, primarily because it doesn't know – it can't know – what's missing. Otherwise the work wouldn't be at the horizon of knowledge, i.e., out of distribution to use the CS lingo.

2025-09-28 10:25:04 UTC

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A few anecdotal cases:
When I ask an LLM to create an abstract for a grant proposal I have just written, it's laughably off the mark, highliting irrelevant points.
When I ask an LLM to summarize a scientific manuscript, the result is concerning in that some of the points aren't made in the manuscript at all.
When I ask an LLM to pick key points from a long document, be it a book or a white paper, the choices are its own, not the ones I would have chosen. Resisting its choices is hard, setting up a concerning anchoring effect that I'd rather avoid.
Last I tried was this last August.
For all the above I don't use LLMs. For my domain of knowledge LLMs fall very short.

2025-09-25 08:02:33 UTC

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Internet Archive Europe:
https://www.internetarchive.eu/
#InternetArchiveEurope

2025-09-22 22:06:23 UTC

Vikas Bhandawat is hiring, at Drexel University, Philadelphia:
"The Bhandawat Lab is seeking a motivated Research Assistant interested in biomechanics and neuroscience of locomotion."
https://careers.drexel.edu/cw/en-us/job/505695
#neuroscience #PhDJob

2025-09-22 22:01:23 UTC

Full Professorship (W3) in “Multimodal Imaging” at University of Heidelberg, Germany.
Deadline: September 30th.
https://adb.zuv.uni-heidelberg.de/info/INFO_FDB$.startup?MODUL=LS&SESSID=0&M1=1&M2=0&M3=0&PRO=38162

2025-09-18 12:54:02 UTC

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Plus the mosquito body frame is rather common across the Nematocera, from the large and harmless craneflies to extraordinary insect-like mimics such as the Lasioptera genus https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/56758-Lasioptera/browse_photos in the Cecidomyiidae family, one of the most specious – read, varied, in number of species – groups of insects, possibly even more than beetles; see Hebert et al. 2016 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2015.0333

2025-09-18 12:38:23 UTC

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Thank you, very appreciated. The stats say that there are 5.41 billion social media user identities – carefully crafted not to confuse it with actual people. One wonders, is it 1/5th, 1/10th, 1/100th of that number, the actual individual human beings using social media?
The same page states there are 5.65 billion individuals using the internet, and 5.76 unique mobile phone subscribers.

2025-09-18 12:17:51 UTC

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Seems worthy of a second attempt aiming at a broader audience.
And to normalize: what percent of adults in any one country use social media at all at least once a week?

2025-09-15 21:52:43 UTC

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Reminded of "Joel on software" blog post from 2007 on the perception of the past from the future, quote:
"And you’ll tell your children how excited you were to get 2GB to store email, and they’ll laugh at you. Their nail polish has more than 2GB."
Except it's not nail polish but an "adult pacifier" (that's one to keep).
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/09/18/strategy-letter-vi/

2025-09-15 21:48:09 UTC

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"Someone's trash is another person's web server."
Remarkable.

2025-09-07 10:05:35 UTC

#SilentSunday #Pembroke1347
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/115/162/449/344/861/466/original/932ad7f137672252.png

2025-09-04 14:56:59 UTC

"High-Speed Microscope for Biological Imaging"
https://www.optica-opn.org/home/newsroom/2025/august/high-speed_microscope_for_biological_imaging/
Sara Abrahamsson's lab delivers again!
Paper at:
"High-speed 3D imaging with a 25-camera multifocus microscope", Miyasaki et al. 2025
https://opg.optica.org/optica/fulltext.cfm?uri=optica-12-8-1230&id=575640
#neuroscience #GCaMP #CaImaging #Drosophila #Celegans #DrosophilaLarva

2025-08-17 10:19:46 UTC

Sea fennel, Crithmum maritimum
#Bloomscrolling #SilentSunday #Croatia
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/115/043/593/173/758/533/original/b8dbe45fbfb9b5ac.png

2025-08-17 09:52:51 UTC

When the peer review and publishing process didn’t go as smooth as it could have been, the editor asks you about it, takes notes, forwards your feedback. From an academic to an academic.
But in the overpriced journals, instead, there is a:
Customer Experience & Insights Manager Data, Insights & Analytics
ELSEVIER | Operations
… that reaches out to you with a form to fill in, even when things went well. For you to do their job. Which I suspect then they feed into “AI” (an LLM). No, I didn’t answer the request.
Besides the 30% pure profit, that’s what #RELX #Elsevier does with your research funds: employ a bunch in bullshit jobs. It’s not like they have to do market research or stay on top of changing conditions. Beyond embarrassing, it’s malpractice. A form of corruption.
And no, I didn’t choose to send the manuscript there, I was merely a middle author.
#ScientificPublishing

2025-08-10 11:33:02 UTC

Unusual flies, recently spotted:
Milesia semiluctifera (tentative ID)
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/304732813
#iNaturalist #Diptera #flies

2025-08-09 07:56:31 UTC

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"T&E, a transport and clean energy advocacy group, says air travel is artificially cheap mainly because all parts of the sector – from airports through plane manufacturers through to airlines – are subsidised by local, regional, national and EU authorities, while airlines are exempt from paying tax on their fuel and VAT on their tickets."
Deallocating such subsidies from air travel and allocating them to train travel would help. A lot.
#TrainTravel #EUTrains

2025-08-03 22:31:53 UTC

The day has come when twitter is sharing screenshots of messages in mastodon. How things turn around.

2025-07-31 21:58:38 UTC

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The green transition is a great nice-to-have, but what the railway does is to liberate: to not ever having to think about transport at all, knowing there's reliable, frequent transport to just about anywhere, anytime. Having lived in Switzerland I can't ever let go of that feeling of complete and utter freedom of mobility. A car is a pale shadow in comparison.

2025-07-24 20:51:48 UTC

"Many sites have been affected by the aggressiveness of web crawlers designed to improve LLMs.
I’ve been relatively spared, but since the phenomenon started, I've been looking for a solution to implement.
Today, I present a zip bomb gzip and brotli that is valid HTML."
https://ache.one/notes/html_zip_bomb
#WebMaster

2025-07-11 06:35:48 UTC

Mystery fly. iNaturalist's computer vision model doesn't know it, and so far community suggestions are above family level.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/296640551
As seen in Pembroke College, Cambridge, this past week.
#iNaturalist #Diptera #flies #entomology

2025-07-09 01:14:54 UTC

Position available: Post Doctoral Research Associate in Whole Organism Neuroscience – lab of Iris Hardege, University of Cambridge, UK.
Deadline for application: August 3rd, 2025.
"This BBSRC-funded project aims to understand the interplay between excitatory and inhibitory metabotropic and ionotropic dopamine receptors and how they contribute to the regulation of complex behaviours."
https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/51874/
#PhDJobs #neuroscience #Celegans #dopamine

2025-07-08 08:20:03 UTC

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To what extent do subsidies account for the difference?

2025-07-06 07:39:06 UTC

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Given such practices from Adobe, there's no expectation that they'll respect the setting, or come up with a new way to undermine the user's choice in the future. The only sensible path forward is to stop using Adobe products altogether. There are plenty of alternatives.

2025-06-29 10:01:13 UTC

#SilentSunday #Bloomscrolling
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/766/067/645/933/639/original/346e4c1850d147b4.png

2025-06-29 09:07:55 UTC

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Or putting the bucket when it rains? Given abysmal academic salaries across the board, frankly it is only understandable.
Affiliation would matter more if the host institution provided a proper salary commensurate with costs of living and funds for research, as opposed to asking the academic to raise both from external sources.

2025-06-29 08:49:08 UTC

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And yet, a hand-written letter from a friend is a treasure.
Mutatis mutandis, a written essay, as opposed to a generated one, is a superpower, because writing and rewriting is a very strong aid to thinking.
What's more, those posed to benefit the most from LLMs are precisely those who know how to write well and have extensive knowledge of the subject matter. Those who will be harmed the most are the ones who neither know how to write well nor know the subject matter – among them, students.

2025-06-29 08:00:35 UTC

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Oral exams have always been, and I foresee they'll become more common again. But th3 ability to write well is precious and valuable. If anything LLMs will further deepen the divide between those who can and those who cannot.

2025-06-29 07:48:54 UTC

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I wish you could have experienced what it is to try to have a one on one one-hour supervision session with a student who not only didn't read the material but thinks he did, and produced an essay he hasn't actually read, much less understand, but somehow expects you to comment on it, de facto explaining the material to him for the first time, all the while displaying an attitude of the whole thing being unnecessary and a mere busywork exercise.
Beyond depriving the student of putting in the effort to find, read, and digest the material, to then develop a critical view on it, and exercise the expression of such thoughts in writing, the use of LLMs set in a profoundly felt feeling of empowerment, yet entirely vacuous, and a sense of helplessness too. It's disabling – for the student.
#academia

2025-06-29 07:36:49 UTC

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Hope exists in the form of a a set of students who resist and, under the constrained conditions of exams, delivered wonderfully articulate and rich essays on complex subjects. Here is to hoping such a group will persist among their peers over the next few years, until the damage of comoditised LLMs becomes more common knowledge and countermeasures emerge. Otherwise we'd have a lost generation, enslaved to the tech titans du jour.

2025-06-29 07:31:21 UTC

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To further add, this paragraph below discredits the essay, like a student who consulted chatgpt instead of reading the paper:
"So it was possible to record the patterns of connections made in participants’ brains as they composed the essays."
The above is, charitably, an overstatement.
That said, at this point we academics have all experienced what large language models are doing to students. Those who never cared and merely sought credentials continue to not care. Those who cared now feel if they don't use LLMs they'll be disadvantaged, and therefore use them, impacting their independence of thought and diminishing their learning, in addition to developing a dependency. Does not forebode well.
#academia

2025-06-27 16:48:05 UTC

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These courses are largely mistargeted and not helpful. Fortunately they often can be speeded up, and the questionaire at the end can be answered without much difficulty. They are largely an embarrassment. Sometimes also a mockery of what they pretend to teach, auch as the phishing one, that requires a prior email announcement to rescue it from the spam folder because it gets labelled precisely as a phishing attempt.
#academia

2025-06-22 12:12:09 UTC

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“Violence is the last resort of the incompetent”

2025-06-22 09:59:43 UTC

#Bloomscrolling #SilentSunday
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/726/428/061/281/147/original/cdfa37aded3cbbb6.png

2025-06-20 09:51:04 UTC

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Anecdotally, I've asked undergraduate students that I was supervising whether they were studying their degree out of interest or to get the credentials. All of them said: for the credentials. A small sample, but chilling.
They couldn't have cared less about the subject matter and it showed. For them it was busy work. No wonder they feel drawn to LLMs to deliver essays, given their perception of them as busy work rather than as part of a learning journey – learning the subject matter but also learning to study, to research, to come up with a synthesis, and to exercise critical thinking.
Occasionally there's a student who cares, and I will unapologetically give such students more attention.
#academia

2025-06-15 18:15:51 UTC

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Except if you misplace the PDF you might not trivially get it back, except via the local academic library who can purchase it for you ... which is ridiculous: the publisher ought to send it to you for free.
#ScientificPublishing #academia

2025-06-03 12:31:19 UTC

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The author @npub13c0…ehps is here too.

2025-05-12 14:31:24 UTC

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It is legal and it is possible. Only the cowardice fostered by complacence and the squeeze that even politicians feel in their finances – and hence the insecurity beyond their time in public office service – could explain the present predicament.

2025-05-12 14:29:12 UTC

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Imagine a government that approaches Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Samsung, Amazon ... and says: either you commit 2% of your revenues (not profits) to fundamental research or we break you up into small companies *now*.

2025-05-12 14:01:30 UTC

"I've always pursued my interests without much regard for final value or value to the world. I've spent lots of time on totally useless things." — Claude Shannon
"It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964... Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough." — Peter Higgs
The article that quotes these notables, though, falls short of mentioning where the funding came from: a peculiar arrangement imposed by the US government that forced Bell/AT&T to either commit money for fundamental research or give up its monopoly.
https://1517.substack.com/p/why-bell-labs-worked
#academia

2025-05-02 19:49:11 UTC

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Been lucky lately, seem to catch them while at rest letting me get real close — within mere centimeters, which my pocket camera demands for macro photos.

2025-05-02 12:29:07 UTC

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Beautiful photo. This year there are loads of cuddly fee flies (Bombylius major) here in the Cambridgeshire too:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/267537047
#iNaturalist #Diptera #entomology #Bombyliidae

2025-03-16 20:48:17 UTC

#SilentSunday #sunset
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/174/067/480/527/564/original/e8199140978ead81.png