seems like a good time to raise money for wildly ambitious speculative projects

Amazon buys Fauna Robotics, maker of the Sprout humanoid robot Amazon has acquired Fauna Robotics, just under two months after the startup introduced a humanoid robot called Sprout designed for social spaces like homes and schools.

HUGE congrats to my old Herophilus.com co-founder @seanescola.bsky.social on two fronts. The robotics company he co-founded was acquired by Amazon. apnews.com/article/amaz... He put out a paper proposing how to train large AI models so they acquire more cognitive functions arxiv.org/abs/2603.03414

We hypothesize that these webs are a collective strategy to increase the "serendipity window" in time and in space for the colony.

Worm Webs and Wormstuff Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes in a lab notices a phenomenon that has been under the noses of researchers for a long time but ignored as a distraction. After more careful observations, replications, a...

We noticed that a plate of C. elegans worms, under starvation conditions, forms stable living spatial structures, which we dub "worm webs". These webs seem to be scaffolded by an excreted substance from living or dead worms, which we dub "wormstuff". www.focolab.org/post/worm-we...

I do think the AI hypewave will accelerate the corporate realization of just how many bullshit jobs there are, which will lead to major white collar job loss, not because AI will do the jobs better but because the jobs were superfluous in the first place.

as long as humans are mortal (and in charge of society), even if energy and production of worldly things goes to negligible cost, there persists the finite resource of human time. It is already the case for people with wealth. As long as there is scarcity of a valued resource, an economy can exist.

An article about our article Current Biology published a perspective article, "Short-term memory: How oscillatory networks preserve sensory history" which covers our recent paper about short-term memory in the worm. It's a nice p...

Here's a nice 1-pager by Tomke Stürner in Current Bio about our recent article on short-term memory implemented by oscillator networks in the worm. www.focolab.org/post/an-arti...

Skeuomorphism is back!

oh right, its the data

These university cash “deals” to restore federal funding are worrisome. They seem more naïve than pragmatic. Please no more.

"Large-scale compressive microscopy via diffractive multiplexing across a sensor array" preprint released Kevin Zhou, former postdoc in the collaborating lab of Laura Waller at Berkeley, and who recently started his own lab at University of Michigan, developed this way to achieve gigapixel-resolution high...

Preprint posted for Kevin Zhou's awesome development in the Waller Lab of a gigapixel-scale microscope using a low-cost sensor array, along with Muneki Ikeda.
www.focolab.org/post/large-s...

"SurfDist" pre-print posted We developed an "interpretable machine learning" system to find and characterize blobs in volumetric images, such as microscopy images of cells, something we need to do all the time in our lab. The no...

We built StarDist to detect cells in volumetric microscopy and jointly infer closed curved parametric surfaces for each cell. It's an example of an interpretable machine learning approach. More detail in the blog post and preprint.

www.focolab.org/post/surfdis...

Nature does a news piece on our tardigrade work This is a nice news article by Benjamin Plackett in Nature covering our science and community building work to establish tardigrades as a new model organism for neuroscience. Kudos to postdoc Ana Lyon...

Here’s a nice Nature news article on efforts to establish the tardigrade as a new model organism for neuroscience.

www.focolab.org/post/nature-...

The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s? Zheng and Meister write about the paradoxical slowness of human behavior. Although our senses gather data at 109 bits/s, our overall information throughput is only 10 bits/s. This stark contrast touch...

An instant classic by Zheng and Meister ‪(@mameister4.bsky.social‬): www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

"...1⁢0^8... the ratio between peripheral information processing and the overall throughput of the brain. Numerically speaking, this may be the largest unexplained number in brain science. "

so glad websites are back.

"Recombinant dynamical systems" pre-print posted This is an idea and a small but curious result that I've been sitting on for a very long time. Finally got around to sharing it. It the simplest possible model I could come up with for experience-base...

Here's a curious result we found from modeling human problem solving as the composition of past remembered dynamical systems. www.focolab.org/post/recombi...

Article in the Transmitter on our tardigrade work Dori Grijseels wrote a great article about our work and preprint on tardigrades for neuroscience. https://www.thetransmitter.org/animal-models/how-tiny-tardigrades-could-help-tackle-systems-neuroscien...

Here's a nice article on our tardigrade work in the Transmitter: www.focolab.org/post/article...

Congrats to the Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience at UCSF Collaborative Awardees!

🔬 @focolab.bsky.social, Christoph Kirst: AI-driven 3D tracking of object perception in C.elegans

🧠 Robert Stroud, Robert Edwards, James Holton: Mapping SVs w/ cryo-ET #KavliNeuro
kavliifn.ucsf.edu/grants

kleptokakistocracy

When A.I. Passes This Test, Look Out The creators of a new test called “Humanity’s Last Exam” argue we may soon lose the ability to create tests hard enough for A.I. models.

Data contamination (validation data leaking into training data) is a critical problem for the whole approach of (static) performance benchmarks to test large AI models. This issue needs to be surfaced more. This article for example, completely neglects it. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/t...

Prediction: AI will ultimately drive the renaissance of the fourth estate, the press, as we seek authoritative sources of information and trusted interpretation.

effect size? without any effect size claims, it is impossible to gauge importance of such findings.

It has become impossible to distinguish real newspaper headlines from Onion headlines. We need a name for this era

Our paper "Unifying community whole-brain imaging datasets enables robust neuron identification and reveals determinants of neuron position in C. elegans" is out. https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-methods/fulltext/S2667-2375(24)00354-0Congrats Yutaka and the rest of the team! It has been a fantastic collaborative effort and we hope the community continues to bu...

Our paper on WormID is out. Moral: building a multi-lab data corpus boosts generalization and performance of ML labeling algorithms. We extended the Neurodata Without Borders format to support this. Resource at wormid.org. www.focolab.org/post/our-pap...

and congrats to first author, postdoc Ana Lyons!

Our preprint "The tardigrade as an emerging model organism for systems neuroscience" is up. We have been making the case for some time that tardigrades, aka water bears, would be an amazing new model organism for certain big systems neuroscience questions. We put this into a detailed paper o...

For our inaugural post on bsky, we're happy to share our preprint on tardigrades as a new model organism for neuroscience. Exciting times for these little critters! www.focolab.org/post/our-pre...