Full proposals are now open for our Massively Scalable Neurotechnologies programme.
Led by Jacques Carolan, we are investing £50m to develop a new class of neurotech – interfaces that reach the brain via the body’s natural pathways.
Submit by 11 May: link.aria.org.uk/MSNx
Our latest publication grapples with how the brain could implement gradient descent by sending learning targets top-down, gating plasticity with dendritic inhibition, and updating synaptic weights with biologically observed learning rules like BTSP.
www.cell.com/cell-reports...
First whole-brain recording of social sound processing in a vertebrate. Surprises start in the hindbrain; thalamus gates conspecific calls; male and female brains diverge downstream. Work by @joerghenninger.bsky.social, @mh123.bsky.social sky.social and team. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Terence Tao on how math is changing, #formalverification as the enabler of scaled human-AI collaboration:
"The reason why scaling and AI and broad participation actually is a net win is because we have formal verification."
📺 www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuTx...
#leanlang #leanprover
We've just added a new FRO to our website!
In this Essential Technology piece, we share three three principles from CHI-FRO, an engineering-heavy partnership to build out tools for probabilistic programming:
www.essentialtechnology.blog/p/the-evolut...
A special opportunity for lovers of mass spectrometry proteomics to join a like-minded team at PTI.
Join a collaborative initiative to enable direct protein analysis at unprecedented scale, in partnership with leading instrument developers, academics, and industry leaders.
1/2
So you sequenced a billion+ bases. That don’t impress me much.
JERBOA is a toolkit to figure out what genes do at scale. We've used it to unlock 43 non-model microbes across 12 different phyla.
Light-microscopy brain mapping was picked as one of 7 technologies to watch in 2026 by Nature!
Hear from E11's CEO @andrewcpayne.bsky.social: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Synaptic MEMOIR: mapping individual synapses of neurons with protein barcodes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11....
It's been an incredibly exciting year in metascience at large, and for us at Convergent.
Last week, the NSF announced their Tech Labs Initiative.
www.essentialtechnology.blog/p/the-future...
Dim Red Dot
Scientists have just released a photo featuring a dim red dot. It is the light of a single star exploding in a galaxy so far far away that that nothing we do could ever affect it — even in the very fullness of time.
It lies beyond the Affectable Universe.
Let me explain…
1/🧵
Last Friday, the @NSF released an RFI for a new Tech Labs Initiative, to "build and scale next-gen independent research organizations to advance science."
A Vision of Metascience; How does the culture of science change and improve?
We need metascience entrepreneurs, seeking to achieve a scalable improvement in the social processes of science
https://pllqt.it/Qg2rOs
To mark the occasion, FAS CEO Daniel Correa spoke with @sgrodriques.bsky.social and @adammarblestone.bsky.social about how best to run a Tech Lab/FRO-style org, what they've learned, and the role federal funding can play:
fas.org/publication/...
If you've been interested in FROs, you'll want to see this from NSF:
sam.gov/opp/7332ade9...
"sustained... support to... independent organizational structures operating outside of existing academic, start-up, and industry constraints... a dedicated, full-time team... operational independence..."
A genetic platform for a biocementation bacterium www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12...
[C]Worthy has secured multi-year support from ORCA and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation to scale open, trusted science tools for ocean-based carbon removal.
We can’t scale what we can’t measure—this funding accelerates our MRV models + datasets.
Full announcement: www.cworthy.org/media/cworth...
A global screen for magnetically induced neuronal activity in the pigeon brain www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... - so cool! 🐦🧠
Have a look if you are interested in how the team at @cultivarium.bsky.social is finding electroporation protocols for new microbes: both screening lots of conditions on a custom built electroporator concurrently, and cyclical iteration using bayesian optimization
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Announced today: @evebio.bsky.social's pharmome-mapping dataset - the largest public map of how compounds do or don’t touch druggable targets - is now live on DrugBank's knowledgebase and available programmatically + interactively on Hugging Face, @hf.co.
Learn more: evebio.org/pharmome-dat...
a poster titled a synaptic locus of song learning
Poster now til 12 pm, come check it out at V6! #SfN25
Is there an academic/industry divide in attitudes about using AI to support discovery? I noticed this post has 3.6k likes on X but only 6 likes on Bluesky. It deserves more attention here!
As AI collapses coordination costs, our new thesis - Scaling Trust - explores how scalable trust infrastructure could usher in a world of many AI agents, capable of mobilising, negotiating, and verifying on our behalf across digital + physical spaces ↓
link.aria.org.uk/ST-thesis-BS
Gotta get the mouse connectome
It is actually an incredibly frustrating time to be a theoretical neuroscientist right now imo, for this reason
cool! tools to making it easier to work with 𝘐𝘥𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢 𝘴𝘢𝘬𝘢𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘴 (now 𝘗𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘢𝘬𝘢𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘴) for PET degradation
#MicroSky
