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How children remember time changes dramatically as they grow up & understanding that shift matters more than you might think.

Two new papers from the lab's newest PhD, Dr. Owen Friend, explore what that difference looks like & what it tells us about the developing brain 🧠

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Most genomic AI models use fixed rules to process DNA into chunks, imposing arbitrary boundaries on a sequence with its own biological structure.

Arnav Shah, Victor Li, and team developed dnaHNet, a tokenizer-free foundation model that learns its own segmentation from scratch.

The Preston Lab has a new doctor in the house! 🥂🎉 Congratulations to Dr. Owen Friend, who defended his dissertation today. Seven studies in four years, all on how children remember when things happen. His committee called it the best defense talk they'd ever seen. We're so proud!

The award honors Naomi Breslau & Jane Murphy, two women who were small in stature (like me!) but absolutely enormous in presence, impact, and generosity to the scientists they trained.

A reminder that you don't have to be big to be a giant.

More: www.cla.purdue.edu/news/college...

Feeling a bit verklempt to be honored with the 2026 Breslau/Murphy Award from @appa-association.bsky.social. It’s hard to overstate how much an award like this means to me.

I love science, and training the next generation of scientists isn’t part of the job; it IS the job.

We’re excited to welcome Maria Kalambokidis, PhD, to Stellate as an Account Coordinator ✨

Maria is an evolutionary biologist with expertise in academic research, STEM engagement, and science writing. We’re thrilled to have her on the team 💜

Learn more: stellatecomms.com/team

Homepage — PL Neuro

PL Neuro is officially live! plneuro.xyz

We exist to break bottlenecks, accelerate progress in neurotech & NeuroAI, and to invest in innovations that benefit humanity.

PL Neuro will focus on 3 core areas:
- Neural augmentation
- Biologically-inspired intelligence
- Whole brain emulation

We only experience time moving forward. But memory can both predict what comes next and reconstruct what must have happened before.

In a new @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint, we show how hippocampal development enables this flexible representation of time 🧵

We’re hiring a full-time Research Coordinator in the Preston Lab at UT Austin (start May/June 2026).

Work on behavioral + fMRI studies of how memory & decision-making develop from childhood to adulthood.

Learn more & apply: preston.clm.utexas.edu/news/join-th...

Please repost!

Today in @nature.com, the @christophthaiss.bsky.social & @maayanlevy.bsky.social labs trace age-related memory loss to the gastrointestinal tract & map the complete gut-to-brain pathway driving it. Targeting this pathway can reverse cognitive aging in mice.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

CAR T cell therapy has shown strong results against certain cancers, but metabolic exhaustion limits its effectiveness over time.

In Cell, the @maayanlevy.bsky.social & @christophthaiss.bsky.social labs report that a common supplement can fuel CAR T cells to fight cancer more effectively.

Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one?

In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵

Evo 2: One Year Later | Arc Institute Now published in the journal Nature, the DNA foundation model is showcasing the power of open and collaborative science

This was a massive effort across Arc, @NVIDIAHealth, @Stanford, & many collaborators. Congratulations and thank you to everyone who contributed to this project.

Learn more from @pdhsu and @brianhie about Evo 2’s first year: arcinstitute.org/news/evo-2-o...

How to get started with Evo Designer YouTube video by Arc Institute

Try it for yourself.

Using Evo Designer, you can paste in a DNA sequence to score variants or generate new sequences in real time.

See how it works: youtu.be/6P0L1qG_PhU

In the updated paper, the team used Evo 2 to generate synthetic DNA that produced experimentally confirmed changes in chromatin accessibility in both mouse & human cells (AUROCs 0.92–0.95).

Code, weights, and resources available here: arcinstitute.org/tools/evo

Since last February, Evo 2 has seen 200+ citations, 88K+ downloads, and 8M+ API requests. Groups at Yale, JohnsHopkins, NCState & UW have applied Evo 2 to problems from Alzheimer's risk prediction to 3D genome structure

Genome modelling and design across all domains of life with Evo 2 - Nature Evo 2 is an artificial intelligence-based biological foundation model trained on 9 trillion DNA base pairs spanning all domains of life that predicts functional properties from genomic sequences and p...

First released one year ago, Evo 2 predicts variant effects & generates functional DNA across all domains of life, from bacteria to humans, from a single set of weights, with no fine-tuning required.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Building Evo 2: A Frontier DNA Language Model YouTube video by Arc Institute

Evo 2, the largest fully open biological AI model to date, is now published in @nature.com

youtu.be/o_w-E--u7GQ

With Evo 2, AI can model and design the genetic code for all domains of life The DNA foundation model Evo 2 has been published in the journal Nature. Trained on the DNA of over 100,000 species across the entire tree of life, Evo 2 can identify patterns in gene sequences across disparate organisms that experimental researchers would need years to uncover.

Evo 2, a large-scale AI model trained on over 128,000 genomes, can analyze genetic sequences across all domains of life and assist in disease mutation prediction and genome design.

Most genetic interaction studies measure gene relationships in one condition, but environment can reshape which genes depend on each other.

Today in Molecular Cell, Luke Gilbert & team deliver the first systematic, multi-condition map of genetic rewiring in human cells.

Finding one mutation that improves a protein is hard. Finding five that work together is exponentially harder.

Today in @science.org, Hsu and Konermann labs present MULTI-evolve, a lab-in-the-loop framework that does it in just one machine learning-guided round.

Alex Pretti was a nurse to the end In his final moments, Alex Pretti did what nurses are educated to do, a nurse writes. He noticed, cared, and responded to an emergent threat.

"Alex Pretti was a nurse to the end. His death should galvanize the rest of us." www.statnews.com/2026/01/27/a...

The final Calvin and Hobbes, which appeared in papers 30 years ago today.

The social media discourse of engaged partisans is toxic even when politics are irrelevant Abstract. Prevailing theories of partisan incivility on social media suggest that it derives from disagreement about political issues or from status compet

This paper for example: people who are toxic on political subreddits are also toxic on subreddits that have nothing to do with politics

✨ That’s our 2025 wrapped!

Thank you to our participants, students, collaborators & community for making this year such a success.

✨ That’s a wrap on 2025!

From research milestones to community connections, we’ve accomplished so much this past year. Here’s a look back at everything we did together...

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🧵Our new preprint shows how the brain develops to transform how kids, teens & adults represent & navigate their world: shifting from local, moment-to-moment memories in childhood to integrated, global cognitive maps in adulthood 🧠

Paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...