thank you, Pierre!!

GitHub - Sun-Lab-NBB/ataraxis: Entry point and documentation hub for the Ataraxis science-automation framework. Entry point and documentation hub for the Ataraxis science-automation framework. - Sun-Lab-NBB/ataraxis

Paper: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.13.705771v1
Code: github.com/Sun-Lab-NBB/ataraxis

Everything is open-source and designed as building blocks. We're relicensing under Apache 2.0 in the coming weeks to make adoption even easier.

If your science hits a wall at the hardware layer, this is for you.

Key design choice: AI helps at configuration time only. During actual experiments, everything runs deterministically with no AI in the loop.

Network goes down? API rate limited? Doesn't matter - your experiment keeps running.

@inkaroseng.bsky.social also built a centralized marketplace hub for our agentic skills with native Claude Code integration, enforcing our lab's conventions across all projects.

We built standardized Python/C++/C# libraries for common lab hardware - cameras, microcontrollers, motors, timing - that all follow the same interface pattern.

Then exposed them to Claude Code through @anthropic.com's MCP servers. cc @bcherny.bsky.social

The problem: AI coding assistants can't discover what hardware is on your rig, diagnose why a device isn't responding, or help integrate a new instrument. Closing this gap is essential for automated laboratories.

Ataraxis Demo 2: Hardware Troubleshooting & Experiment Setup YouTube video by Weinan Sun

Paper: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.13.705771v1
Code: github.com/Sun-Lab-NBB/ataraxis

Video demos:

🎥 Pre-session validation: youtu.be/Ui2AEvFkCoE
🎥 Hardware troubleshooting: youtu.be/KBgv4zgwwKw
🎥 AI-guided integration: youtu.be/iemcuTz1_iM

Closed-loop AI scientists will need to talk to lab hardware. We released Ataraxis - an open-source framework giving AI coding assistants direct access to physical instruments. biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.13.705771v1

Built by our talented Ph.D. student @inkaroseng.bsky.social at Cornell. 🧵

Thanks Misha for the shout-out!
It has been a truly mind-opening journey. WHOLISTIC is one step towards whole-organism neuroscience and a true physiological observatory - with extensions on the way! I am continually amazed by what the data reveals - so much remains to be discovered and mined.

Emergence of orthogonal hippocampal representations during spatial learning Learning & Behavior - Sun et al. (2025) reveal the progressive, dynamic changes in the response properties of thousands of hippocampal neurons as mice learn a conditional discrimination while...

New #Outlook #PsynomLB 'Emergence of orthogonal hippocampal representations during spatial learning' https://bit.ly/4mlOXQa by Prof. Vern Bingman @BGSU_Biology about the recent paper https://bit.ly/4jZO0eT by @sunw37 @JohanWinn @CornellNBB et al. @nature @Psychonomic_Soc

Excited to share our latest story! We found disentangled memory representations in the hippocampus that generalized across time and environments, despite the seemingly random drift and remapping of single cells. This code enabled the transfer of prior knowledge to solve new tasks

It was fun to visit Weinan's lab @sunw37.bsky.social at Cornell to give this talk. Exciting to see the experiments he's cooking up, and we had lots of fun discussions about PFC, hippocampus, consciousness and meditation!

Part of the talk content is here: blog.dileeplearning.com/p/space-is-a...

Large Concept Models: Language Modeling in a Sentence Representation Space – Janelia CVML Summary of and thoughts on Meta’s recent paper

We read "Large Concept Models" in our reading group. It models language at the sentence resolution - "concepts". We had lots of thoughts about it! You can read them in our new Janelia CVML blog post:
janelia-cvml.github.io/blog/posts/L...
#ML #AI #Janelia @adjavon.bsky.social @bogovicj.bsky.social

Cortical control of innate behavior from subcortical demonstration Motor control in mammals is traditionally viewed as a hierarchy of descending spinal-targeting pathways, with frontal cortex at the top. Many redundant muscle patterns can solve a given task, and this...

(1/11) Today I preprinted a lot of work from my postdoc with @dudman.bsky.social, which started with a question of how the nervous system balances flexibility with efficiency of learning. The thread below gives some background....
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Atypical hippocampal excitatory neurons express and govern object memory - Nature Communications Pyramidal cells are classically thought to comprise the excitatory output of the subiculum. Here, the authors show the existence of “ovoid cells”, excitatory subiculum neurons with specialized gene ex...

delighted to share our work revealing a new type of excitatory hippocampal neuron we call the "ovoid cell", which has really exquisite properties relative to adjacent pyramidal cells! superb work of first-author @adriennekinman.bsky.social and many others in the lab

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

#Cellpose 3 paper now out. Not all images are perfect. Restore your images with Cellpose3 to get better segmentations, w/ @marius10p.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Classification of psychedelics and psychoactive drugs based on brain-wide imaging of cellular c-Fos expression - Nature Communications A challenge in psychiatric drug discovery is to predict the therapeutic potential of a novel compound. Here, the authors show that brain-wide imaging of immediate early gene expression can be used to ...

Can whole-brain imaging of cellular c-Fos signals be used to classify #psychedelics? 🧠🔬💊

Our study by @aboharbf.bsky.social and @pashadavoudian.bsky.social, developing an imaging and machine learning pipeline to test a panel of psychoactive drugs.

Paper here 👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I’m excited about this collaborative project by @sunw37.bsky.social, @johanwinn.bsky.social, and many other talented contributors. Read about how our @hhmijanelia.bsky.social team imaged thousands of neurons in mouse hippocampus as mice learned cognitive tasks over several days: hhmi.news/4hXIp7r

thank you Dileep for the huge inspiration!

Must-read for anyone interested in cognitive maps & the hippocampus.

Do I like this so much because it's a fantastic bit of science or because it's a fantastic job of doing science communication?!? Probably both. Regardless, awesome work that is worth checking out:)

sounds great! hope to catch up soon :)

Thank you, Dan! Hope you are well!

Fantastic video explaining a study of hippocampal map formation.

Thank you, Tim!!!

Great fun!!!

12/12 This work wouldn’t be possible without co-first author @johanwinn.bsky.social, mentor @nspruston.bsky.social, and co-authors Maanasa, Chongxi, Koichiro, Arco, Michalis, Rachel, @computingnature.bsky.social, Dan, and James, plus many others (see Acknowledgments), and support from @HHMIJanelia!

11/12 In summary, our work offers a dataset on how hippocampal cognitive maps form, revealing how brains build mental models and shedding light on learning algorithms—which could guide biologically inspired AI that reason using naturally formed internal world models.

10/12 Our data support prior work on multiple hippocampal representations for ambiguous inputs (e.g., Eichenbaum, @dileeplearning.bsky.social, @behrenstimb.bsky.social, @jcrwhittington.bsky.social). See our paper and preprint for more foundational references!