@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

albertcardona

@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz

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

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jni, to random
@jni@fosstodon.org avatar

Is there a comprehensive archive, with references, of Elsevier's many sins against scientific progress? @albertcardona @brembs The lead authors of a paper I played a small role in want to submit to Cell 🤢 and I would like to dissuade them.

Follow-up Q: I have a vague vibe that, although the entire traditional publishing system needs to die in a fire, NPG are not quite as scummy as Elsie. Is that vibe justified or not really?

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@jni @brembs

If given the amount of data out there on (and Springer Nature) the authors remain intent on submitting to their journals, there’s not much you can do. At this point throwing data at such authors doesn’t work anymore. Instead, you could try telling them about Robert Maxwell https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science , about how journals don’t have to be expensive to be respectable https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ and drop some shade, with comments like “do you think your grant funder will be happy to see the work published there?”. It’s not like they don’t know – they can’t not know –, it’s that they are still calculating impact towards career advancement as a function of journal impact factor. And sadly, for many institutions, they aren’t wrong.

At least try to get them to send to Science or PNAS, which are meant to be societies for scientists rather than an unapologetically exploitative business.

biorxiv_neursci, to random
@biorxiv_neursci@biologists.social avatar

Mating proximity blinds threat perception. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.23.590677v1?med=mas

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@biorxiv_neursci

“Romantic engagement can bias sensory perception. This 'love blindness' reflects a common behavioral principle across organisms: favoring pursuit of a coveted reward over potential risks.”

“we discover a dopamine-governed filter mechanism in male Drosophila that reduces threat perception as courtship progresses. We show that during early courtship stages, threat-activated visual neurons inhibit central courtship nodes via specific serotonergic neurons. This serotonergic inhibition prompts flies to abort courtship when they see imminent danger. However, as flies advance in the courtship process, the dopaminergic filter system reduces visual threat responses, shifting the balance from survival to mating.”

Cazale Debat et al., 2024, from Carolina Rezaval’s lab.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.23.590677v1?med=mas

neuralreckoning, to academia
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

So oral exam at end of PhD. Good idea or just a tradition that doesn't make any sense any more? What are the good things about them? If we didn't do them, how else could we get those good things?

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@neuralreckoning @steveroyle @kofanchen @nicolaromano

An additional benefit is that PhD thesis are available online without a paywall.

albertcardona, to Neuroscience
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

How the insect centre for learning and memory, the mushroom body, evolves. By Farnworth et al. 2024, using the example of "the Heliconiini (Nymphalidae), which show extensive variation in mushroom body size over comparatively short phylogenetic timescales, linked to specific changes in foraging ecology, life history and cognition."

Some key findings:

  • number of GABA cells change, concomitant with increase in Kenyon Cell number;
  • number of DANs don't.

"Mosaic evolution of a learning and memory circuit in Heliconiini butterflies"
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.21.590441v1

25kV, to random
@25kV@mas.to avatar

I've just heard the phrase "carbon terrorist" used in relation to someone who chose to fly domestically rather than take the train. I'm 100% using that

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@25kV

My employer when suggesting travelling by train: "we support whatever is cheapest".

Replying to the tune of, did they take into account fuel subsidies and other subsidies into the costs landed on deaf ears – it's all local optimization, despite the money coming from the same place: my employer is the government.

albertcardona, (edited ) to Neuroscience
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

The honeybee brain hosts over 600,000 neurons, at a density higher than that of mammalian brains:

"Our estimate of total brain cell number for the European honeybee (Apis mellifera;
≈ 6.13 × 10^5, s = 1.28 × 10^5; ...) was lower than the existing estimate from brain sections ≈ 8.5 × 10^5"

"the highest neuron densities have been found in the smallest respective species examined (smoky shrews in mammals; 2.08 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [14] and goldcrests in birds; 4.9 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [16]). The Hymenoptera in our sample have on average higher cell densities than vertebrates (5.94 × 10^5 cells mg^−1; n = 30 species)."

Ants, on the other hand ...

"ants stand out from bees and wasps as having particularly small brains by measures of mass and cell number."

From:
"Allometric analysis of brain cell number in Hymenoptera suggests ant brains diverge from general trends", by Godfrey et al. 2021.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.0199

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@futurebird

On fairy wasps, they do include them. This is what they write:

"In the small Hymenoptera, neuron size may be a limiting factor for brain miniaturization, as shown for the smallest insects (the parasitoid wasp Megaphragma [42]), whose larval brains comprise less than 5000 cells, the cell bodies of which are lost during pupation. The brain of the smallest species in our sample (the parasitoid wasps Leptopilina; figure 1) comprised around 30 000 cells (electronic supplementary material, table S1). Similar neuron numbers (2.2 × 105–3.7 × 105 neurons; [43]) have been estimated for fairyflies (Hymenoptera: Mymaridae), which are smaller than the smallest of our samples, suggesting that our cell number estimates may be conservative."

On ants: ants have large antennae and use them for all sorts of tasks, including sensing wind, scent, and mechanoreceptively as if they were hands but also as drums for assessing through vibration the content and properties of what they are touching. Parasitoid wasps ("flying ants", sort of) use their antennae to drum surfaces, a form of active echolocation of caterpillars and larvae inside plant stems or wood. All of these activities need a lot of brain power to process them.

Granted, eyes as 2D surfaces require lots of repeated neurons for contrast and color, and neurons that integrate across them just to process movement in the visual scene. I'd like to see a comparison with the size of antennal lobes and AMMC (antennal mechanosensory and motor center) regions of wasps and ants.

By the way, large brains may be costly for parasitoid wasps for little benefit, say van der Woude et al. 2019 https://academic.oup.com/jeb/article/32/7/694/7326298

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@glowl

Regarding nutrient and oxygen flow, would be interesting to compare the brains of a large bee like Xylocopa violacea (violet carpenter bee [1]) with that of a small bat like Craseonycteris thonglongyai (bumblebee bat [2]).

These two species are of about the same size (3-5 cm), yet one is an insect and the other is a mammal. Actually, the bee is larger than the bat! I wonder which one has more neurons.

[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/89535013
[2] By Andaman Kaosung: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/41399-Craseonycteris-thonglongyai

Xylocopa violacea on thistle flowers.

rmounce, to random
@rmounce@mastodon.social avatar

This is big news: https://library.harvard.edu/about/news/2024-04-23/harvard-library-launching-harvard-open-journals-program

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@rmounce

Now imagine that Harvard departments stated that unless their faculty publishes there instead of in the usual glamour journals, they won't get tenure or be allowed to apply for grants.

Now wouldn't that bring about change immediately. And lots of shouting. Ultimately, what glamour journals can do, and could do very well, is write short summaries of papers for broad consumption. Not publish the original works.

albertcardona, to random
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Conway's game of life, the book: https://conwaylife.com/book/

"This book provides an introduction to Conway's Game of Life, the interesting mathematics behind it, and the methods used to construct many of its most interesting patterns"

albertcardona, to academia
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

NIH increases PhD and postdoc salaries:

"Predoctoral scholars will receive an approximate 4% increase in their pay level bringing it to $28,224, and postdoctoral scholars will receive an approximate increase of 8%, with pay levels beginning at $61,008 and upwardly adjusted based on years of experience. NIH aims to increase these pay levels over the next five years."

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-increase-pay-levels-pre-postdoctoral-scholars-grantee-institutions

For postdocs, "only" ~10k short of entry-level salaries at : https://www.hhmi.org/news/hhmi-announces-postdoc-salary-changes

stefan, to random
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online avatar

Adding descriptive alt text to your images is punk rock.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@stefan

Agree, yet, can’t shake off the feeling of feeding the scrapers in search of text-image pairings to train ever larger machine learning models.

foaylward, to evolution
@foaylward@genomic.social avatar

Happy to share the latest manuscript from our lab, in which we propose that eukaryotes evolved from a genomic chimera of Asgard archaea and giant viruses.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.22.590592v1

This is a controversial topic, but we believe we have strong evidence to suggest a critical viral role in eukaryogenesis.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@foaylward

How cool is that. Been looking for a paper I read 15 or 20 years ago proposing a viral theory of DNA origin, whereby an inserted DNA virus on an RNA genome would then replicate the whole bacterial genome as DNA, and the bacterium became dependent on that insertion from then on. Will read yours and Phil Bell’s to see if I can find a reference to it.

garfiald, to random
@garfiald@mastodon.social avatar

Hello! Serious post from me for once. If there are any autistic people reading this who have views about the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, I would be immensely grateful if you could share them with me. I'd also be grateful for any resources relating to autistic people's perspectives on Baron-Cohen's work. Thank you

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@FrauZeitlos @garfiald

Cousins, IIRC.

neuralreckoning, to random
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

So what would it take to publish a paper here on mastodon and do public peer review? Just an agreement to use a few hashtags like , and in replies things like , , , ? Some automatically generated web and pdf output summarising the thread? Submission to something like Zenodo to give a DOI? Linking user accounts to orcid to verify identity? Only real problem I see is that even with markdown and LaTeX, Mastodon posts are not well suited for longer posts with multiple figures etc. Maybe fine for short results though?

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@neuralreckoning

Perhaps software publishing requires a new application that happens to implement ActivityPub but isn't necessarily Mastodon.

What you are describing reminds me of @joss https://github.com/openjournals/joss

25kV, to random
@25kV@mas.to avatar

Is there a product that degrades less gracefully when there is no internet access than Microsoft Office 365?

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@25kV

I have been on the internet since 1995, written client-server software applications and more, and I am not able to understand what is the use case of Microsoft Office 365, or what advantages it may have over plain old software application running on one's computer. None at all.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@25kV

Google Docs and Overleaf aren't far from a system that works. I still find local document writing augmented with good version control systems better for collaborative writing.

Adria, to random
@Adria@mstdn.science avatar

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01080-x

This is a systemic injustice that people from passport-underpriveleged places must suffer through to be successful in a research career. The fact that UK and US universities also impose huge fee increases on international students adds insult to injury.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@Adria

And not just "Global South". Citizens from European Union countries that aren't part of Shengen have trouble with visas – they are left out of al the bilateral agreements and visa waivers. As do Chinese students.

albertcardona, (edited )
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@Adria

In the UK at least, ever since the introduction of fees for undergraduate degrees – instead of direct funding from the government –, and particularly since Brexit, a major source of funding are foreign students and their high tuition fees. How long the situation will last is anyone's guess. But fair it is not.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@Adria

At the moment, in the UK, for many universities, foreign students are subsidizing domestic ones. It's that bad.

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

Are there actually neuroscientists who dont believe that most invertebrates, fish, etc. have lowercase-c consciousness, an internal subjective experience of the world? Is the alternative that they are just reflex machines? Why wouldnt we make the opposite assumption - that animals that have a complex enough nervous system to run a whole body thats responsive to their ecosystem are "conscious" until proven otherwise. But what would the point be of proving otherwise? I guess im just deeply uninterested in semantic games that exclude most of the animal kingdom from the assumption of mere subjectivity.

Re: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01144-y

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@jonny

Reading Thomas Seeley's "Honeybee democracy" https://archive.org/details/honeybeedemocrac0000seel and observing bees in the wild, and having read Goulson's "Bumblebees behaviour, ecology and conservation" https://www.nhbs.com/bumblebees-behaviour-ecology-and-conservation-book , it's quite the exercise to conclude that bees don't haver inner representations of the world and complex wants, leisure, and play.

yoginho, to Futurology
@yoginho@spore.social avatar

Wow. Mike Levin has finally come out as a full : https://noemamag.com/ai-could-be-a-bridge-toward-diverse-intelligence

I'm not sure "most of us think this way about the world we want for our kids"... at least I don't. Not at all. I find this toxic optimist "vision" utterly naive & disgusting. /1

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@yoginho

You are asking for effort. Reasonable, but unlikely.

The scary bit for me is that presumably intelligent and highly educated people are capable of deluding themselves as much as the rest of us.

albertcardona, to climate
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Cambridge, UK: 8C at noon, about 7C less than the historical mean daily maximum for April 22nd. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge#Climate

A peek into the jet stream shows a massive meander bringing cold air from the North. Courtesy of : less temperature differential between the poles and the equator weaken the jet stream which then meanders more, swinging the weather from cold to hot and to cold again over the space of a couple of weeks as meanders shift about.

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/250hPa/orthographic=-352.11,45.49,352

video/mp4

pvonhellermannn, to random
@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green avatar

Half thinking of starting an hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.

Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@pvonhellermannn

In the short term, the cost cutting makes the decision-makers (VC and pro-VC) look smart among themselves. Plus all they need is another year or two of holding the fort until stepping down – they “serve” a term, you see, they aren’t owners or dictators – to then pick up a golden parachute into charing a charity or towards actual retirement.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@pvonhellermannn

Accountability isn’t ever for them. It’s that old approach to crises from “Yes, Prime Minister”:

Bernard Woolley : What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Then we follow the four-stage strategy.
Bernard Woolley : What's that?
Sir Richard Wharton : Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0751831/characters/nm0001329

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