Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown that
bacteria can learn from past experiences,
store memories across generations
and adapt their behavior to changing environments
all without a brain or nervous system
https://www.cmu.edu…
fly_larva: Drosophila larva brain (2023)
A complete synaptic map of the brain connectome of the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Nodes are neurons, and edges are synaptic connections, traced individually from brain image sections using three-dimensional electron microscopy–based reconstruction. Node metadata include the neuron hempisphere, hemispherical homologue, cell type, annotations, and inferred cluster. Edge metadata include the type of interaction (`'aa'`,…
(YouTube) #Neuralink: Accessing new brain regions with surgical robotics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93yWGUiYFEk Totally naive: "Every problem has a specific location in your brain";
And yet another reply, “But the human brain works just like an LLM!”
Yes, famously we fully understand how human brains work, maybe just some minor details left to figure out.
Mum Brain
Join TV news journalist Estelle Griepink as she consults the collective mum brain to get you the answers you need to know in ten minutes or less...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/mum-brain/
RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116529331753494872
This study raises a lot of “methodology vs conclusions” red flags — or at least what I’m seeing doesn’t jibe with how it’s being presented.
(It comes off like “using AI causes brain damage!!” but the actual experiment seems more like it shows that if you let people use a calculator on a test and then yank it away without warning 3/4 of the way through, they get pissed off and bail.)
I’m all for dunking on AI in education, but maybe take this one with a dose of skepticism until the dust settles.
Well, I have just written my first software, and created my first pull request, since April. It's not rocket science but perhaps my brain is recovering from fog.
#OpenSource
#AmWriting
I hope the world still exists when my NDAs expire. I hope my brain hasn't imploded by then.
One thing they don't tell you (or perhaps know) about antidepressants is that you can and likely will continue to have the brain zaps later, even when you've stopped taking them for a while-- I'm talking months later. Not that antidepressants don't work- they can, and do. But just something to be prepared for.
#MentalHealth
cintestinalis: Tadpole larva brain (C. intestinalis)
Entire connectivity matrix for the complete brain of a larva of Ciona intestinalis. Each directed edge represents a synaptic connection from pre-synaptic cell i to post-synaptic cell j (may not be a neuron). Edge weights represent the cumulative depth of presynaptic contacts in µm.
This network has 205 nodes and 2903 edges.
Tags: Biological, Connectome, Weighted
The Dissociated Universe: Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism and the Mind That Contains the World
This essay completes a sequence. The first article considered Iain McGilchrist's panpsychist proposal that matter is a phase of consciousness, the way ice and vapor are phases of water. Its companion examined Daniel Dennett's illusionism, which argued that consciousness as we ordinarily conceive it is a user illusion the brain stages for itself. The third position, the…
Babies are bleeding to death as parents reject a vitamin shot given at birth - ProPublica https://apple.news/AILfklhbqToOdkpsHVDk57g
Flourish, which is building Cortex AI, a brain-like synthetic intelligence system that uses less power than LLMs, raised $500M, including $100M from Jeff Bezos (Steven Levy/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/jeff-bezos-is-funding-a-wild-hunt-for-t…
"Europe needs stronger enforcement, greater transparency, and more independent scrutiny of industry science. When credible evidence points to risks for children’s neurological development, public health must come before commercial interests."
https://www.
Brain activity under anesthesia challenges what we know about consciousness | ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260624025514.htm
The unconscious brain appears to be far more capable than scientists once believed. Researchers found that…
About one in eight people globally have some form of sleep apnea.
Sleep apnea causes breathing to stop and start several times during sleep.
This happens because either your airway is blocked, known as obstructive sleep apnea,
or you brain isn’t controlling your breathing as it should, known as central sleep apnea.
For decades, the main form of treatment for this population has been the continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine, which helps keep a person’s a…
I have some sketches of an essay that I need to write, but I think it's worth brain-dumping a bit more in the mean time.
#LLMs are an attempt to make tech grow forever. But like, how many "your mom/a friend, but done by a precarious worker instead" apps do we really need? Everything right now is in the AI grift hole, but there's almost nothing of interest (even if you ignore the ethical concerns). Like, no, I don't fucking want a robot to lie to me about my groceries. That doesn't sound like a useful feature. There's a lot of useless shit being pumped out to prop up the bottom line, and a lot of people just want to be able to use their old phone for more than a couple of years.
No one is happy with this. No one wants this. Except the billionaires who are forcing us all to drink the capitalism koolaid, because they'd rather exterminate life on earth than live in a world where they experience consequences.
Nothing grows forever. That's not how literally anything in reality works, or has ever worked, at all in history. Some people think that the universe itself may work like that, but that's only an educated guess. Finite things don't grow forever. Every organism, every society, every technology, every dynamic and adaptive system we have ever known goes through a growth phase and then goes in to a stabilization phase. Or, following a Malthusian pattern, grows until it reaches a catastrophic point and collapses. Like lemmings. Or reindeer. Or cancer.
Bec's Unhinged Reviews
The local weirdness, the big headlines, the TV that melts your brain, the everyday moments that deserve a gentle roast and a hard laugh. It's opinionated, community-fuelled, and proudly unpolished...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpo…
Brain-Computer-Interface: ALS-Patient nutzt Hirnimplantat 19 Monate lang
Ein ALS-Patient hat ein Brain-Computer-Interface fast zwei Jahre lang täglich zu Hause genutzt. Die Studie liefert wichtige Belege für die Alltagstauglichkeit.
I've never been a breakfast person. Back when I smoked I was a coffee-and-a-cigarette person, now Im just a coffee and I-hate-everyone-until-this-kicks-in person.
But every now and then Ill get this weird craving for granola in a bowl with milk (GF eats granola every day pretty much).
me: now remember, everytime you get a craving for granola you never finish half of it.
also me: shut up brain I know what Im doing.
me: that's way too much
also me: alr…
Happy 250th, America 🇺🇸
Hopefully this is your awkward, lashing-out-at-all-good-things teenage years and not your the-world-should-burn-because-of-my-brain-worms boomer years.
Sorry, brain fart and typo. Part of the problem with trying to do philosophy when mentally ill is I have a lot of brain fog, and can't really evaluate how good my ideas are.
However, when I typed 'survival', what I meant to type (and thought I had typed, was 'society'.
Remember the vacuum tube train? The car tunnels? The brain implant chip? The humanoid robots? Making government “efficient”? An AGI based on… tweets (wtf)?
But sure, colonizing Mars is totally real.
The first gene therapy for deafness earns FDA approval.
About sixty percent of all babies born deaf have some underlying genetic cause,
and mutations in the OTOF gene account for between 2 and 8 percent of them.
That gene encodes a protein called otoferlin, which enables hair cells inside the ear to transmit messages into the brain.
The OTOF gene is quite long, though, stretching about 90,000 bases of DNA.
This means it’s too long to ‘package’ inside a single vi…
Yes, I abuse f-strings in python because "print(f'" will always make more sense to my C-poisoned brain than "print('".
Creativity is so intimate.
You're literally letting us see how your brain works.
Via @… on Bluesky
https://bsky.app/profile/nasibov.me/post/…
When I got in to tech, things felt fragile. After years of trying to fix things, I spent more years feeling as though the information apocalypse was immanent. Everywhere I turned, something was broken horribly. I can't even count the number of times I've just had to be like, "oh fuck. That's really bad. I knew it was bad, but like... oh fuck."
We have *all* had our identity stolen. I don't even know how many times my social security number has been in a data breach. How many of my medical records are on the market? But yeah, sure, let's accelerate that.
The problem was never that we couldn't find problems. The problem has always been "leadership" being unwilling to invest in fixing them. The problem has always been this mind-set of growth-at-any-cost.
I tuck these things away in my brain, and they sit there gnawing on my sanity, like little RFK worms.
Not the usual stuff I post.
Thanks to @… I've been playing around with this website. I'm happy to find that my name and handles are most absent. I'm either a "fictional character from the YA novel and film adaptation 'The Spectacular Now'" or a character from Star Trek.
cintestinalis: Tadpole larva brain (C. intestinalis)
Entire connectivity matrix for the complete brain of a larva of Ciona intestinalis. Each directed edge represents a synaptic connection from pre-synaptic cell i to post-synaptic cell j (may not be a neuron). Edge weights represent the cumulative depth of presynaptic contacts in µm.
This network has 205 nodes and 2903 edges.
Tags: Biological, Connectome, Weighted
Auf Anregung von @… habe ich mal versucht, meinen Workflow von #Logseq auf #Orgmode umzubauen.
Der erste Ansatz mit org-roam sah vielversprechend aus. Aber schon nach ku…
EyeBrain: Left and Right Brain Lateralization Activity Classification Through Pupil Diameter and Fixation Duration
Ko Watanabe, Pooja Pol, Nicolas Gro{\ss}mann, Shoya Ishimaru, Andreas Dengel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23562 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.23562 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.23562
arXiv:2604.23562v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The relationship between brain lateralization and cognitive functions is well-documented. The left hemisphere primarily handles tasks such as language and arithmetic, while the right hemisphere is involved in creative activities like drawing and music perception. Eye-tracking technology has shown the potential to reveal cognitive states by measuring ocular metrics such as pupil diameter and fixation duration. However, the ability to distinguish lateralized brain activity using these ocular metrics remains underexplored. Here, we demonstrate that pupil diameter and fixation duration can effectively classify left and right brain hemisphere activities. We obtained a considerably high classification performance, with an F1 score of 0.894. The results suggest that ocular metrics are robust indicators of lateralized brain activity and can be applied in cognitive monitoring and neurorehabilitation. Our future work expands on this by integrating these methods into real-time applications EyeBrain, potentially broadening their use across various cognitive and neurological domains.
toXiv_bot_toot
Massachusetts-based brain implant company Axoft raised a $55M Series A and says it tested its device in a Shanghai patient, with plans for more trials in China (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…
Sweet jesus, I think the brain worms have worked on this one beyond remedy. The whole thing is toast.
A shoutout to the systems engineers that made Microsoft Windows so fragile, that a single file browser (explorer.exe) freezing causes my Edge downloads to pause, and closing the frozen file browser closes all my file browsers.
My ADHD brain needed those open file browsers so I could keep track of all my in-progress tasks. How do I resume now? Yeah, I suppose I could come up with a better system than that.
I'm getting stack frames corrupted (or else I'm hitting the wrong stack frames) and I can't see why. My brain is far too messed up to deal with this level of shit just now!
#PostScarcitySoftware
#TheJoyOfSoftwareEngineering
I woke at 2am and it's now 3am and my brain is still swirling. Unlike my usual insomnia routine, I am choosing to read my masto feed in the hope that my brain changes direction and settles down. Good luck to anyone else awake and struggling to sleep.
"You wouldn't normally buy this pile of dogshit, but what if we mixed all this dogshit together with shit from other animals and put a pretty bow on it and called it a cupcake? Would you buy it then?"
https://beige.party/@maxleibman/116507984376346134
fly_larva: Drosophila larva brain (2023)
A complete synaptic map of the brain connectome of the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Nodes are neurons, and edges are synaptic connections, traced individually from brain image sections using three-dimensional electron microscopy–based reconstruction. Node metadata include the neuron hempisphere, hemispherical homologue, cell type, annotations, and inferred cluster. Edge metadata include the type of interaction (`'aa'`,…
fly_larva: Drosophila larva brain (2023)
A complete synaptic map of the brain connectome of the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Nodes are neurons, and edges are synaptic connections, traced individually from brain image sections using three-dimensional electron microscopy–based reconstruction. Node metadata include the neuron hempisphere, hemispherical homologue, cell type, annotations, and inferred cluster. Edge metadata include the type of interaction (`'aa'`,…
A study in Nature Health finds that microplastics and nanoplastics
were at a higher level in brain tumour samples from living patients
than in healthy human brain samples from cadavers,
with a correlation between microplastic surface area and tumour proliferation. https://go.nature.com/4cuBK4I…
It's a week since my last #PostScarcitySoftware entry. The version of eval/apply copied from `0.0.6` still doesn't compile, let alone work. There are reasons. I've been ill — my brain really is fucked — and I've had urgent outdoor work.
There is progress. I am cleaning up bits of old cruft as I go. But I don't think copying the old code was a good decision. I…
Physical Intelligence says its new model, π0.7, can direct robots on tasks they weren't trained on, an "early sign" of generalization, surprising researchers (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/202…
No! No no brain, no brain. no brain. Toot toot toot toot [unintelligible] like-like-like-like YeAH toot. boost. toot. boost. toot. toot toot toot toot like-like-like-like mastodon no brain. mastodon no brain. boost-toot-boost-toot. never! never! never! brain. boost toot boost toot. Never think!
https://
(YouTube, 2025) The surprising way the brain is wired https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9939jVJIZYo "What if vast areas of the brain contribute to many different functions and its connectivity is far more intricate than we once believed?"
How Kosovo's tech industry, driven by local companies like business outsource provider SPEEEX, is helping cut youth unemployment and changing Pristina's skyline (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-30/…
cintestinalis: Tadpole larva brain (C. intestinalis)
Entire connectivity matrix for the complete brain of a larva of Ciona intestinalis. Each directed edge represents a synaptic connection from pre-synaptic cell i to post-synaptic cell j (may not be a neuron). Edge weights represent the cumulative depth of presynaptic contacts in µm.
This network has 205 nodes and 2903 edges.
Tags: Biological, Connectome, Weighted
New York-based Probook, which is building an AI operating system for home service businesses, raised a $34M Series A led by a16z and a $6M seed led by Sequoia (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/06/23/excl…
Would getting a Neuralink Blindsight brain implant for restoring vision be worth it? #BCI
fly_larva: Drosophila larva brain (2023)
A complete synaptic map of the brain connectome of the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Nodes are neurons, and edges are synaptic connections, traced individually from brain image sections using three-dimensional electron microscopy–based reconstruction. Node metadata include the neuron hempisphere, hemispherical homologue, cell type, annotations, and inferred cluster. Edge metadata include the type of interaction (`'aa'`,…
If you compare the challenges that a Neuralink Blindsight brain implant for restoring vision still has to overcome with the challenges for The vOICe (sound-guided mental imagery)... https://www.artificialvision.com/neuralink.htm Supporting independent and open science
US company Paradromics on brain-computer interfaces: China's recent developments and what they mean for the US https://www.paradromics.com/blog/china-bci-developments Seems at odds with how the US administration keeps eroding the scientific ecosystem in the US;
It's not that The vOICe vision BCI is so good, it's that invasive BCIs for (restoring) vision are far worse than often claimed. The human brain is not plug-and-play. https://chatgpt.com/share/69f448a9-de04-83eb-9720-98a2f66ca7e5
By linking up visual and auditory processing in the human brain, The vOICe vision BCI can act as both a fully noninvasive visual prosthesis for the totally blind and as a research vehicle for macroscopic neuroscience https://www.artificialvision.com/neuralink.htm
Astrocytes connect specific brain regions through plastic networks (in mice) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10426-6 "communication between distant brain regions that is mediated by plastic networks of gap junction-coupled astrocytes";
Brain-computer interfaces in healthcare: building the picks and shovels company while the giants fight over gold #BCI
A computer model predicted which human brain implant channels would fail #invasive
Trying to draft a kind of "graphical abstract" on visual prosthesis BCI options... brain implants with electrodes, ultrasound with optogenetics or nanoparticles, and noninvasive visual-to-auditory sensory substitution. Suggestions for improvement? #neuroscience
Seeing and imagining are handled by the same brain cells https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2026/05/12/seeing-and-imagining-are-handled-by-the-same-brain-cells/
"Researchers make advances in understanding how human brains ar…
Lucid dreaming shows that the human brain can go into a state of vivid mental imagery. If and once we can effectively tap into that, sound-guided mental imagery will restore veridical vision to the blind https://www.artificialvision.com/literature.htm
(YouTube) China's government-backed BCI push could bring brain-computer tech to the masses within 3 to 5 years #BCI
#Paradromics: From brain implants to neuroprosthetics | Making sense of brain-computer interface terminology https://www.paradromics.com/insights/from-brain-implants-to-neuropr…