@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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albertcardona, to uk Catalan
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Auroras over Cambridge, UK. Surreal!

#aurora #UK

albertcardona, to random
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Did somebody say ... nectar?

Harmonia axyridis, the invasive (in the UK) Asian ladybug.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/214878124

#iNaturalist #Coleoptera #beetles #ladybugs

Daojoan, to random
@Daojoan@mastodon.social avatar

This is par for the course in what I call the Exploiter Economy:

Addiction-optimized platforms that strip away our free time and bombard us with ads. Products designed to extract maximum value from users while returning the bare minimum. And always, the creators get the short end of the stick while Big Tech laughs all the way to the bank.

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/its-an-exploiter-economy-not-a-creator-economy

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@Daojoan

Well put. One should always perform due diligence before committing one's time and effort into a platform. If it isn't a non-profit, it won't end well.

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

Dr. Núria Cortadellas and her colleague Almudena Fernández taught me electron microscopy – so grateful for all the time they shared with me and the opportunities granted.

I am very happy that my alma matter, the University of Barcelona, named a lecture hall in her honour (in 2022! How did I miss that?):

http://www.ccit.ub.edu/EN/2022/new20220325.html

albertcardona, to random
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Online course on "Scientific Image Editing and Figure Creation" using open source software and .

By BioVoxxel via Zoom, on:
Thu 27 Jun 2024 09:00 - Fri 28 Jun 2024 15:30 CEST

Register at: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/biovoxxel/1198561

Details: https://www.biovoxxel.de/workshops/scientific-image-editing-and-figure-creation/

steveroyle, to random
@steveroyle@biologists.social avatar

It seems I have found a new way to procrastinate on a grant application. Using to make my Gantt chart!

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@steveroyle

I recently got reviews back for a grant application where all my figures were left out by accident. The reviews were very good, and none mentioned the lack of figures or Gantt chart.

As a reviewer myself, I have never paid any attention whatsoever to the Gantt chart when one was included, as I consider it at best wishful thinking. Seems that many others are of the same mind. Just saying :)

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@steveroyle

Nope. To be fair I was referring to them in the text as the preliminary data – there was just one figure –, not with numbers or panel lettering.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@steveroyle

I am so over checkbox ticking exercises. I'd rather support a scientist writing an honest grant than one trying to dazzle me with what ultimately amounts to busywork.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@steveroyle

😀 Plans and meeting the enemy and all that.

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

"A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution" by Shapson-Coe et al. 2024 (Lichtman lab).

The reconstruction at its current state is already useful and very interesting. Here is to hoping the authors will put in more time and resources to further polish it.

Paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk4858

Preprint (2021): https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.29.446289.abstract

Browsable data: https://h01-release.storage.googleapis.com/landing.html

Viren Jain's (Google) press release: https://research.google/blog/ten-years-of-neuroscience-at-google-yields-maps-of-human-brain/

#neuroscience #connectomics

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

A remarkable finding from Shapson-Coe et al. 2024 paper on human brain #connectomics: the presence of canalized connections in the human brain cortex. Canalized in the Kauffman boolean networks sense [1], which here means: among the many synaptic inputs that any one neuron integrates, some are far stronger (by number of synapses) than the rest.

This is a pattern that we described in the #Drosophila larval nervous system (Ohyama et al. 2015 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14297 ) and that has been reported as well for the mouse hippocampus (Bartol et al. 2015 https://elifesciences.org/articles/10778 ) and cerebellum (Nguyen et al. 2023 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05471-w ).

[1] Canalisation as a term was introduced by Waddington in 1942 in the context of genetics to mean "some phenotypic traits are very robust to small perturbations" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canalisation_(genetics)

#neuroscience #connectomics

kittylyst, to random
@kittylyst@mastodon.social avatar

As you might know, I have no academic training in computing of any kind. My training was in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

It is, therefore, often a surprise when I encounter a CS paper (often a vintage one) and realize just how beautifully it is written and what it expresses.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@kittylyst

Second that. Happened more times than I can recall. Wagner and Fischer’s edit distance paper stands up there in the pantheon of clearly and eloquently written papers:

“The string-to-string correction problem”, 1974 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/321796.321811

cnrs, to random French
@cnrs@social.numerique.gouv.fr avatar

#EuropeDay 🇪🇺 À l'occasion de la #JournéeDeLEurope (9 mai), découvrez une sélection d’articles et de vidéos de #CNRSleJournal sur la construction européenne et le rôle majeur de la recherche scientifique.
https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/dossiers/la-longue-construction-de-leurope

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@cnrs

Ce serait merveilleux si la #SNCF coopérait avec d'autres compagnies ferroviaires européennes et coordonnait ses horaires de train. Les scientifiques pourraient alors se rencontrer et collaborer beaucoup plus facilement dans toute l’Europe.

albertcardona, to random
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Bikeshedding, iNaturalist-style:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/research-grade-observations-from-the-international-space-station/51066/8

albertcardona, to Trains
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

In Europe, flying is cheaper than taking the train.

It's an embarrassment, and a major problem: we have to stop flying for silly short distances. Realise that the overheads of flying (reaching the airport, awaiting 2 hours, the flight, the unloading, reaching the destination) largely cancel out any time gains of flying. And the carbon costs are utterly untenable. Not to speak of the modern, dire conditions of the whole flying "experience".

Another embarrassment is that train connections can't be guaranteed when across countries or companies. They aren't even coordinated. As if those who commission and set the schedules didn't travel by train themselves, at least not internationally. In considering how tiny most European countries are, it's frankly bizarre.

There are so many destinations one could travel by train to, yet in practice, it's not sensible. A disgrace.

The upside is that it can be fixed.

#trains #EuroRail

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@villavelius

I hear you – same here. One wonders, how much of the price difference are fuel and airport subsidies to airline companies. If that much tax-payer money has to go to flying to make it affordable, I'd rather it was allocated to the railway. Far more humane, less noisy, less hassle, far lower carbon footprint, far more pleasant.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@kofanchen

If it involves one big leg only like the Eurostar or a single German ICE train or French Grande Lignes, then yes, travelling by train is smooth. Issue is when one has to make connections across countries and railway companies.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@paulthenerd

My rule of thumb would be, if there's a train route that can make the journey in less than 8 hours, there's no reason to fly at all. Flying will take about as much time when including the overheads, and most hours will be wasted rather than comfortably sitting on a train.

Distance is not a factor; time is. E.g., London-Bergen, in Norway, would be quite difficult to replace by train or boat. Whereas London-Barcelona, which is about the same distance, is easy: there already is a route with Eurostar + TGV via Paris.

London-Bergen: 1044 km https://www.distance.to/London/Bergen

London-Barcelona: 1138 km https://www.distance.to/London/Barcelona

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@brembs

Sorry to hear. Back in the late 2000s I travelled quite a bit across Germany by train and the experience was always delightful.

What you describe is too close to the current state of British railway, which is so unreliable that, well, one can't rely on it for anything time-sensitive. It is only infrastructure if the system operates so smoothly one grows to rely on it completely. The UK's railway is more akin to a fair joyride: something one goes into for the thrill of it, knowingly.

albertcardona, to Neuroscience
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

eLife neuroscience is 🔥: papers from Claudia Clopath’s lab, Andrew Hires’s lab, and Richard Hahnloser’s. Yowza!

https://elifesciences.org/articles/88053

https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/96931

https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/90445

#neuroscience

albertcardona, to Neuroscience
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Simple, simulated “animals” (agents) exhibit cooperative hunting:

“Collaborative hunting in artificial agents with deep reinforcement learning” by Tsutsui et al. 2024.

“using computational multi-agent simulations based on deep reinforcement learning, we demonstrate that decisions underlying collaborative hunts do not necessarily rely on sophisticated cognitive processes.”

“This has implications for a reassessment, and perhaps a widening, of what groups of animals are believed to manifest cooperative hunting.”

https://elifesciences.org/articles/85694

albertcardona, to random
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Ceutorhynchus sp. weevil.

http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/213954264
#iNaturalist #Coleoptera #WeevilWednesday #entomology #weevils

albertcardona, to random
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

What’s up, doc?

Ichneumonoidea wasp.

http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/213968073
#iNaturalist #Hymenoptera #parasitoid #wasplove #entomology

carnage4life, to random
@carnage4life@mas.to avatar

This feels like the first ad that is a tone deaf miss from Apple. An ad showing beautiful tools of human creativity being crushed to be replaced by the newest and thinnest gadget feels antithetical to Apple.

I’d expect this from an AI company not Apple.
https://youtu.be/ntjkwIXWtrc?si=VGoNknBw7VNkvuwO

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@carnage4life

In tune with those who think "we've had enough of experts".

albertcardona, to Neuroscience
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

"Lu.i -- A low-cost electronic neuron for education and outreach" by Stradmann et al. 2024 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16664

#neuromorphic #neuroscience #education

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