iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Vinny Costa

Duke Institute for Brain Sciences @dukebrain.bsky.social · 14h

Congratulations to Dr. Martin Bohlen @bohlen.bsky.social, Research Scientist in Duke BME, for receiving the Cajal Club's Editor's Choice Award! He shares the honor with co-authors A. Horn, S. Warren, & P. May for two 2025 papers (titles/links below). @cajalclub.bsky.social @springernature.com

Photo of Dr. Martin Bohlen in a white lab coat sitting at his desk

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 5h

Is there a plan for distribution? These look amazing.

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Reposted by Vinny Costa

Alicia Izquierdo @aliciaizquierdo.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Can we also have a series of articles on the limitations of organoids? Or have I missed them?

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

And actually let me put it another way. I care more about finding some “stamp” or implementation detail in brain that helps alleviate psychiatric disease burden, than looking to the brain for inspiration to help us “solve consciousness” and create digital twins.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Just collecting stamps, mailing letters, and seeing what’s returned to sender.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I would argue it is indeed impossible

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I mean this is their whole reveal isn’t. The vast majority of people interested in #NeuroAIcould care less about the neuroscience. It was a dalliance. If car engines could think it would be #LamborghiniAI

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The game is implementation details and the depression you feel is that you actually have to grapple with biology if you want to make a unique contribution.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Cookie Monster is pure good. If AI make Cookie feel sad. AI must be evil.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Please someone in Hollywood pay an actual human $ to write a script building off this story that ends with Matt going to jail and Cookie Monster securing the world record for largest baked chocolate chip cookie. It will surpass all box office records.

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Reposted by Vinny Costa

Lea Duncker @leaduncker.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

If you are an undergraduate student interested in computational and systems neuroscience research, this is your chance to attend #COSYNE27 !!! Apply here for our undergrad travel grant tinyurl.com/cos27ugtravel deadline is Oct 30 (and if you are not an undergraduate, please help to spread the word!)

tinyurl.com

Cosyne 2027 Undergraduate Travel Grant Program

This is the application form for the Cosyne 2027 Undergraduate Travel Grant Program. The deadline to apply is October 30th 2026.

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Reposted by Vinny Costa

Denise J. Cai, Ph.D. @denisejcai.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

NEW: The anterior hypothalamic nucleus acts like a volume knob for stress, scaling the brain’s response to threatening events 🧠 Read the Cai Lab's latest paper, led by @zachtpennington.bsky.social, in @nature.com 🎉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... More: bsky.app/profile/did:...

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Jim Thompson @jimthommo.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

What you don't want to spend your time and lab resources helping a highly privileged HS student build an EEG-controlled wheelchair?

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I just snorted coffee out my nostrils.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

That’s full time in Lake Woebegone

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This is my point. Formalized program (a) have these logistics already solved and (b) are hopefully less biased in who they admit. 90% of these emails are from teenagers from wealthy parents paying half or all of my salary a year for them to attend a private high school.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Please stop telling high school students to cold email university professors. Really, just stop. If you are a high school student looking for research opportunities, search and apply to the myriad of formal training programs that cater specifically to your education level.

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Becca @sciencelizard.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I actually did ask Gemini where to get a particular antibody and when it recommended Santa Cruz I slept well at night knowing AI dependent would be bioterrorists are doomed

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Someone tell the AI biology labs that the best place to buy antibodies is from Santa Cruz.

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Reposted by Vinny Costa

Robert Phillips @rphillips3.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Very excited to share our newest preprint, led by myself and Biostats PhD Student Jianing Yao, where we generate a three dimensional reconstruction of the human NAc to understand how cell type heterogeneity and topography change across the anterior-posterior axis. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

nyti.ms

Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)

An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

If any book editors or agents see this I am dead serious.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I want to write a nonfiction travel book where I spend a year responding to and accepting these predatory conference speaker emails titled “Warm Greetings Dear Respected Professor”

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

This is amazing but I have one question. When do we transition from big mice to humans?

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Reposted by Vinny Costa

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A new publicly available single-cell atlas of the human prefrontal cortex was made from 6.3 million nuclei across 1,494 donors, ranging from before birth to more than 100 years. By @siddhantpusdekar.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/transcriptom...

thetransmitter.org

Prefrontal cortex has three transcriptomic acts

Various genes show distinct exits and entrances with age in the open- source dataset, the largest of its kind to date.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I mean honestly who wouldn’t watch a YouTube channel of birds of prey crashing into roof airbags.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

We have sensors for literally everything. How do we not have velocity and acceleration photodiodes that would set off air bags for the roof of a house?

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

What is the subjective valuation of your screams, heard by no one, as you are crushed by a tree in the forest

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

$279 for a chainsaw rated as “plenty of chainsaw most of the time” with some probability of limb loss or $3000 for the certainty of a professional arborist.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Insane. Kurt doesn’t need any more conference travel trauma

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

You are conveying score driving strengths and weaknesses not making an ASMR video.

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MwahahahahahadScientist @mads100tist.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

You know what's also interactive? Reading the paper. Talk to your colleagues about the paper you just read. Tell them why you loved it. Tell them why you hated it. And even better: invite the authors to talk about their paper 🧪

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Guillaume Lajoie @glajoie.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

In brain-computer interfacing, clever and adaptive decoders help brains learn complex tasks faster. These can impact the nature of solutions learned by the brain. Our new paper is one of the first attempts to study this effect. W/ @neuroamyo.bsky.social and team www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Assistive algorithms influence neural representations in motor brain-computer interfaces - Nature Communications

Assistive algorithms are widely used in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), but their effects on neural representations remain unclear. Here, the authors show that adaptive BCIs lead the brain to learn ...

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

We did it on an MPI and it worked out fine. No issues.

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Reposted by Vinny Costa

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 14/09/2026

When we talk about how science is broken, maybe at least consider how a huge collaboration measured the ripples in spacetime resulting the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away, as counterweight the guy who had to fake his data to show that people who procrastinate fall behind.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Or maybe I’ll start chewing tabacco.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Look there are two things in my life I get to be righteous about and that I won’t compromise on. 1. I’ve never smoked a cigarette. 2. I’ve never written an academic book chapter.

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Anita Devineni @anitadevineni.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

My department (Biology at Emory) is hiring for a teaching track position! These are stable, well-respected, long-term positions with a path to promotion and ppl often staying for decades. The dept is wonderfully supportive and filled with amazing humans (faculty + staff) apply.interfolio.com/191814

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Alright done. Let’s see what happens.

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Vinny Costa @vincentcostaphd.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I am legitimately considering posting a “here is what an AI generated prompt to work in my lab looks like” paragraph on my website with a disclaimer that “if your message looks vaguely similar to this I will not respond” in order to get the AI to hallucinate and make these emails more interesting

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