Jan Lause
data science postdoc in Tübingen 🧬🖥️🧠 scRNA data analysis, UMAP/tSNE & retina neuroscience | science journalism on AI & sustainability 🤖❤️🌍 | easily sidetracked by small plot details & cool birds 📈🔍🦜
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- Reposted by Jan LauseMore than 200,000 Danish citizens have signed a petition to buy California as a response to Trump’s attempt to take Greenland. They say they will provide Californians with “rule of law, universal health care, fact-based politics, and a lifetime supply of Danish pastries.”
- Reposted by Jan LauseWe're hiring an intern! Apply here.
- Want a relaxing break? Scroll this thread instead of your timeline. 🐈 (For best results, close this app once you are done and check your own surroundings for cats you don’t own — maybe you get lucky!
- Reposted by Jan LauseGlobally, no single day in 2025 was cooler than its 1991-2020 average. climate.copernicus.eu/global-clima...
- The numbers in this overview were pretty surprising to me - I wonder how they look for Germany... (were we also suffer from low economic mobility etc...)
- Reposted by Jan Lauseonce again being driven insane by ML conference submissions
- Reposted by Jan LauseMartin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).
- Interesting work on LLM memorization: Researchers were able to extract long book passages verbatim from Claude, Gemini and Grok --- sometimes almost the whole book. Curious to see how this type of result influences Copyright cases... Also see their thread with details and limitations below ⬇️
- Reposted by Jan LauseSince Jan 1 2025, which feels like four trillion years ago, research has been shared on here 5 million whole-ass times. Bluesky recently passed 2 billion posts IN TOTAL. So 0.25% of the entire site's traffic was citations to research. That is actually massively high. Is it? Yes. Here's why.
- Reposted by Jan LauseI have been asked several times how we draw the 3D Figures for of our papers, so I wrote a blog post on it. This does not replace a Blender tutorial, just a couple specifics for scientific papers: - import images as planes - render edges - transparent BG chriswolfvision.medium.com/creating-3d-...
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- Reposted by Jan LauseFrom the 2022 drop era: “who needs wheat? Bread is so much tastier”
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- Reposted by Jan LauseBecause international media largely seems to struggle to choose the correct wording to describe what’s happening: the US, under the self describes „peace president“, attacked another country and kidnapped its president. That is factual, no matter how bad or illegitimate Maduro‘s rule is (very bad).
- Reposted by Jan LauseOne thing I wrote about here is how technology has made buses *way* more convenient while techno-futurists were obsessed with flying taxis and self-driving cars.
- I wrote about how surprised I still am a candidate for NYC mayor won in large part by talking incessantly about buses, and also about how making them fast as promised will be an immense challenge. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
- Warum brauchts Journalismus von Netzpolitik.org? Nur so erfährt die Öffentlichkeit von Datenleaks und problematischen Entwicklungen in Richtung Überwachungsstaat (Palantir, Chatkontrolle..). Digitale Zukunft geht nicht ohne unabhänge Medien, die sich auskennen! Also, wer kann: Jetzt spenden!
- Reposted by Jan LauseThrilled to see our review article "The evolutionary origins of synaptic proteins" highlighted on the cover of Nature Reviews Neuroscience 🤩. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @msarscentre.bsky.social 🧠✨🧬🌊🪼🧽
- First neurons didn’t appear overnight. We trace their roots to ancient secretory cells - showing how lifestyle & behavior shaped the evolution of first synapses.🧠🌊 #Evolution #Neuroscience Our latest in @natrevneuro.nature.com Link: rdcu.be/eMX3E @jeffcolgren.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social
- Reposted by Jan LauseIncredible piece on Oliver Sacks. If you were ever awed at his supposedly true stories (I remember being stunned by the account of the autistic twins who rattled off large prime numbers), read this. He told wonderful stories, but they were in large part fiction. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
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- Reposted by Jan LauseI'm more and more convinced that low-dimensional manifolds in the brain are just an artifact of the experimental designs and analyses we use... 🧠📈 🧪
- Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
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- Reposted by Jan LauseSynaptic-resolution connectomics: towards large brains and connectomic screening — a Review by Moritz Helmstaedter @mhlab.bsky.social #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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- Reposted by Jan LauseThe future is not in the training set.
- UKRI exploring use of AI in grant review - this will prompt debate but interested to know if people think it’d encourage novelty or the opposite? www.chemistryworld.com/news/ukri-op...
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- Reposted by Jan LauseCome work with us!!!
- We are looking for a Research Engineer (E13 TV-L) to work at the intersection of #ML and #compneuro! 🤖🧠 Help us build large-scale bio-inspired neural networks, write high-quality research code, and contribute to open-source tools like jaxley, sbi, and flyvis 🪰. More info: www.mackelab.org/jobs/
- 🎁Your [scientific] BlueSky 2025 Wrapped is here! 🧪
- Reposted by Jan LauseOpenAI says they aren't liable for the suicide of a user their chat bot urged to kill himself because suicide is a violation of the TOS
- From the Scientific Reports publisher response: "Whilst the details of peer review are confidential, we can confirm that the article underwent two rounds of review from two independent peer reviewers, supporting an accept decision [..] that [..] was a case of human error." 🥲🥲🥲
- On the Factor Fexcectorn and autism bicycle AI slop study: I got an answer from Springer Nature this morning that this scientific paper will be retracted! 🧪 Full story: nobreakthroughs.substack.com/p/riding-the...
- Reposted by Jan LauseNature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?
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- How can it cost >2000$ to publish in Scientific Reports (by @springernature.com ) and such a paper gets through? Check out the pub peer comments, the Fig 1 might be just the beginning.. Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41... PubPeer: pubpeer.com/publications...
- Uhh,,, Figure 1 shows you... what exactly? Trying to understand Medical fryrmbial, runctitional features and mum's legs going through concrete. This whole article is a bit of a disaster. And it's very difficult to find other published work for the author. Strange! 🧪 (via @smutclyde.bsky.social)
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- Reposted by Jan LauseJournalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪
- More spoon science - this time tracking how they disappear from an office kitching! 🥄 🕳️ 🕵️♂️ “The loss of workplace teaspoons was rapid, showing that their availability, and hence office culture in general, is constantly threatened.”
- 70 teaspoons placed in tearooms around the institute & observed weekly over 5 months. 80% of spoons disappeared; spoon halflife~81 days. Communal room halflife lower than in specific labs. 250 spoons annually required to maintain 70 spoon population. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
- 🥄💥🥄 “We note that the illusion makes for an excellent party trick.” (from the paper ⬇️ , which is a nice short read and has more gems like “These results speak for themselves. However, in this digital age many scientists cannot believe results without inferential statistics.”)
- Let me present the Spoon Illusion 🙂🥄 This has been in the works for over a decade when we were just goofing around testing sound localisation in my in-laws' kitchen... But we finally managed to do some reasonably controlled experiments on this. #psychscisky #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1177/0301...
- Reposted by Jan LauseHow do we make sense of scientific literature that is growing explosively to the point where no-one could read all the relevant papers, and is contaminated with fraudulent and LLM-generated papers? I think that science isn't currently equipped to deal with this, and we need to. #science #metascience
- Reposted by Jan LauseWe're almost at the end of the year, and that means an end-of-year review! Send me your favorite NeuroAI papers of the year (preprints or published, late last year is fine too).
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- Very interesting set of threads below on: What is limiting Theoretical/Computational Neuroscience right now? Are we missing better models or more/the right data? Why can’t ”AI” solve it all?
- Auf dem Weg nach Wien zu den @sciencenotes.bsky.social — 5 #wisskomm Talks zum Thema VERBRECHEN ab 19.30 im FLUCC, Eintritt frei, folgt der Spur und kommt vorbei! 🕵️♂️ Ich spreche über Sprach-KIs in der Justiz 🤖 ⚖️🧑⚖️ und welche Probleme KIs bei Gericht verursachen. sciencenotes.de/veranstaltun...
- Reposted by Jan LauseOpen AI loses copyright case in Germany. Judge Elke Schwager summarized the case saying that if you want to build something and need components, "then you purchase them and do not use the property of others."
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- Reposted by Jan LauseGreat new work from the labs of @jakhmack.bsky.social and @philipp.hertie.ai! The software Jaxley enables brain simulations which both imitate the processes in the brain in detail and can solve challenging cognitive tasks. Press release of @unituebingen.bsky.social: uni-tuebingen.de/en/universit...
- Our work on training biophysical models with Jaxley is now out in @natmethods.nature.com. Led by @deismic.bsky.social, with @philipp.hertie.ai, @ppjgoncalves.bsky.social & @jakhmack.bsky.social et al. Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- This is such a powerful tool for anyone working in biophysical modelling! 🧠💻
- I am super happy to share that our project on training biophysical models with Jaxley is now published in Nature Methods: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- 🚨 PhD opportunity at the new @hertie-ai.bsky.social in Tuebingen, Germany! 🤖🧠📊 If you are interested in machine learning and visualization for clinical and brain research data, this is the perfect place to start! See next skeet for some of the nice AI/ML/Neuro things we have in Tuebingen! 1/3
- 🎓 We're hiring two PhD students in #MachineLearning for my new group at the Hertie Institute for AI in Brain Health, University of Tübingen! Work on unsupervised learning, #DeepLearning, and #Neuroscience in a vibrant research environment. 👇 Details below
- Some of the nice AI/ML/Neuro hubs in Tuebingen: @ml4science.bsky.social @mlcolab.org @tuebingen-ai.bsky.social @hih-tuebingen.bsky.social @unituebingen.bsky.social @ellis.eu @maxplanckcampus.bsky.social @rhetai.bsky.social @tueneurocampus.bsky.social @twiml.bsky.social /2
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- Someone found that for some SpringerNature journals, citation counts are off for the first article in each volume, causing random articles to be cited A LOT (see attached) Can someone turn this into a quasi-experiment to study what effect citations have on careers - independent of study quality?
- Oops. Ooooooooooooops. I do hope that nobody has been given or denied a job/promotion based on their SpringerNature citation counts in the past 15 years. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01675 h/t @nathlarigaldie.bsky.social
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- Interesting review of q.e.d, an LLM system that automatically reviews scientific papers and gives feedback
- Just tried q.e.d. by @odedrechavi.bsky.social et al. with a few papers including by myself & others where I knew a claim within was flawed based on a misunderstanding of the signal. 1) it was impressive. I see what the hype is about. 2) it hallucinated. www.qedscience.com Overly long #SciPub🧵 1/n
- very much this -- viele Firmen stampfen gerade ihre LLM-basierten "KI"-Projekte wieder ein, wahrscheinlich weil viele auf den Hype aufspringen wollten. Folge: LLM-KI wird zu schnell eingefuehrt, unueberlegt und fuer den falschen Usecase. --> Geld weg, echte Potentiale bleiben ungenutzt.
- Reposted by Jan LauseIt’s grad school application season, and I wanted to give some public advice. Caveats: -*-*-*-* > These are my opinions, based on my experiences, they are not secret tricks or guarantees > They are general guidelines, not meant to cover a host of idiosyncrasies and special cases
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- Reposted by Jan LauseFrom Dec 4-6, our friends from @rhetai.bsky.social will be holding "Transformativ" in Heilbronn, a conference about how AI transforms our society. It will bring together a variety of speakers from different disciplines, ranging from science communication and art. 1/2
- Reposted by Jan LausePlease repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026. The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social. Please apply here until Nov 25: www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
- Want to work on ethical implications of using ML/AI in science? Tuebingen & the ML4Science cluster are a great place to work :)
- We are looking for several postdoctoral researchers to join our Norms & Practices Lab! This is an exciting opportunity for scholars of #philosophy, #law, #culturalanthropology, and (qualitative) #socialscience: uni-tuebingen.de/en/128980#c2... 1/2
- Good (long) Sunday read about how the “AGI narrative” works — spoiler: “It’s not utopia or hell—it’s OpenAI and its peers making a whole lot more money.” Here are a few more quotes/important points I likes to read:
- I had a long conversation with MIT Tech Review’s @willdouglasheaven.bsky.social about AGI; it fed into this very good read on the rise of AGI orthodoxy
