jordan

When I was writing my dissertation, I took snapshot copies of my powerpoint file just in case. • You can see right around April 12 my valley of despair as I deleted everything and started over again... and then • CRUNCH MODE on the 18 as I realized I was <1wk away...

8 Sept

amazing crowd today to save the Academy of Natural Sciences! save-the-academy.org and awesome speech by Councilwoman @ninaahmadphl.bsky.social!! #savetheacademy @sarahmackattack.bsky.social @skypeascientist.bsky.social @philadelphiascienceaction.substack.com @greenphilly.bsky.social

4 Sept

for #FossilFriday, two of the most charismatic displays at the Museum Of The Moment, the Academy of Natural Sciences here in Philly

doi.orgCan Neural Networks Think Like Geomorphologists?A simple neural network can infer parameters from synthetic topography generated by a process-based numerical model of landscape evolution The network can be queried to identify a sensible relati...

1 Sept

When the Academy of Natural Sciences opened, paleontology had just been founded and the first steam locomotive launched. All other custodians of this museum preserved its incredible cultural and scientific heritage for 200 years. This is an embarrassment to the Drexel administration forever.

Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D.@sarahmackattack.bsky.social

I feel like I’m going to throw up

jordan reposted

Jo Martin

@jrymart.bsky.social

5 Aug

Can neural networks think like geomorphologists? @gregtucker.bsky.social and I trained a neural network to invert the streampower-diffusion model, and then opened the black box. It learned how valley spacing and drainage density connect to process. Out now in GRL: doi.org/10.1029/2026...

jordan reposted

Turan Orujlu

@turanorujlu.bsky.social

25 July

UAI 2026 paper: A genetic perturbation can change the connectome, a new policy can rewire economic links between firms. In each case, interventions change the graph itself which standard SCMs treat as fixed. We tackle this in Partially Observed Structural Causal Models (POSCMs).

jordan reposted

blog.jordan.matelsky.comMaking holograms with a pen plotterI have a pen-plotter! It’s great. It’s like having a printer but slow and it breaks more often. I got it on eBay and it came sorta broken and I immediately spent the difference between what I paid and...

So it turns out you can make holograms with a pen-plotter: blog.jordan.matelsky.com/Penplotter-h... #penplotter #creativecoding

jordan reposted

well that's awfully young for a prime minister

Jonn Elledge@jonnelledge.bsky.social

King Charles III is about to welcome the fourth Prime Minister of his reign, which is not yet four years old.

well that's awfully young for a prime minister

Jonn Elledge@jonnelledge.bsky.social

King Charles III is about to welcome the fourth Prime Minister of his reign, which is not yet four years old.

So it turns out you can make holograms with a pen-plotter: blog.jordan.matelsky.com/Penplotter-h... #penplotter #creativecoding

for example, here's a hologram I carved of Suzanne from @blender.org . like doing File ⟩ Print in Blender, but with a bajillion other steps :) #penplotter #creativecode #blender #blender3d

amasci.comHolography without Lasers: Hand-drawn Holograms [SCIENCE HOBBYIST]

I followed this amazing literature, amasci.com/amateur/holo..., by @wbeaty.bsky.social who omg is on bsky, hi!!! and modified it slightly: • hyperboloids instead of circles (just showing off, barely changes anything) • used a robot holding a sword instead of precise hand carving • I made it worse

18 July

hey, come on now blueblocks.jordan.matelsky.com

14 July

these are some blender-ass conference snacks #blender #blender3d @blender.org #blenderguru

adapalmer.comInventing the Renaissance - Ada PalmerIn Inventing the Renaissance, acclaimed historian Ada Palmer provides a fresh perspective on what makes this epoch so captivating.

29 June

booking a trip to Florence right after reading @adapalmer.bsky.social's "Inventing the Renaissance" is like being 8 and walking past an ice cream store and hearing your parents say, "why don't we go in!" www.adapalmer.com/publication/...

28 June

oh wtf @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social, I searched for four papers in five minutes while writing a grant and that gets me banned??

jordan reposted

15 May

rotisserie pillow. is this anything?

27 June

Just donated to #fdroid because the #FOSS ecosystem is a beautiful thing! Learned a lot when I published Coppelia [https://blog.jordan.matelsky.com/coppelia/], my Jellyfin music client, and the review team and community was extraordinary!! #foss #jellyfin #android

jordan reposted

so I just realized I forgot to #skeetprint my Contactomes paper... (is that what we're calling it?) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @kordinglab.bsky.social @dacolon.bsky.social smithneurallab.weebly.com @jhuapl.bsky.social #academicsky #preprint #neuroscience

More generally, if you knew every cell a neuron touches, would you know something new beyond its synaptic #contactome? How many other cells does a neuron touch, anyway? Here was our first exploration: a single pyramidal cell (cyan), followed by all its synaptic partners, and then all its contacts:

16 June

oh brother.... * #connectome I meant here!

In any case. Thank you for joining me on this little #academicsky journey :) brain is awesome!

Bonus video! Poke it for yourself: neuroglancer.bossdb.io#!https://sho... #sciart #neuroscience

I first got excited about this ~8y ago when I started seeing a pattern in #microns and other datasets at bossdb.org @alleninstitute.org @bcmhouston.bsky.social @princeton.edu @mit.edu Usually neuron cell bodies are spread out... But every so often, you get what I call "cuddle buddies". wtf?

wow I totally thought this was a 2x cuddle buddy but it turns out to be a triple cuddle buddy too!! neuroglancer.bossdb.io#!https://sho... (Am I supposed to NSFW tag this..?)

The full answer must wait; a single time snapshot can only tell us so much. But (unpublished) sneak-peek: when a neuron cuddles with glia, it has 1.3x synapses than one without a cuddly glia. When neurons cuddle, their synapses are more central to the rest of the connectome than uncuddly peers.

github.comAPL BRAINAPL BRAIN has 118 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

Metabolism? Communication shortcuts? It remains to be seen :)

Contact is a totally new way to think about how nervous systems are organized. As part of this science, we're releasing all of our code and data #opensource (happening presently), and if you have a dataset that could benefit from a contactome, get in touch please :) github.com/aplbrain/

Finally, I want to return to those cuddle buddies that inspired me ages ago. Here's what it looks like to sneak "inside" a soma of a TRIPLE(!!) cuddle buddy. When you look "up" at the surface of the cell, it's dominated by contact with other neurons. Clearly important! But why?

And it's just... always true. EVERY synapse is like this. Glia are EVERYWHERE. Here's the same synapse in two views; the glia (green) surrounds the synapse, and could foreseeably tune/train/kill it. HOT TAKE: I think big chunks of learning & memory will turn out to be mainly driven by this :)

smithneurallab.weebly.comSmithLAB@NDSmithLAB@ND

Here's a beautiful shot of a single dendritic spine (black). It has ~3 synaptic partners (blue). But it has nearly TWENTY contact partners (red), which could be electrically or chemically influencing it! (thank you @blender.org for making it so easy to create videos like this ❤️)

Seeing that astrocytic network was a jaw-drop moment for me. Thank you to Cody Smith at Notre Dame for driving this science: This changed the way I think about neuroscience entirely!! smithneurallab.weebly.com

For our next trick: Does that glial network touch synapses specifically? Another resounding YES: PRACTICALLY EVERY SYNAPSE has a glial cell within 1µm, and near the synaptic site, almost ALL of the surrounding tissue is glial. Glam-shot: a synapse's microenvironent is dominated by an astrocyte :)

So let's see if we can find any evidence of an astrocytic long-range network (a "syncytium," which is totally award-winning spelling for a word)... Let's look at our contactomes and get the network of astrocytes-contacting-astrocytes. Can we see that long-range network?

wired.comJeff Bezos Is Funding a Wild Hunt for the Brain’s ‘Core Algorithm’With $500 million in funding and a reported $2.5 billion valuation, Flourish wants to reinvent AI by putting real neurons under the microscope.

The answer is... holy crap YES. Here, I've shaded in red the astrocytes that participate in this network. Yep. It's literally EVERYWHERE. If we look at the nuclei of these astrocytes, they're perfectly uniformly distributed in the mouse visual cortex too!

I mean... that's crazy. That means that synaptogenesis needs to move MANY microns away to even see a new potential partner. That has some pretty big implications for biological learning algorithms, which, like, I hear that's a big deal bsky.app/profile/sean... #neuroai

Sean Escola@seanescola.bsky.social

What if we could redesign AI to mirror biology’s efficiency? Reardon & the Flourish team are exploring exactly that. By mapping neural connections in the human brain, they aim to develop biology-inspired AI that is radically more energy-efficient. Read here: www.wired.com/story/jeff-b...

thetransmitter.orgHow a hidden network of astrocytes shapes the brainAstrocytes are wired together in precise, long-range networks that remodel in response to experience, according to new research.

When we look at contactomes instead of connectomes, we also get an obvious bonus: GLIA!! Glia aren't commonly involved in synapses, but they are EVERYWHERE. Lots of chatter recently about astrocytes: www.thetransmitter.org/astrocytes/t... @thetransmitter.bsky.social #astrocytes #glia

ok cool so let's take each neuron (blue), and draw increasing radii around it: 0.5µm (green), 1µm (yellow), 2µm... all the way up to 10µm. That's actually quite a lot of distance! ~1000x more volume than the neuron itself. So how many new partners are there in that HUGE halo we don't already touch?

The answer, INCREDIBLY, is... basically ZERO! *A neuron already touches virtually every neuron that comes within ~10µm of its cell membrane.* omg!

It also turns out that different cell types have different "fingerprints" of their volume to surface-area relationships. Unsurprisingly, you can immediately tell who's a neuron and who's glia (green = glia, blue = neuron), and in fact different cell types even have their own "sub-fingerprint"!

SECOND: One of the weaknesses of connectomics today is we only get a single snapshot in time. If we instead watched the neurons form and kill synapses, how many new partners might be available? One way to learn this is to look at a "halo" around each cell: how many un-contacted neurons are nearby?

Our first result was super obvious: in mice, CONTACT networks (the #contactome) are 5-10 times as dense as the synaptic connectome.