Vincent Bonin (follow me boninlab.bsky.social)

More holiday gifts from the lab! Beautiful work by Dr. Karolina Socha in @CellReports reveals how nasal, back-to-front visual motion can trigger arousal-related behavioral state changes that modulate responsiveness and stimulus selectivity of mouse visual thalamic neurons.

I am a US citizen & Surgeon who took care of the Boston Maraton Bombing victims in 2013. I paid for 7 years to own a small apartment in downtown #Beirut for my 3 kids to enjoy summers there. Today, #Israel reduced my dream home to rubble, with american weapons, paid by my taxes.

📢 Applications are open for our student-led #TheoreticalBiophysics workshop at @HHMIJanelia. We’re looking for students & postdocs excited to participate in talks, chalk-talk tutorials, and discussions across biological physics. 🛏️ Meals & lodging covered ✈️ Travel support available Apply by April 16 ➡️ janelia.news/THB26 @HHMIScience @zamakany @AllysonSgro

Writing out a conversation I’ve been having a lot at this conference: Things in US science are far, far worse than people know. Far worse than even other scientists know. 1/

@ryanair_cs03 I received a call from customer service. hopefully now taken care of.

@BoninLab Hello 👋, we're extremely sorry about this experience with us. Kindly give us a follow back,we would like to respond. Thank you.

@Ryanair absolutely kafkaesque situation where I booked a RyanAir airfare from to Charleroi to Lisbon via @Expedia @ExpediaHelp, outbound flight was cancelled by @Ryanair due to strikes, and now neither @Ryanair nor @Expedia take responsibility for the organizing the refund.

What do carbon sequestration in wetlands, quantum computing and fungi have in common? They're all research areas studied by our second class of Pivot Fellows — a cohort of scientists who received funding to pivot to a new research topic in a different field of #math or #science: simonsfoundation.org/2025/08/25/fro…

@AToliasLab I totally agree with the larger point but failing chat boxes / AI agents are already a threat to human safety. They can impersonate, harass, bully, mislead or guide people to unsafe behavior such as suicide. They also give unprecedented powers while being totally unreliable.

I had a great time participating in the panel on the future of AI at Davos 2026.

The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE.....

WSJ: To help make the case on Iran, Graham traveled several times to Israel in recent weeks, meeting with members of the country’s intelligence agency. “They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” he said. He spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, coaching him on how to lobby the president for action. wsj.com/politics/polic…

Wow!

Online now: Movement-stabilized three-dimensional optical recordings of membrane potential changes and calcium dynamics in hippocampal CA1 dendrites dlvr.it/TRGrNk

'Aren't Arabs terrified? Don't Arab women weep when their children are bombed?' Tony Benn remains as relevant as ever.

@sama You’re doing deals with the military of an admin that’s openly racist and white nationalist, bullies allies with tariffs and military threats, ignores civil rights, and shows no respect for democracy or rule of law. Why would international customers trust you with their business?

I'd like to answer questions about our work with the DoW and our thinking over the past few days. Please AMA.

This #RareDiseaseDay, we're highlighting research initiative @SPARKforAutism and @s_searchlight, an international research program focused on 184 rare genetic neurodevelopmental disorders. Learn more about these cohorts: sfari.org/resources/?nav… #science #autismresearch

@sama Collaborateur. Cancelling my subscription.

Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only. We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.

Apply if you want to start a laboratory as a new Group Leader at the Paris-Saclay Institute of Neuroscience (NeuroPSI)! Deadline - 15 May 2026. neuropsi.cnrs.fr/ao-2026/

Interested in deep learning-based spike inference with Cascade? We re-implemented the code in Torch -previously in Tensorflow - for better compatibility. Blog: gcamp6f.com/2026/02/17/cas… GitHub: github.com/PTRRupprecht/C…

It’s time to make this point neat and clear. Attempts to show that AGI has already been achieved are just plainly wrong. For three reasons: 1) They shift the definition of general intelligence, originally based on robustness, generalization, and reliability, to behavioral alignment with benchmarks. 2) They confuse benchmark performance with capability to handle novelty. Spoiler: these are different. 3) They ignore that the same behavioral output can come from totally different epistemic pipelines. Joint work with @Walter4C and @GaryMarcus Links in the first reply

New preprint from the Akrami Lab shows that mice can quickly learn patterns in sounds, including abstract rules, simply from experience. The hippocampus is essential for this capacity. Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.648… Blog: sainsburywellcome.org/web/blog/findi…

It’s important that you understand what happened last night. Last night, Stephen Colbert interviewed Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, a candidate who, by all accounts, is on track in the polls to flip Texas blue. In response, Trump’s FCC reportedly threatened CBS if the interview aired. CBS caved and pulled the segment, citing “financial reasons.” In modern American history, no president has been more hostile to free speech than Donald Trump. But censorship always backfires. Here’s the full segment Trump didn’t want you to see.