Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · 20d

Excited for this paper to be out, literal years of hard work by Kozzy. Excitingly, my first last author paper!

This work came from joining the Kinds of Intelligence group at Cambridge and being given time by @martahalina.bsky.social to explore and cross disciplines. Hard work but very fun! 🧪 🤖🧠

Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · 20d

We find that recurrence confers a significant advantage for learning more complex grammars, but lamination does not.

This work would not have been possible without Matishalin Patel, Colin Klein, Marta Halina, and Andrew Barron. You can check out our preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.13968.

Exploring Major Transitions in the Evolution of Biological Cognition With Artificial Neural Networks

Transitional accounts of evolution emphasise a few changes that shape what is evolvable, with dramatic consequences for derived lineages. More recently it has been proposed that cognition might also h...

arxiv.org

3 6

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Aug 20

youtu.be/lLlwvmu1ZeA?...

Possibly my favourite What If? ever. If you haven't read the what if books I highly recommend finding some copies.

What if you had a mole of moles?

YouTube video by xkcd's What If?

youtu.be

2

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Aug 1

They are sequential hemaphrodites! All born male and when they inherit an anemone they develop into females. Each group has a dominant female, a smaller breeding male and a queue of progressively smaller underdeveloped males helpers. Such a cool system!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_...

1

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Aug 1

It is likely then that cooperation in A. percula is driven by direct fitness benefits via inheritance or pay-to-stay type mechanisms!

#evolution #gametheory

1

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Aug 1

Why do anemonefish (A. percula) live in groups where only the dominant pair breed? We tested ~200 groups for genetic relatedness and showed no patterns indicating relatedness was high within groups. 🧬🧪

doi.org/10.1093/behe...

@theresarueger.bsky.social #MarineBiology #SocialEvolution

A bright orange clown anemonefish (Amphiprion percula) with white bands and wide black edging. swims near the tentacles of a pale purple sea anemone.

1 1 3

Reposted by Matishalin

Theresa Rueger @theresarueger.bsky.social · May 22

New study in @science.org Science Advances: Clownfish can shrink to survive heatwaves and social conflict!
Led by Melissa Versteeg, with Chancey MacDonald, Morgan Bennett-Smith, Pete Buston
@newcastleuni.bsky.social
@sciencesncl.bsky.social
@bostonu.bsky.social

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Individual clown anemonefish shrink to survive heat stress and social conflict

Clown anemonefish survive heatwaves by shrinking together with their breeding partner.

www.science.org

2 14 20

Reposted by Matishalin

Evolutionary Ecology Group, Cambridge @eegcam.bsky.social · Jun 29

After a week of intense population genomics, lots of tired but still smiley faces. Thank you @embo.org for funding another edition of our Population Genomics course in Naples. And thank you to the trainers and participants for making this eight edition another success! #EMBOpopgen

Group photo from the EMBO Population Genomics Course in Naples, 2025

3 11 15

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · May 14

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Yeah I mean they went to all this trouble secretly stealing stuff. It's only fair they don't have to tell anyone...

UK ministers block amendment requiring AI firms to declare use of copyrighted content

Government uses arcane procedure to strip amendment passed by House of Lords from its data bill

www.theguardian.com

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Mar 4

yes more acc the branch of middle english leading to english. old-english used a partative genitive (i think; I am only a hobby linguist). I think the key point is zero was introduced and naturally replaces "no" or the indication of an absence of stuff, so takes a partative construction.

1

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Mar 4

At least that's my understanding! But I haven't opened a linguistics book in 10 years so could be wrong!

2 11

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Mar 4

The branch leading to English used to have a dual class (two things only) so it's not unreasonable language may develop a null class of grammatical number some day.

1 1 16

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Mar 4

Lots of confusion here. It's not about singular/plural.

Zero came after English grammar stabilised, we used the partative for no things: I have no marbles.

English partative looks like the plural sometimes. So it's confusing ppl.

3 1 56

Reposted by Matishalin

Kozzy Voudouris @kozzyvoudouris.bsky.social · Mar 1

How can we rigorously investigate the common-sense capabilities of agentic AI systems? How can we build better models of non-human animal cognition?

(Re-)introducing the Animal-AI Environment: A virtual laboratory for comparative cognition and artificial intelligence research!

1 5 10

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Feb 27

I've been thinking about the same thing and came across economics-games.com

Not sure how well it works but looks good from small scale testing.

1 3

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Feb 20

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

100 year discussion on whether to use the word scientist can now be resolved correctly.

By recognising the correct term should be lorer.

anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Lore

#conlang

4

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Feb 19

www.cea.fr/english/Page...

This seems very cool progress from the EAST result. Can physics people tell me is there still an issue with neutron shielding? Is that on its way to a solution? 🧪⚛️

Nuclear fusion: WEST beats the world record for plasma duration!

On 12 February, the CEA’s WEST machine was able to maintain a plasma for more than 22 minutes. In doing so, it smashed the previous record for plasma duration achieved with a tokamak. This leap forwa...

www.cea.fr

3

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Feb 15

To hijack Weinberg:

With or without notebooks, good people can program well and bad people can program badly; but for good people to program badly - that takes notebooks.

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Feb 9

Seems so cool and strange to me that tokenising+transformer of a time series can work. And that the performance generalises so well across the different tasks. 🧪

openreview.net/forum?id=QlT...

very good video exposition by first author:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqrC...

1 3

Reposted by Matishalin

Dylan Burnette @mag2art.bsky.social · Jan 20

A cancer cell with three nuclei (cyan) videoed through a microscope. Mitochondria (yellow) and the actin cytoskeleton (red) are also shown. #Science #Biology #CellBiology #microscopy

1 9 51

Reposted by Matishalin

Anna Dewar @annadewar.bsky.social · Jan 8

Our review is out in Nature Reviews Genetics! rdcu.be/d5AY2

We show how phylogeny-based methods can resolve the problem of non-independence in genomic datasets.

These methods must be considered an essential part of the comparative genomics toolkit.

@lauriebelch.bsky.social @stuwest.bsky.social

A phylogenetic approach to comparative genomics

Nature Reviews Genetics - Controlling for phylogeny is essential in comparative genomics studies, because species, genomes and genes are not independent data points within statistical tests. The...

rdcu.be

5 84 170

Reposted by Matishalin

Tom Scott @tomwscott.bsky.social · Jan 21

New paper with @tobykiers.bsky.social and @stuwest.bsky.social on whether plants send signals through fungal networks to warn other plants of impending attack – theory suggests unlikely.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

www.pnas.org

5 18

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Dec 10

Hinton's responses during the banquet interviews are truly S-tier. I'm a bit confused as to why they think ai won't blush though!

1

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Dec 7

Now I'm finally on holiday I have time for pointless projects right?

I went ahead and calculated the graph for heterozygote dive combinations for the 3 set non transitive dice.

The missing link between olive-red and blue-blue is a tie.

Diagram of how all 6 pairs of 2 non transitive dice affect each other.

1

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Dec 1

Which then led me to the equally cool, non-transitive dice.

singingbanana.com/dice/article...

Non-transitive Dice

We describe a set of very unusual dice, and a two player game where you will always have the advantage. You can even teach your opponent how the game works, yet still win again! Finally, we will d...

singingbanana.com

2 1

Matishalin @matishalin.bsky.social · Dec 1

Good Sunday recreational maths read on permutation fair dice. 🧮🧪

www.ericharshbarger.org/dice/go_firs...

Go First Dice

www.ericharshbarger.org

1 7