Matt Kirkcaldie
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matttkk.bsky.social
Matt Kirkcaldie
@matttkk.bsky.social
2K followers 680 following 290 posts
Neuroscientist obsessed with brain structure and comparative neuroanatomy.
They’re not circuits. It’s not wiring. Cortex is a resonant mesh.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matt-Kirkcaldie [ image by https://mattcoyle.net ]
Posts Replies Media Videos
matttkk.bsky.social
Who better to sing the blazing soul of Horses than @jennpelly.bsky.social?
Nobody, that’s who.
pitchfork.com/reviews/albu...
Patti Smith: Horses
Read Jenn Pelly’s review of the album.
pitchfork.com
November 9, 2025 at 12:26 PM
Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie
adammorton.bsky.social
Amid squabbles, bombast and competing interests, what can Cop30 achieve?
- by @fionaharvey.bsky.social

www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...
Amid squabbles, bombast and competing interests, what can Cop30 achieve?
Climate summit in Brazil needs to find way to stop global heating accelerating amid stark divisions
www.theguardian.com
November 9, 2025 at 8:20 AM
matttkk.bsky.social
Fascinating piece sifting the historical evidence to reinstate Franklin’s status as a co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, not the less-insightful also-ran portrayed in Watson’s popular history.
matthewcobb.bsky.social Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · 3d
If you believe either that Franklin discovered the double helix, and / or Watson and Crick stole her data, ask yourself how you know this. Then take a read of this article.
rsmythfreelance.bsky.social Richard Smyth @rsmythfreelance.bsky.social · 3d
If I see one more stupid Rosalind Franklin take I'm going to lose my mind. Thank god for @matthewcobb.bsky.social and @nccomfort.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
November 8, 2025 at 8:00 AM
matttkk.bsky.social
Well that's $1.5 million worth of integrity right there
python.org Python Software Foundation @python.org · 15d
as a condition of funding, we were asked to affirm that we wouldn’t undertake any diversity, equity, and inclusion work, whether or not we used the government funds to do so. The PSF simply couldn’t agree to that statement,
October 28, 2025 at 5:46 AM
Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie
carlbergstrom.com
The dark truth behind FormatMyPaper.com
Beware giving this site your unpublished data
Users noticed the website had fake testimonials and a domain name registered seemingly overnight.
https://ubadah.substack.com/p/beware-giving-this-site-your-unpublished\
October 24, 2025 at 12:11 AM
Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie
tasinquirer.bsky.social
Unauthorised earthworks and land clearing by a cement company in northern Tasmania has damaged the known habitat of endangered freshwater crayfish and snails, smothering creek beds with silt. #politas

tasmanianinquirer.com.au/news/cement-...
Endangered Tasmanian crayfish habitat damaged by unapproved works
The habitat of an endangered native crayfish in northern Tasmania was damaged by unauthorised earthworks and land clearing by a cement company, according to an order issued by the Environment Protecti...
tasmanianinquirer.com.au
October 19, 2025 at 8:53 PM
Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie
ornellabertrand.bsky.social
New paper out! It was an honor to collaborate with the legend Leah Krubitzer on this review to show that paleontologists and neurobiologists working together can only improve our understanding of brain evolution 🧠
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Full access to the paper: rdcu.be/eK167
The functional adaptations of mammalian brain structures through a behavioural ecology lens - Nature Reviews Biodiversity
Palaeontologists and comparative neurobiologists share a common interest in the evolution of the mammalian brain, but often fail to realize the benefits of this shared interest. This Review draws thes...
www.nature.com
October 15, 2025 at 9:52 AM
matttkk.bsky.social
Nobody asked me, but I’m dismayed to see echo-chamber / clickbait outrage beginning to dominate Bluesky. For me the point of getting off Twitter was to leave the culture war being algorithmically stoked for profit. This polarisation fractures society and makes it impossible to find common ground.
October 16, 2025 at 1:46 AM
Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie
markrubin.bsky.social
Report on Australian Higher Education finds:

🔹️ Council members have no lived experience of universities

🔹️ Council members have COIs with consultancy firms

🔹️ Council meetings are closed affairs that lack transparency

🔹️ Leaders' exorbitant salaries could not be justified
One submission said leaders’ salaries could not be “justified by the quality of executive decision-making, nor by the scope of executive duties. The core business of a university – teaching and research – is co-ordinated virtually entirely by ordinary non-executive staff”.
September 27, 2025 at 9:28 PM
matttkk.bsky.social
I know they won the Nobel Prize and all, but I still think the discovery of how spatial awareness is assembled in vertebrate brains is underrated - the most exciting thing in neuroscience in the last 50 years. Literally seeing the brain build a map and use it to navigate, the basis of all behaviour.
September 25, 2025 at 4:22 AM
matttkk.bsky.social
Fantastic, essential piece of scientific history, key work from an unheralded pioneer. We’ve only known that the stars are hydrogen and helium for a hundred years.
elisecutts.bsky.social Elise Cutts @elisecutts.bsky.social · Sep 24
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪

Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students.

I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:
September 25, 2025 at 2:14 AM
Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie
k-hermit.com
POKEMON ‎🤍
September 23, 2025 at 1:26 PM
Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie
psychopharmres.bsky.social
We’re looking for Australian clinicians working with people who are seeking help with their substance use to share the stories of their wins. Find out more and complete the brief, confidential survey here: bit.ly/3GpQTXP
September 17, 2025 at 11:33 AM
matttkk.bsky.social
A point which I never see raised is that the cost of the stadium would be borne by all taxpayers, whereas the profits and economic benefits would accrue to businesses catering to the resulting traffic, and the AFL. Seems like a massive expenditure of public money to benefit the private sector.
nickfeik.bsky.social Nick Feik @nickfeik.bsky.social · Sep 17
For a state already carrying massive debt, and with massive health, education, youth justice problems (et al), this stadium is unbelievably irresponsible. #politas
nickfeik.bsky.social Nick Feik @nickfeik.bsky.social · Sep 17
"The stadium would 'diminish the economic welfare' of Tasmania (and) would have an 'irrevocable and unacceptable' impact on Hobart's landscape.

"The govt would need to accumulate $1 bil in debt for construction costs, which would rise to $1.8 bil over 10 years"

Govt proceeding anyway. Awesome.
September 17, 2025 at 7:34 AM
Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie
hourlycosmos.bsky.social
Mars Valles Marineris from EMM - From Jason Major (jpmajor.bsky.social) - https://flic.kr/p/2pqhbFq
Here's a view of the 4,000-km-long Valles Marineris canyon on Mars made from images captured with the EXI camera on UAE's Hope Mars Mission on May 23, 2023 from about 21,000 km. South on Mars is toward the top here.
September 11, 2025 at 4:00 AM
Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie
tasinquirer.bsky.social
🐬 Four dolphins died at Huon Aquaculture #salmon farms during first half of 2025. Total number of dolphin deaths over the past two years is now seven, adding to a wildlife toll that includes 108 seals killed on salmon leases since 2018.
#politas #auspol

▶️ tasmanianinquirer.com.au/news/huon-aq...
Huon Aquaculture reported 4 dolphin deaths at salmon farms
Four dolphins died entangled in equipment at Huon Aquaculture salmon farms in the first half of 2025, newly released Tasmanian government data reveals.
tasmanianinquirer.com.au
September 7, 2025 at 11:09 AM
Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie
socdevbio.bsky.social
✨Nervous about development? Don’t be! 🧠 E13.5 🐁 embryo showing nerves (🩵) and endothelial cells (💙) weaving together in the developing pup 🔬 image by Nathan Burns 🧪 #FluorescenceFriday #DevBio #MouseEmbryo
September 5, 2025 at 9:20 PM
matttkk.bsky.social
I had no idea Brooks Otterlake was here - had been periodically searching the full name for a couple of years now.
izzz.bsky.social B. Otterlake @izzz.bsky.social · Jul 3
Wrote about what's really going on when you talk to an AI assistant
The system prompt defines the character Claude is supposed to play: an intelligent assistant with “depth and wisdom”, possessing its own thoughts and point of view, capable of emotions like interest and enjoyment. It’s told explicitly not to claim that it lacks sentience or subjective experience — rather, to treat the question of its own consciousness as intriguingly unknowable. How does Claude understand, purely on a language level, what any of this means? How does it know what a friendly, possibly-sentient AI is, or how such an entity is supposed to act? Like any LLM, it draws on what exists in its training data. And since an “intelligent assistant” is something which, until very recently, was only a speculative concept, Claude’s behavior — and the behavior of every AI assistant — is constructed largely from what exists in fiction. A chatbot’s system prompt is the invisible beginning of every conversation it has with a user. (The final line of Claude’s prompt is “Claude is now being connected with a person.”) When the user types a question or instruction, the text they enter is appended to the end of the system prompt, and the LLM is then made to generate more words — a few sentences or paragraphs that seem appropriate, on some deep-probabilistic level, as a continuation of the existing text — which are presented to the user as a response. To be totally clear about what’s happening here: the language model is doing next-token prediction on a document whose first several thousand words establish everything that follows as a conversation between a human and a highly advanced artificial mind — a type of mind that doesn’t really exist, but that the model is designed to roleplay. When a person uses Claude or ChatGPT, they’re meant to believe they’re interacting with a helpful AI assistant. What they’re actually doing is collaborating with a language model on writing a work of science fiction about a human talking to an AI.
September 4, 2025 at 7:29 PM
matttkk.bsky.social
Quelle surprise
janellebelle.bsky.social Janel Le Belle @janellebelle.bsky.social · Sep 2
I asked an AI app to make a professional headshot for me as a scientist from a recent photo of myself and it made me a MAN because it assumed that a scientist must be male! 😂😂😂 So now I know what I'd look like as a man anyway 👨🏻‍🔬
Photo in the style of a professional headshot of a man in glasses wearing a lab coat over a button down shirt. It’s supposed to be me but I don’t see the resemblance.
September 2, 2025 at 5:09 AM
matttkk.bsky.social
"Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit."
This cannot be said enough.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
ChatGPT is bullshit - Ethics and Information Technology
Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persist...
link.springer.com
September 1, 2025 at 12:24 AM
matttkk.bsky.social
This delights me for some reason - a comparative anatomical framework for the brains of 26 carnivore species!
parkvillegeek.bsky.social Marc L Seal @parkvillegeek.bsky.social · Aug 22
Comparative neuroimaging of the carnivoran brain: Neocortical sulcal anatomy | bioRxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
August 22, 2025 at 5:06 AM
Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie
ptros.bsky.social
MFer COOKED here
What’s a surprising question that you are asked about your job? People often ask us to justify why we do our work or explain its broader benefit to society. I often retort with: “No one asks an accountant, or someone making money from money, what their greater purpose is.” Yet, someone like me working to conserve frogs is treated as if that’s not a real job. I’m not tired of justifying that what I do is important, because we are saving species from the face of extinction. But I do enjoy making people laugh with that joke, because it’s true.
August 20, 2025 at 6:57 PM
matttkk.bsky.social
Due to a generous invitation from the #ANZLAA (Aus/NZ Lab Animal Association) national conference I got to talk about these ideas to a larger audience, and explore how our ideas about animal minds affect neuroscience researchers who work with animal models. clems.eventsair.com/anzlaa-confe...
August 15, 2025 at 4:44 AM
Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie
psychopharmres.bsky.social
Worldwide! Looking for living experts on substance use to tell us what makes a drug great or something to avoid! head to: tinyurl.com/bettermeasure for info. #drugs #druguse
August 12, 2025 at 11:47 PM