1 New paper from my former PhD student Raffaela Lesch's lab used a citizen science database to show that urban racoons, who are rapidly becoming less afraid of humans, also have shorter snouts than wild-type rural racoons.
Link: rdcu.be/eRcpT

Tired of posting about my much-derided brain painting for the Phil Trans cover... here's a watercolor painting I did last year of my father in law. Paint on paper: No ChatGPT was used, just an old black-and-white photo:

My art is not "AI slop"
I am very proud of this artwork, based on my own watercolors and drawings. It IS scientifically accurate, based directly on the work of the great comparative neuroanatomist Glenn Northcutt (and inspired by Georg Striedter's wonderful book). ChatGPT did the styling only...

My art is not "AI slop"
I am very proud of the artwork on the cover of our recent Phil Trans issue on consciousness. It was the product of 10+ hours of hard artistic work on my part, drawing, painting, and interacting with ChatGPT to try to get something in the style of an old Victorian engraving.

The goal was a scientifically accurate but aesthetically appealing cover, capturing the fundamentally conservative nature of the vertebrate brain over millions of years of evolution. The brains by themselves weren't enough, so I decided little figures of the animals to clarify this message.

I am very proud of the artwork on the cover of our recent Phil Trans issue on consciousness. It is based on watercolor paintings and ink drawings on paper I did myself, based on published diagrams by recognized experts on comparative brain anatomy (detailed in the caption which it seems no one read)

My art is not "AI slop"
I'd been thinking about joining Bluesky for a while, but it's ironic that I finally joined NOT to combat right-wing propaganda or AI-generated nonsense, but to defend myself and my own artwork which has been widely labelled, and derided, as "AI slop" on this platform...