Pure science on blue sky (chchatham dot bsky dot social). On X, pushback on the redshift
NYC metro area
Joined May 2011
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Chris Chatham retweeted
Sad news - Barbara did amazing work…
Barbara Finlay, who died on 12 September, championed the idea that developmental constraints dictate how evolution sculpts brains, which she used to model the timing of hundreds of events and align them across mammalian species.
By @callimcflurry
thetransmitter.org/evolution…
Chris Chatham retweeted
The Unbearable Blurriness of Autism
psychiatrymargins.com/p/the-…
Chris Chatham retweeted
Neural networks are already symbolic
LLMs run on vectors, not symbols. A preprint led by Yale’s Tom McCoy (@RTomMcCoy) with CDS Assoc. Prof. @tallinzen found those vectors closely approximate symbolic structure in language, arithmetic, logic, and code.
arxiv.org/abs/2608.29530
news.yale.edu/2026/10/08/how…
Chris Chatham retweeted
Rogue state.
Incredible scoop by my @WSJ colleagues: Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration. wsj.com/world/ukraine-starli…
I’ve met this team, they may well have the real thing.
Great hope for the horizon of biological science thanks to tech like this
Chris Chatham retweeted
Meet Courtney and her son, Luke 💙
Stories like Courtney’s remind us who this research is for, and why it’s so urgent. We’re so grateful that she shared her story with us.
At CureSHANK, one of our goals is to uplift and share the stories of families affected by Phelan-McDermid syndrome. As we accelerate life-transforming therapies for PMS, we will ensure the family voice is connected to that research.
Thank you, Courtney, for sharing your family’s story. Together, we’re building the path to treatments for a better future for Luke and every person living with PMS.
Are you a PMS parent or caregiver? We invite you to share your story with us! All it takes is 5-10 minutes to help shape the future of PMS research.
🔗 Click here to get started: storyprompt.com/reply/XkAW4f…
Raising awareness is important every day, but especially on PMS Awareness Day this coming Thursday. Join us by sharing your story, amplifying PMS-related content, and more on October 22nd!
@pmsshank3mama
#PhelanMcDermidSyndrome #PMSAwarenessDay #CaregiverStories #PMSResearch #RareDiseaseResearch
Chris Chatham retweeted
This work is not getting enough attention. These are pretty massive leaps in modeling splicing. Very excited about this. Need to do a deep read but the performance on diverse splicing related tasks looks really good.
#SpliceAI2 splice variant effect benchmarks. Considerably improved performance in 9 evaluations spanning cryptic splicing, sQTLs, MPRAs, population genetics, plasma proteins, and rare disease. 🧬✂️🧵
Chris Chatham retweeted
The brain can stop an automatic habit by "scrambling" the pattern of activity rather than by simply turning it down.
Orbitofrontal value dynamics and striatal population geometry during interruption of automatic behavior
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
#neuroscience
Chris Chatham retweeted
Trump's America, ladies and gentlemen. Reminder that this was the preferred candidate of half of the people in charge of silicon valley, and now they won't even let people building interesting tech come to SF to raise money.
finally landed on SF, but we might need to go back to Brazil :(
long story short, I was really tired from the trip, hospital and the migraines, and I wasn't at all prepared for all these questions. the immigration agent didn't love my English pronunciation nor my story, asked tons of questions and decided to revoke our visas, giving us 2 weeks to go back
this is kinda devastating to HOC because we had so many meetings lined up and even some soft commitments. also we had already paid for it all... but yeah, my bad, next time I'll be prepared. I think I'll just refund HOC, reschedule the conversations to calls, and use the time here to focus on the health checks?
there may still be ways to recourse though, I've spawned a fleet of agents to investigate my options
on a brighter note I'm finally home, safe, no migraines, and the food here is amazing. everything seems so high quality. although I'm concerned about the french fries, are you sure you're not confusing salt with sugar? I'm not complaining, it tastes amazing, but that cannot be healthy?
Chris Chatham retweeted
"Braak stage was not associated with H&Y at death, disease duration, age at death, or brain weight in autopsy-proven #Parkinsons patients. These findings provide evidence that path. α-syn–based staging does not represent a model of clinical progression"
neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WN…
Chris Chatham retweeted
Who could have predicted that a new treatment in psychiatry overpromised and underdelivered?
Some were telling me that withholding SAINT TMS was unethical. While I am a fan of short and time-limited interventions, we should learn to moderate our enthusiasm.
SAINT (SNT) TMS once promised outsized recovery rates for refractory depression, but two new trials from independent centers bring it back to earth:
psych-partners.com/a-setback…
Thanks for the find @RecoveryDoctor
Chris Chatham retweeted
If any mathmos feel like defecting to biology, we still got plenty of work to do here and we could benefit from your skills
OpenAI is downplaying this for PR reasons. If you’re a mathematician, you must feel like a nuclear bomb hit, and you’re at ground zero.
Reasoning models are two years-old. In that time they went from incapable of basic arithmetic to solving problems humans couldn’t solve for decades.
Math is only the beginning. AI will revolutionize the entirety of the human scientific endeavor. Most of us don’t appreciate what that means.
What a time to be alive!
Chris Chatham retweeted
This is a thoughtful benchmark that they put together and I'm impressed. They really tried to mimic authentic biopharma tasks.
Biopharma Bench V0.1: a benchmark for AI agents on drug and device development work (CMC, quality, regulatory, clinical ops), not drug discovery.
9 frontier systems, 71 real assignments across 12 companies reconstructed from real product histories. The best system (GPT-6 Astra) fully completed 8 of 71; five systems completed none.
Full runs from showcase available at: eval.raycaster.ai/benchmarks…
Chris Chatham retweeted
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Yann LeCun: we are not going to get human-level intelligence or AGI by just scaling LLMs.
“There’s absolutely no way in hell.”
“The idea that we’re gonna have a country of geniuses in a data center, that’s complete BS.”
“It may feel like you have a PhD sitting next to you.”
“But it’s not a PhD.”
“It’s a system with gigantic memory and retrieval ability, not one that can invent solutions to new problems.”
Chris Chatham retweeted
the ceo's of europe's biggest drug companies signed a letter describing the EU's dire path when it comes to drug innovation:
novartis.com/news/europe-los…
Chris Chatham retweeted
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued a 10-page memo signaling a retreat from its traditional role of giving grants to individual researchers to pursue their best ideas and to train the next generation of scientists.
Instead, the memo makes clear, NSF will devote the bulk of its resources to addressing the research priorities of President Donald Trump and his administration, many of them technology focused. scim.ag/4ipE1kY
The cost of poor measurement is nowhere higher (in time or money) than in clinical trials.
Every tech VC wants to believe that drug discovery is now a function of compute. They think if we throw enough H100s at the problem, tokenize enough dead sequences, and scale virtual cells, biology will be 'solved'.
They are wrong.
Drug discovery is not a function of compute. It is a function of measurement.