Giorgio Gilestro

The reason for sleep to exist is still a mystery. "Why do I have to sleep" is not just a question every toddler asks, but, at some point, every curious mind. Many hypotheses have been put forward, some more fundamental than others. In this preprint, I try a different approach doi.org/10.32942/X22...

Nobody has ever proved you are conscious. We concede it, on resemblance and habit. A recent Nature comment by @anilseth.bsky.social, @neddo.bsky.social, and Tononi says AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be. I argue that statement says nothing about machines and a lot about our priors.

I have asked Claude to make a teaser for our open source sleep detection platform, the ethoscope. It delivered, I think.

The fight over what LLMs can't do is a 70-year-old feud between connectionists and symbolists, which started with two gifted teenagers at the same Bronx school. A short history of why that war is fruitless, and some thoughts on the scientists we no longer are. giorgio.gilest.ro/four-seasons...

Personal essay, weekend edition. My relationship with AI is changing. 1.8k words, 8 min reading time. doi.org/10.59350/bh7...

Biology is not safe. What I actually fear the most about biology is the funding squeeze: if on one hand you have AI promising thick and thin, funders will ask themselves is it even ethical to keep funding a small group studying the chemical composition of lizards saliva? (Not a random example!)

Wow. Amazing, prescient vision of the future of academia by @giorgio.gilest.ro You don’t need to agree, but read and consider.

An incredible, eye opening piece

Academia has seen inflation in the past 30 years but it is now entering Republic of Weimar territory, with value of knowledge moving from "paper to land". In all this, Open hardware is an act of armed resistance to Technofeudalism. giorgio.gilest.ro/the-weimar-o...

Writing a manuscript with this new generations of LLMs became an impossible task. I feel that moving away from RLHF towards RLVR increased problem-solving abilities at the cost of conceptual clarity and exposure. LLMs became brilliant engineers who cannot longer comunicate with humans.

We are recruiting!! We are looking for an expert in the metabolic engineering of non model microorganisms to join our team working on plastic waste upcycling. For details please check the link below. www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Here's an idea. Arxiv could peer review the papers and accept only those that pass peer review. Then even get an IF maybe! Insanity all around.

On the Navier-Stokes drama. From this exchange, I find OpenAI to be rather accomodating and I would interpret the "why would you damage your career line" as "by publishing something that is rushed, AI slopped and half baked". The request to drop Alpoge is indeed weird but I can see the complcation.

$3.7 billion spent on APCs in 2025. That's ~1000X more than it costs to run bioRxiv/medRxiv. Worth thinking about as we consider how to fund infrastructure... arxiv.org/pdf/2608.16322

Four claims about Jason Arday spread like wildfire in the days around his death: that he was unqualified, that he plagiarised his thesis, that he was hired as a poster boy, that he lied his way to the top. All four are checkable, so I checked them. giorgio.gilest.ro/four-lies-ar...

“move from preprint to peer-reviewed publication leaves the central claims of most abstracts intact, indicating preprints are a reliable source…papers that were never posted as preprints were retracted at roughly twice the rate of those that were…” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A short, informal intro to Drosophila genetics (with a French accent 🇫🇷): key concepts & techniques for new lab members. www.epfl.ch/labs/lemaitr...

Heading to FENS 2026 and curious about the latest thinking on sleep function(s)? Join us for a networking event exploring sleep across species, with amazing speakers Peter Meerlo (Netherlands), Meg Crofoot (Germany), @giorgio.gilest.ro (UK) More info: fens2026.abstractserver.com/program/#/de...

Applications are now open for the inaugural CAJAL Advanced Neuroscience Training Course on Neurobiology of Sleep 😴🧠!!! 📅 Dates: 19 November – 8 December 2026 ⏳ Application Deadline: 3 July 🔗 Information and application: cajal-training.org/on-site/neur...

Beautiful creative work and a great 🧵 Kudos to all involved in this nice work 🧪

Calling all #Drosophila #NewPI #researchers! A few spots remain for the upcoming JEDI Conference - and you won’t want to miss this! Every attendee gives a talk, making the exchange dynamic, personal, and highly interactive - all at a stunning venue that inspires collaboration and creativity.

Thanks to @tonysouthall.bsky.social for suggesting the feature!

Immense respect for handling this situation with this level of integrity. Mistakes happen. Science is a process.

Submitted my first manuscript to a social sciences journal nearly 3 months ago and it’s still stuck at "Editor Assigned." 🫠 We STEM folks love to complain about turnaround times, but the humanists have unlocked a new level of patience. This is a different league! 📄: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28098/

Well some of us are. Many top neuro journals straight up desk reject model organism papers nowadays. And if you want to get fast, detailed and precise mechanistic answers - some of these are still the best systems.

Very cool! Useful tool for #Drosophila folks. Would be great adopted by whole labs / institutions. Considering it's newness, add features? Tinkering & I don't yet see: 1) Retrospective dating / bulk stock flipping 2) Stock acquisition date 3) Column sort by chromosome 4) Reference usage citation

Happy to announce I've launched a new service for the fly community: flyRoom, a web-based comprehensive stock manager for all your fly pushing needs. Organise all your stocks, maps all your genotypes, plan your crosses, print and scan your labels. Give it a try and let your colleagues know!

Can anyone think of an example of government spend of this magnitude and speed (excluding covid)?? 4 weeks from call announcement to submission (no advance warning) and within that only 2 weeks to flag your intention to submit. £40M total - individual awards £9.4M www.ukri.org/opportunity/...

An example of how useless X has become. 2020 Twitter would have been the place to go to get real time news on the war. Now it's 100% noise. Just old clips repackaged as new and an ocean of conspirationists talking to a crowd of blue checked clueless idiots. Incredible.

Richly perceptive analysis of UKRI’s funding ‘strategy’ by @ersatzben.com raises 2 questions: why do we still not understand how best to manage the interfaces between research & societal needs? And why doesn’t UKRI give Ben a job? open.substack.com/pub/johnsonb...

There were 36 votes between the Green Party and Reform. 36 votes. Reform are absolutely stoppable - and the Green Party can win with our message to lower bills, protect the NHS and rebuild public services. Join.greenparty.org.uk

Labour’s vote is collapsing everywhere. In Peterborough last night, as in Gorton and Denton, voting Green is the only way to stop Reform.

If the PM reckons Jim Ratcliffe should apologise for spreading this exact same lie, should the Home Office apologise too, or? 🤨

A Reuters photographer captured this image of a page from Pam Bondi's "burn book," which she used to counter any questions from Democratic lawmakers during an unhinged hearing today. It looks like the DOJ monitored members of Congress’s searches of the unredacted Epstein files. Just wow.

So now we have it- not only the reduction from 12-13 to 3 grants from each board recommended for funding but the budget for applicant-led research to be reduced from £200 million to £113 million per year. This is appalling, Especially given all that is happening with medical research in the US.

Paywalled but visible to many uni-based people Apparently... Much reduced MRC success rate for grants now in pipeline Reduced MRC future funding for 'applicant-led' research But 'life sciences remain a priority'.... Lot of room for more clarity (and recognition of effects on ECRs)

Interesting discussions on this topic (here and on other socials) made me realise that English provides an interesting peculiarity that other languages do not have. A distinction between intelligent and smart. Q. for skeptics and everyone: would you say that LLMs are smart but not intelligent?