Projects
Six directions, in this order. Cellular perception (the perceptome framework and toolkit) is currently the active center. Comparative biology of neural networks and aging research are the two long-running substantive threads. Cognition and social projects, methodological work (including a deliberate negative result), and an AI-collaborative research methodology framework round out the portfolio.
Cellular perception
Treating cellular signaling pathways as a perceptual repertoire. The current center of the portfolio: a framework + toolkit + a growing family of papers.
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44 signaling modules treated as a cell's perceptual repertoire; 9-PC eigenspace from 154 Human Protein Atlas cell types; capacity-floor predictor; validity scorecard with three null controls. Headline empirical result: an 8-cell attractor cluster toward which 11 cancers from 11 organ systems converge during transformation — independently replicated on the Sun et al. 2021 paired HCC cohort.v0.3 public release · Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20113468 · 73/73 tests passing
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157 genes across 14 oscillatory pathways classified by temporal role only. Rise-phase genes map to oncogenes, recovery-phase to tumor suppressors (OR = 27.5, p = 3.6 × 10⁻⁹). Predicted inversions in growth-inhibitory pathways (p53, TGF-β) confirmed.preprint
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Algorithmic extraction of 128 NFLs from 159 KEGG signaling networks. NFL genes show 59-fold CGC enrichment over non-NFL same-pathway genes (p = 9 × 10⁻⁴⁴). Irreversible Authority metric predicts cancer gene fraction with Spearman ρ = 0.83.manuscript in preparation
Comparative biology of neural networks
Applying biological methods (DFE, population genetics, epistasis) to neural networks. Almost-biological experiments on trained transformers — same statistical apparatus that population geneticists use on yeast and flies.
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935 ablation experiments from 161 ML publications. The DFE of architectural modifications matches biological DFEs; architectural diversification follows logistic dynamics with punctuated equilibria; 14 traits independently invented 3–5 times in parallel with biological convergences.preprint on arXiv (2604.10571)
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1,584 ablations × 8 checkpoints × Pythia 410M. The DFE shape evolves from delta-peak-with-outliers to heavy-tailed Student's t (df ≈ 2.3). 39% of eventually-critical heads emerge from noise; only 4% born-critical. L8H9 single-head phase-transition specialization between training steps 4k and 8k.manuscript, submission-ready
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Cross-model pairwise head-ablation interactions: 78% of significant top-30 pairs in Pythia 410M show synthetic-lethal-like ε > 0 in loss space. The epistasis transition co-locates with the DFE crystallization at training steps 512–1,000, rejecting lottery-ticket emergence.in progress, multi-phase
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Biological counterpart to the ML epistasis study above: does the synthetic-lethal/redundancy regime found in Pythia 410M heads have a developmental analog in cell differentiation? Tests the prediction on Schiebinger 2019 reprogramming scRNA-seq, with Norman 2019 perturb-seq as a true-perturbation comparator. Same statistical apparatus across substrates.scaffolding + active pilot calibration
Aging research / biomarkers
Aging signatures across substrates: cardiac conduction, EEG, bulk and single-cell transcriptome. Cross-population replication is the default standard.
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412,730 recordings across three continents (PTB-XL, Chapman-Shaoxing, CODE-15). β is diagnostic of cardiac conduction anatomy: CLBBB vs CRBBB AUC ≈ 0.98 across all three populations. Aging flattens the spectrum; disease steepens it. Honest null on mortality.preprint submitted to bioRxiv
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Three-level variance decomposition on GTEx v8 + Tabula Muris Senis + Calico rat + macaque atlas. Tissue identity is preserved across 40 years of aging; the signature is systemic noise, not selective accumulation. Caloric restriction acts as a noise filter, not a structure restorer.preprint on Zenodo, post-Gudkov-review v4
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Peak-trough asymmetry of EEG oscillations in 215 (LEMON) + 608 (Dortmund Vital Study) adults, with 208-subject 5-year longitudinal follow-up. β-band asymmetry decreases with age; effect exceeds classical alpha slowing. Theta spatial entropy predicts memory independent of age.under review at Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience
Cognition, education, experiments, social projects
Public instruments, cognition studies, and educational / social experiments.
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Russian-language adaptation of the DAT (Olson et al., 2021). 21,159 submissions; Cronbach's α = 0.899; split-half reliability 0.696; no measurable practice effect. Live instrument at mool32.github.io/dat-ru.manuscript ready, live instrument deployed
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Russian-language interactive experiment ("Ты не случаен") in the BrainyBara line of educational / playful experiments. Live at mool32.github.io/you-are-not-random.live
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A 4-player repeated non-cooperative game with incomplete information, stochastic shocks, oil-price dynamics, nuclear-escalation logic, and economic phase transitions. 500 Monte Carlo simulations; approximate Nash equilibrium via best-response dynamics. Built as content / teaching material on game theory, not as a forecast — interpretation discipline named explicitly in the README. Live demo at mool32.github.io/game_theory_models.v5.1, live demo deployed
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Telegram bot delivering short supportive messages four times daily; community-contributed phrases with moderation. Built during a difficult period in Israel ("matsav tov" — "good state" — is the inversion of the wartime-news framing "matsav"). The first public version of an ongoing family of small social-support bots; other variants are kept private for now.deployed, first public version
Methods & cross-substrate work
Cross-substrate bridges and methodological contributions — including a deliberate negative result. Where same apparatus operates across different objects of study, or where the methodology itself is the contribution.
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(Gini, eff_N) framework applied jointly to mouse cell-type compositions (Tabula Muris Senis, Calico CR atlas) and to Pythia-410M head-importance during training. Same quadrant; CR rescues 64% of the Gini drift in rat bone marrow. A substrate-independent compositional signature, narrower than full DFE universality.manuscript in preparation
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Three studies on whether the wisdom of crowds survives consultation of a small set of LLMs. GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini show pairwise error correlation r = 0.78 on 568 Metaculus questions; LLMs inherited human biases rather than introducing novel ones. A methodological observation about collective AI behavior at scale.manuscript in preparation
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18 metrics tested across 5 independent EEG datasets, 126 subjects total. No metric replicates across datasets; the strongest within-subject signal (DERCo wPLI alpha CV) reverses direction on ZuCo. A universal zero-calibration EEG comprehension detector does not exist with current metrics.honest negative result
AI-collaborative research methodology
A framework for doing science in active collaboration with AI — preregistration discipline, sign conventions, locked-vs-working artifacts, AI-friendly publishing — with this portfolio as the worked-example track. First concrete pre-registered study under the framework is now public.
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Canonical document covering project lifecycle (scaffolding → pilot → full run under locked preregistration), sign-convention locks, repository structure conventions, README templates, code discipline, manuscript discipline, AI-friendly publishing (llms.txt, robots.txt, JSON-LD, served BibTeX), and reference exemplars. 17 sections; the epistasis pair (ML side + biology side) is the worked example throughout.v1 live
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Pre-registered retrodictive-calibration pilot: given a paper's abstract stripped of technical content, can an LLM predict its multi-year scientific impact substantially better than citation-velocity baseline? Primary metric: Spearman ρ between LLM score and composite Impact, with a +0.05 margin over baseline required for go/no-go. Pre-registration v1.0 hash-locked 2026-05-01 (SHA-256 in HASH.md); stop condition binary and pre-committed. Pilot 1A: NLP corpus + Opus 4.7 + Pythia 6.9B (contamination control). Stage-gate to Pilot 1B contingent on 1A passing. First concrete artifact applying the framework end-to-end.pre-registration v1.0 locked, Pilot 1A in setup