🚨Three Chinese astronauts couldn’t return to Earth after space junk hit their spacecraft. Scientists warn this could be just the first of more accidents caused by orbital debris. The situation is concerning. “There are a lot of people up there,” one source told me. My story @sciam.bsky.social 🧪

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

Psychedelics disrupt the link between vascular and neuronal activity, which complicates interpretations of fMRI data. Adopting a more holistic view of what constitutes brain activity may help. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/psychedelics...

in my post-academic era i have become extremely scathing of the way academia considers papers to the primary outcome of intellectual work, and refuses to give credit to academics who write software or build other tooling. in industry we very rarely read your papers; but we always use your software

“Science is never settled” sounds reasonable—but it’s often a rhetorical trick to undermine consensus on issues like vaccines or climate change. Science evolves, but some things are overwhelmingly supported by evidence. My latest for Live Science www.livescience.com/... 1/10

Ouch. AI chatbots fail at accurate news, major study reveals p.dw.com/p/528zp?maca... "...four of the most commonly used AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time..."

Today and tomorrow 11a-3p EST, I'll be live posting this terrific workshop. It's open to all! So register at this link if you'd like to watch too (or follow this 🧵 for the highlights). Agenda: 16 presentations + overviews, discussions, recaps and reviews. www.nationalacademies.org/en/event/451...

mRNA Covid shots may boost the effects of certain cancer treatments, study www.statnews.com/2025/10/19/m... "Patients who got Covid shots before starting cancer immunotherapy lived significantly longer." Prelim & better data needed. But what will Republicans, antivaxxers, et al. do?

🚨 New preprint 🚨 Analyzing the academic trajectories of 78,216 psychology researchers, we demonstrate a persistent gender attrition gap, with women psychologists dropping out of academia at consistently higher rates than men psychologists. Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13273

Happening next week! This is exactly the type of high-level "meeting of the minds" we need to be having more of to advance brain health: scientists, policy makers and individuals with lived experience, talking across disciplines. Workshop open to all (virtual).

This is really nice. But at the same time it is sad that a separate journal for replications is needed. Replications are not a different kind of thing but instead a foundational aspect of normal run of the mill science biz. We should not reinforce the idea that they should be treated differently.

OK so I read through this study, and here are my conclusions: - What a cool tech to examine epigenetic factors so closely! - This is a small study - This only differentiates severe-presenting patients from healthy controls; hasn't been used to diagnose ME/CFS *versus* other inflammatory illness. 🧪

Sometimes even a huge amount of feedback just doesn't make a dent in overconfidence — as demonstrated by this new study involving chess players: www.bps.org.uk/research-dig...

Please spread the word! I am recruiting a PhD student this cycle (Fall 2026 start) to join my team in a new venture: the neuroscience of mood. If you are curious to learn more, this short talk provides a good overview of why, what and how. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjIK...

New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft: Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf... 🧵 1/

Really cool story - bird species from across the world make the same sound to warn against cuckoos, and they can even understand each other. Feeds into ideas Darwin had about the origin of language! www.newscientist.com/article/2498...

The UK Covid Inquiry will be looking at children and young people from today. Watch @SkyNews at 7:30, CVF member Seren will be sharing her experiences ahead of her video to be shown at the inquiry.

It continues to be weird to me that adult CNS neurons have a single, nonmotile cilium just hanging out, maybe acting as a site for receptor expression. Like a little extra antenna that we all just ignore in our drawings of neurons. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

💙💜💗 If you believe in our work, we urgently need your support 💙💜💗 🌬 We have been fighting for #CleanAir since we were founded in 2020. 👪 We want to raise the voices of children facing extreme challenges. 1/2 🙏 PLS RT 🙏

We’re hiring! We’re looking for two RAs to study neuroplasticity in sight loss, sight rescue and development in children and adults @ucl.ac.uk using a wide range of neuroimaging and behavioral methods. Please help spread the word! Apply by 16 Oct! t.ly/q3aYe #neurojobs #NeuroSkyence

If confirmed, this is huge. "Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time... Data shows the disease was slowed by 75% in patients." www.bbc.com/news/article...

UK medicine regulator confirms there is no evidence paracetamol causes autism in children www.gov.uk/government/n...

Some people think ChatGPT has a place writing things like news briefs, stuff written to a specific style and tone and, y'know, kinda boring. So Science did a study. ChatGPT failed. Why? It got stuff wrong. "Also, extensive editing for hyperbole was needed." www.science.org/content/blog...

"Progress in theorising means treating our theories as works in progress in need of continuous improvement, and this sometimes also means having to kill one’s darlings." Martijn van Zomeren and @ayseuskul.bsky.social introduce the ERSP special issue on theorizing in social psychology. #SocialPsyc

Pseudoscience and disinformation often takes root because there is some tangential nugget of legitimacy—but then is wildly conflated and extrapolated. That is the story in the example you posit here.

This decision analytic model, based on plausible assumptions of immune escape and vaccine recommendations, suggests that maintaining universal #COVID19 vaccine recommendations could save more lives than targeting high-risk groups alone. ja.ma/47QhWqp

Any psychologists out there doing research around infantilization - self or otherwise?

This is another wake-up call about what is happening with scientific literature, which is being flooded by template papers produced by paper mills. One example is the use of open-access databases like FAERS or NHANES, combined with analyses that rely on biased or incorrect methodologies.

Thrilled that our new review "Motor Working Memory" is now in press at TiCS! @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social By me + Hanna Hillman We argue that a dedicated research program on 'working memory for movements' is long overdue Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lmMX4sIRv...

📢 Children and Young People Voices report about their pandemic experiences has been released today. We would be interested in hearing your views. There is a chapter on Clinically Vulnerable families. We have included screenshots below... 1/

In this new Commentary in @natclimate.nature.com, I reflect on the recent focus on truth discernment in #misinfo research and argue that this outcome alone may not be beneficial to society if interventions do not improve behaviour and other outcomes because... 1/ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We're going to see a lot of bullshit in the coming days and weeks about "causes of autism", and most will be based on flawed, over-interpreted observational studies (1/n)

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

"we are faced with the reality that humans are responsible for what is researched, how it is researched and what conclusions are drawn from such research."

In this @pnas.org Letter, we respond to a comment on our paper about behavioral interventions to motivate action on climate change. In new analyses exploring individual differences, we find that our leading interventions were effective across the political spectrum. 🧵⤵️ www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Summaries of all of yesterday’s talks. Fascinating throughout

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

Happy to share our new research on UK climate politics 🚨 We found Members of Parliament (MPs) use the language of climate "pragmatism" to avoid rapid change. It risks becoming a new discourse of delay. More detail below and in 🧵 1/ theconversation.com/politicians-...

My new essay for @thetransmitter.bsky.social. Why is understanding emotion so challenging? The debates around what counts as an "emotion" shed insight. These disputes are multidimensional, principled and fascinating. Here, I unpack them. www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

Know a psychology postgraduate with research worth celebrating? Nominate them for the BPS Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research Contributions to Psychology 2025. This award recognises doctoral research that’s made a real contribution to psychology. 👉 www.bps.org.uk/news/applica...

This is absolutely batshit and amazing. I didn’t even know that some ant species have to mate with a different species to produce workers (!!!) but they are literally mating with another species, ripping out their own DNA, and producing a clone of the male they mates with. That is NUTS

⚠️ PsyArXiv is updating its policies in light of a higher volume of low quality submissions and our recent switch to a pre-moderation workflow. Read more about this change here 👉 (buff.ly/8jhqRJu ) and see our updated policies here 👉 (is.gd/paxpolicy ).

Wonderful editorial from our colleagues about why self-promotional language should be avoided in scientific articles.

10 years ago?! Holy smokes.

I think until we start measuring interoception in the wild, close in time to symptoms, we are likely to keep finding this null association. We increasingly think of interoception more as a dynamic, psychophysiological state that is highly subject to contextual manipulation, rather than as a trait.

And I think part of the answer - for the field at large - lies there. Take anhedonia. A patient experiencing acute symptoms cannot get out of bed, come into the lab, and sit for a 45 minute test battery. If we cannot measure the process near to the distress, we likely miss its entire relevance.

Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇

A review just in time for our 59th Wedding Anniversary on 1st September Scenes from a Marriage: How We Found Our Way from Experimental Psychology to Social Neuroscience | Annual Reviews - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...