Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

A new "crash clock" says Earth orbit is three days from disaster. If all satellite lost the ability to maneuver (eg in a solar storm), it says collisions would be imminent. Really interesting study this. Story by me in @newscientist.com www.newscientist.com/article/2508...

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

New Paper in @computationalcommunication.org The Telegram COVID-19 Protest Dataset 2020-2022 with the most wonderful co-autohors @buehling.bsky.social & @maxzehring.bsky.social >> 2020-2022 >> 715 channels & 229 public groups >> 5,641,026 messages >> Manually curated >> Open for researchers

🚨 The UK government just published a breakdown of the responses to its consultation on AI & copyright: - 95% of respondents want AI companies to pay for their training data (made up of 88% saying strengthen copyright law, & 7% saying leave it as is) 🧵 1/2

Was on Sky News this morning discussing Flu and whether this was a record bad year or not. Also discussed what we could do and the importance of vaccines, ventilation and wearing a mask if you're ill. youtu.be/_PZiU3R7jac

A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the release of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” and the advent of the late-2000s electro-pop era, which both appeared around the same year, 2008.

Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you can guess where this is going... though it does have a bit of a twist. I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let's dig into the findings. 🧵

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

Look, LLM use in academia isn't just students. You need to be speaking clearly with your collaborators about your writing standards from the beginning. Make people say out loud that they don't write their own articles anymore.

Sorry but I'm pretty sure that mind-altering 'brain weapons' are STILL only science fiction www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

70 teaspoons placed in tearooms around the institute & observed weekly over 5 months. 80% of spoons disappeared; spoon halflife~81 days. Communal room halflife lower than in specific labs. 250 spoons annually required to maintain 70 spoon population. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

What are the fastest-growing areas in neuroscience? Survey respondents pointed to computational neuroscience, systems neuroscience, neuroimmunology and neuroimaging, among other subfields. www.thetransmitter.org/neuroscience... #neuroskyence #StateOfNeuroscience

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

Experimental participants to us

🚨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)