It was great to present at the "Clinical and Scientific Value of Genetics in Child Psychiatry" symposium at #AACAP25 today! Thank you to @jacobvorstman.bsky.social for organizing a wonderful symposium with great talks by @abesterman.bsky.social and Discussant Louise Gallagher! @aacap.bsky.social

Super stoked to share our paper just out in Brain @brain1878.bsky.social LoF variants in DENND2B give rise to an autosomal dominant neurodevelopmental condition characterized by developmental delay, intellectual disability, and episodes of psychosis and/or catatonia. tinyurl.com/4k8hr3bj

#MusicSky #MayTheFourth

Clear and to the point. @ahalladay.bsky.social only needs a mere 5 minutes to address some of the main points of RFKs April 16th conference on #Autism. Worth the listen and please share. www.medpagetoday.com/pediatrics/a...

What scientists do. ‘Dr. Le Pichon initially defended the notions of a static Earth, but he came to realize that they were incorrect. He returned from the laboratory one day and told his wife, “The conclusions of my thesis are false.”’

Xavier Le Pichon, a pioneer in early plate tectonics research died on 22 March. Pichon developed the first global reconstruction of Earth's tectonic plates. eos.org/articles/pod...

Not only an iconic scientist, but also an impressively humane person. This interview reveals some of his thinking about what it is to be human: onbeing.org/programs/xav...

Dr Peter Marks, "Vaccines have been studied very extensively for being potentially associated with autism" "That theory has been debunked" "One study in Denmark, over 600,000 children. It shows that if anything, children had a lower rate of autism than unvaccinated children"

@nytimes.com published a moving obituary of my father in law, who passed away recently. I am forever grateful for his lasting positive impact on my life, and proud of his impressive scientific legacy to the world. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/s...

My dearest father-in-law and precious bon-pappa to our children. He taught me how to be a rigorous scientist to examine life, without reducing life to that what we can examine with science.

🟣 L’Administrateur, l’Assemblée des professeurs et toute la communauté du Collège de France apprennent avec une profonde tristesse le décès de Xavier Le Pichon, professeur émérite du Collège de France, titulaire de la chaire de #Géodynamique (1986-2008).

Half of business owners on this Toronto street estimated that more than 25% of their customers arrived by car. In fact, it was 4%. And the % of customers who who walked or cycled? 72%. Retailers routinely overestimate the # of “car customers.” Via @carltonreid.com www.forbes.com/sites/carlto...

Begum-Ali et al. show that in #neurofibromatosis, changes in visual attention can already be measured during infancy; reporting slower development of endogenous visual foraging and in exogenously-driven saccadic reaction times. Check it out: jneurodevdisorders.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Pretty accurate youtube.com/shorts/N4JwL...

Connecting the Toronto-Quebec City corridor with high speed rail could shave 39 million tonnes of carbon pollution in the coming decades, the equivalent of taking nine million gas powered cars off the road for a year, according to project documents. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/02/20/n...

Reading a classic, I came across this description of our online experience in 2025, which struck me as pretty accurate... (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 1953) What's lost in the process? Time-wasting thought

Correct. If the birthdate field contains corrupt or mismatched data, it defaults to 1875-05-20, which serves as a flag. May 20, 1875, is the day the international standards and metrics treaty was signed. Everything is a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.

“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?" bbc.com/news/article...

Applications until Feb 15th

In 1922, a group of scientists went to the Toronto General Hospital where diabetic children were kept in wards. Most of them were dying from diabetic ketoacidosis. The scientists went from bed to bed and injected the children with a new purified extract: it was called insulin.

This is an important shift - the long awaited new Ensembl web site is ready for beta testing - is smooth, scrollable genome loveliness +clean views of the complex information - but @ensembl.bsky.social needs your help to get all the use cases out. Come to the webinar, and check out beta.ensembl.org

The world has passed “peak child”

Very thoughtful commentary! The idea of polygenic genome editing of human embryos reveals the vast distance between apparently rational and actually unwise.

Open access, timely, and packed with useful information and insight! From Ian Kelleher, child psychiatry innovator and (apparently) collector of hospital affiliations 😂

Just bumping this up for those who may have missed earlier announcements-- we have a new PI position in the Neuroscience & Mental Health program here at SickKids. Neural and glial mechanisms in cognition.

My new year's resolution for 2025 is to persevere with my humble contribution to the daily #Toronto downtown gridlock in hopes that this will be the year that our local policy makers will have their eureka moment; bikelanes don't block traffic, they improve it. @bike.community

I suggest we encourage the anti-vaxx crowd at this point

I like this…..

Fadeev et al. report magnetoencephalography (MEG) findings indicating differences in processing vowel sounds in children with #autism, which may contribute to challenges in understanding speech in background noise. Check it out 👇 jneurodevdisorders.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

@bike.community @thestar.com

Yup

Bookmark for all future grants: Use of Promotional Language in Grant Applications and Grant Success: "the percentage of promotional words was positively associated with the probability of receiving funding (NIH grants: odds ratio, 1.51 [95% CI, 1.10-2.11])." jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Manuscript submission systems are getting out of control

Studying sex differences in the human brain is challenging, but important. Many thanks to @emilysingerneuro.bsky.social & the fab folks @thetransmitter.bsky.social for inviting me to contribute to the evolving conversation on this timely topic ⬇️ 1/n

@abesterman.bsky.social, @shafalijeste.bsky.social et al. describe the Research in Neurogenetics (CARING) Clinic Paper in GiM (tinyurl.com/5byecm8e) & coverage in Neurology Today (tinyurl.com/ycyw7m87) Another step towards precision health care for children with genetic vulnerability for NDDs

note to self: checking the weather forecast may occasionally have its use

Pathogenic variants in CDKL5 cause an X-linked variable neurodevelopmental disorder with seizures, autism and cognitive impairment. Mottolese et al. report in vitro&vivo effects of a ciliary neurotrophic factor-like peptide on neuronal growth. jneurodevdisorders.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

If only there was some way to remove viruses from milk www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcn...

I could not find a "schizophrenia research starter pack" so I made one from the researchers in this area I could find. No need pointing out that it's only a small and incomplete selection, just reach out if you want to be added. 🦋 #schizophrenia #psychosis go.bsky.app/T4ZYSD

So good!! love his play

There's one in every Starter Pack

Eva Loth and team examined orienting to social versus non-social stimuli in children with #Phelan-McDermid, caused by a deleterious variant in #SHANK3, compared to autistic (idiopathic) and neurotypical children. Full paper here: jneurodevdisorders.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

I could not find a "schizophrenia research starter pack" so I made one from the researchers in this area I could find. No need pointing out that it's only a small and incomplete selection, just reach out if you want to be added. 🦋 #schizophrenia #psychosis go.bsky.app/T4ZYSD

I am looking for a starter pack "schizophrenia and psychotic disorders research". Am I right in saying it does not exist yet?

Great position opening at the Hospital for Sick Children Toronto for neuropsychologist interested in a clinician-scientist career in the domain of neurogenetics: www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/40...

🦋 Hello Bluesky 🦋 The Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (JND) is stoked to join this online community! We will be highlighting work published in our open access journal. Please follow, like, comment, and kindly add us to the relevant starter packs jneurodevdisorders.biomedcentral.com/about

Emerson Pugh's quote: “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t” implies a need for humility: "If we accept that the human brain is vastly more complex than our models of it, we may be able to start understanding some of its workings"