This is only true for people who understand neither science nor economics. The NIH budget for this year is FIFTY times larger than OpenAI’s $1B pledge. The foundation of US science & innovation is public funding. The private sector cannot replace it. US science is being killed

New preprint with Chris Nolan and Kelly Garner in which we develop a new metric - transition entropy - that can be used to measure the extent to which behaviour in cognitive tasks is based on a routine. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

While many psychologists have been trained to develop multi-item multi-dimensional scales, there is a place for very brief, even single-item, measures of psychological constructs, particularly if the aim is to have one's work embraced by policymakers and other stakeholders. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

🚨New preprint alert🚨 Does hunger affect your decisions beyond food? We tested whether being hungry affects attention & choice across food, intertemporal and social domains. Spoiler: the effects of hunger state on attention and choice are more limited than you might think🧵👇

Although reward signals are believed to capture attention in an inflexible and automatic fashion, in this preprint we demonstrate through three experiments and some computational modelling that verbal instructions can trigger model-based revaluation processes. osf.io/preprints/ps...

“‘What Oligarchy Looks Like’: AI Giants Pledge to Pump $100 Million Into 2026 Midterms *** The goal of the PAC is to elect a Congress that will prohibit individual states from passing their own AI regulations.” 2/11/26 … 1/ www.commondreams.org/news/ai-supe...

good morning, #linguistics 🐦🐦 pals the University of Essex wants to cut 50% of our Language & Linguistics department, close our foundation programme & our Southend campus, + cut 400 jobs academic departments and professional services jobs across all depts join us in the fight against these cuts!

Just out today, the keto diet showed a (modest) benefit in treatment resistant depression, when compared to a pretty reasonable control! jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Marina Hyde being brilliant

Nice thread

1/8 🧵 Breaking: Groundbreaking study drops in Psychedelics! Psilocybin's effects on social behavior & inflammation in female mice modeling anorexia nervosa? TOTALLY context-dependent on metabolism & exercise. Explains why only ~40% respond in human trials. Implications for personalized therapy!

Large language models can accurately score people’s Big 5 personality traits on the basis of their brief, open-ended narratives. LLM ratings converged with self-reports and predicted daily behaviour & mental health www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The race is on to re-home 120 ex-commercial laying hens in Didcot before February 8th. The British Hen Welfare Trust is appealing for would-be kind hearted chicken keepers to come forward by 4pm Friday and give the hens a chance at a free range retirement.

“Doctors won’t tell you this, but you don’t need medication for a tapeworm—all you need is the natural power of friction,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said as he dropped to the floor, lifted his legs high, and dragged his ass along the White House carpet during a press conference.

What diet are patients with T2D more likely to choose when looking to lose weight? First author Alexis Care (University of Staffordshire + RehabCare) + team, found preferences for continuous vs intermittent low-energy diets, low-carb & simple diet approaches: doi.org/10.1111/jhn....

Do goal-directed actions minimize prediction error? Together with @haslagter.bsky.social and @fahrenfort.bsky.social I identified falsifiable predictions of active inference and reviewed the extent to which they are supported by empirical results. Read the preprint here: tinyurl.com/2by8k3h6

1. The thing about science that these jokers don't understand is that science cannot be vibe-coded. Whatever its flaws, the point with vibe coding is that you're trying to quickly make something that sorta works, where you can immediately sorta see if it sorta works and then sorta use it.

wake up babe, new effect size metric just dropped

Lesion network mapping method, used to identify disease-specific brain networks, produces a nearly identical network map for any given condition, according to a new study www.thetransmitter.org/brain-imagin... via @drrickadams.bsky.social

Fantastic talk! I learned so much

I'm looking to hire a postgraduate research associate in Computational Psychiatry for my new lab at Yale. Please see link below for details & help RT 🙏 postdocs.yale.edu/posts/2026-0...

#postdoc #cogpsych #neurojobs #psychologyjobs #visionscience #cogsci

Just to clarify: once again, this study has only an observational design and reverse causality or third variables are perfectly possible. We simply don't know if social media "harmed" any participant

PSA: With recent spikes in the news, I decided to get tested for my immunity to measles. Results came back saying I had none. If you got your vaccination back in the 1970s like me, you might want to check too.

A new publication in JEP: LMC in collaboration with Brett Hayes, Yanjun Liu, Won Jae Lee, Jaimie Lee and Ben Newell (UNSW Cognition Group). It's all about the link between attention and beliefs in forming "learning traps" psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

You are someone who does quantitative #metascience? Want to do this as a #professor? With a research-focused, tenure-track position in Germany? At a great institute with a super smart and fun team? This one is for you! 🤗

How long should it take to retract a paper with incontrovertible signs of data fabrication? Sleuths think 2 months is too long, particularly when clinical risks are involved. deevybee.blogspot.com/2026/01/an-o... #retraction #stemcells #cardiology @erictopol.bsky.social

Despite the heralded anti-inflammatory actions of statins, simvastatin had no effect on recurrences of acute or acute on chronic flares of #pancreatitis gut.bmj.com/content/earl...

Back at work today. Sunk 3.5 hrs so far into a review of a not-very-good-3-experiments-long paper for a low impact journal. Why do i do this to myself?

A major part of our future health & prosperity lies in medical research. There are billions of available dollars that can be used for vital medical science. Please join the campaign for our government to act urgently to fully disperse these funds: aamri.org.au/mrff/ www.theage.com.au/politics/fed...

babe wake up, they're doing insider trading on war crimes

It’s 1990, I’m 1 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state It’s 2004, I’m 15 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state It’s 2026, I’m 37 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state

We're hiring! Senior position in the learning sciences. "We seek a scholar whose research has focused on the development & application of learning technologies to achieve just & equitable educational learning opportunities, teaching practices, policies, & systems." careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

🚀 Deadline for this is this Sunday! 🏃‍♀️

2026 will bring waves of innovation to GLP-1 medicines from mechanisms to modalities to molecules delivery systems and new indications. #weightloss #obesity A glimpse of the.future here www.nature.com/articles/s41...

OpenWMData has over 30 tagged datasets already, with Klaus Oberauer (forever setting an example for our field) and leading the way with five datasets so far! I wonder if anyone can top that and claim they are truly making their data findable and reusable...

Happy 2026 everyone! Here's a nice write up of our recent work published in Neuropsychopharmacology, on the balance of habits and goal-directed actions in compulsive disorders: lnkd.in/g84fYnD5

The current situation of NIH science is a tragedy. So much was lost in 2025. Many of us are struggling to keep afloat. I only hope that in 2026 more people wake up to the fact that USA science has been deeply damaged. We are resilient, but we are in grave danger of losing ourselves./end

A new community-driven lab handbook for reducing conflict and creating more positive and equitable work environments gets strong support from a survey of 200 researchers. buff.ly/K7CGFLV

New Alabama Law Requires Women To Leave Semen On Lower Back For 9 Months https://theonion.com/new-alabama-law-requires-women-to-leave-semen-on-lower-back-for-9-months/

Postdoctoral fellowship available in structure guided drug discovery in @RothLabUNC Please RT

Postdoctoral research position in #ComputationalPsychiatry and #EEG as part of relmed.ac.uk trial testing reinforcement learning as biomarker for antidepressant treatment response. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... @uclbrainscience.bsky.social @mikebrowning.bsky.social @relmed.bsky.social

This is shocking news. Emma Johnston was an incredible leader, who has inspired many in academia, she'll be sorely missed

Sad to hear that Emma Johnston (@unimelb.bsky.social vice-chancellor) has unexpectedly passed away. I don't have much experience with her, but this quote shared from Kristen Pammer (our Head of School) describes a sustainable "leading from the edges" leadership we need more of at our universities.

Challenge: one random act of kindness every day for the rest of 2025. Can be anything. Hold the door, help someone cross the street, give up your seat on the bus, compliment a stranger, donate to your fave charity, give an extra big tip. Because KINDNESS RULES. 🔥🔥🔥 Welcome to 2026, my friends 🫶🏼♥️✨

I don't think it changes much : 'neural activation was different between the two groups' is a common conclusion of fMRI research and that will still be true, it will be as inconclusive as it ever was

Universities embracing generative AI be like:

“Sure you’re grocery prices are higher and you cannot afford healthcare under Trump/Vance, but at least you don’t have to apologize for being white under our racist regime!” - JD Vance at Turning Point

We’re recruiting a new Lecturer at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social 🎓 Birkbeck offers a collegial, research-intensive environment, with consistently strong performance in the REF. If you’re an early-career researcher looking for a positive change, then Birkbeck could be the right place for you.

Broken. Not broken. Today’s Sunday Age cartoon