We are currently 1800 miles apart. But Angela Hewitt and I have recorded this Christmas collaboration. We play Away in a Manger. Wherever you are in the world, wishing you a peaceful day. #Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays 💚 🎨: Holy Family in an Olive Grove, Palestinian Family, and two versions of Mother and Child by Sliman Mansour (b. 1947), a Palestinian artist who uses traditional motif and textile in his works; one of the pioneers of art for liberation movement in Palestine.

We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years www.bbc.com/news/article...

Cardiff couple invited man in for Christmas, he stayed for 45 years

"Socioeconomic status (SES) — not IQ or psychopathology — showed the strongest associations with both resting-state functional connectivity and cortical thickness in the ABCD Study." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I’m excited to share our new Current Biology paper! We use retrograde optogenetics in non-human primate and revealed a visuomotor convergence mechanism in the FEF-SC pathway. www.cell.com/current-biol...

✨🎄 Christmas magic at Galeries Lafayette Paris Haussmann! The grand tree is sparkling with colour and holiday cheer, making this season extra special. Wishing all of you a joyful, merry Christmas filled with love and warmth! 🎅🎁 #GaleriesLafayette #HolidayVibes #MerryChristmas #paris #parisjetaime

Libre Palestina - Zaid Hilal

Reconnecting the vagus nerve to the heart through nerve conduit preserves cardiac function in a minipig model of right cardiac vagotomy www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Heart-brain connection: A new study reveals role of vagus nerve in keeping the heart young www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

We had ondeh ondeh for Christmas eve. It's a dessert one eats all year and about which there's a song too 😋🎶

And so fate would have it that, a few months before his passing, I spoke with him for BFI in the most emotional interview I conducted this year. RIP the great Mohammad Bakri. Palestinian and Arab culture is gonna be significantly poorer without you. www.bfi.org.uk/interviews/q...

I don't know if this is causal, but the association is worth noting.

As war profiteers try to manufacture consent to bomb Venezuela for oil, remember in 2018 Venezuela sent 200,000 struggling American families across 15 freezing states 45 million gallons of free home heating oil. They continued this program from 2005 to 2009.

Flowers in Singapore 🇸🇬

It's about what your brain considers drudgery ... tedium ... boring; not your attention. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Stimulant drugs (Ritalin) wake you up & boost reward anticipation, they don't make you pay attention better. Since they help with ADHD, it begs the question ... is that a misnomer?

This is your brain on Ritalin. Got your attention? Stimulant medications like Ritalin (methylphenidate) do, but not in the way you might think. They don't act directly on the brain’s attention systems! Find out what's really happening in @cellpress.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Happy Birthday NMR. NMR turns 80 today. It’s the gift that keeps on giving because of it’s infinite flexibility. And Happy Birthday baby Jesus as well to those who celebrate.

New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press. This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...

I may be a *little* biased but this 📘 is GREAT! If you ever found language structure interesting, but were turned off by implausible and overly complicated accounts, this book is 4U: a simple and empirically grounded account of the syntax of natural lgs. A must-read for lang researchers+aficionados!

Excellent analysis from @dirkmoses.bsky.social of the implications of Western leaders devaluing Holocaust memory by invoking it to justify another genocide in Gaza: thediasporist.de/is-holocaust...

"first, this campaign does not protect Jews – it endangers them; and second, this redefinition plays into a larger Christian nationalist project."

For the third year in a row, the New Year will pass without celebration — simply because we are from Gaza. Between displacement, tents, cold, we are only trying to survive. Your donation is not a luxury for us; it is a chance to protect my children and give them warmth. chuffed.org/project/a-li...

The stars are converging weirdly and Wagnerianly as 2025 winds down toward an untold future of norm-shattering. Happy holidays to all and @oliviagiovetti.bsky.social @katewagner.wehwalt.net specifically.

It's over, my younger child has been given the best t-shirt. No further t-shirts are necessary

Adam Kampff prioritized spreading knowledge over publishing flashy papers in prestigious journals, but colleagues say his mark on neuroscience was undeniable. The researcher and educator passed away on 9 December. By Lauren Schneider www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

24 Dec 2025 🎄. A loop closing (pun intended). bsky.app/profile/kopp...

All you want for christmas is.... transposon mutagenesis! Our new work at @cultivarium.bsky.social screening lots of transposon vectors in lots of bacteria, from @charliegilbert.bsky.social and team. Transposon and promoter modular parts available on Addgene (pooled library will be there soon too)

Ganjuran, a Catholic Church in Bantul, Yogyakarta, central region of Java, is known for Javanese-influenced designs, such as the Joglo architecture (ornate wooden house), a main shrine resembling ancient temple, wayang figures as angels, and its style of Eucharistic procession. 1/3 #WyrdWednesday

"Judaism began life, and continues to this day, as a protest against empires and imperialism. Imperialism is the attempt to impose my truth, my culture, my way of doing things on you. And that is what Judaism came into the world to protest against. Judaism is God's protest against empires."

If you really want to ‘put the Christ back into Christmas’ make refugees welcome.

academic.oup.com/nar/article/... Latest article from Rebecca Youle in Taylor lab at Crick in collaboration with Chad Swanson and my labs on the enzymatic activity of KHNYN, cofactor for ZAP It is a highly active endoribonuclease with cleavage site preferences and an absolute dependence on manganese

this seems problematic for claims of increased brain activation

fMRI signals “up,” but neural metabolism might be going “down.” In our @natneuro.nature.com paper, we demonstrate that about 40% of voxels with robust BOLD responses exhibit opposite oxygen metabolism, revealing two distinct hemodynamic modes. rdcu.be/eUPO8 funds @erc.europa.eu #neuroskyence 🧵:

In the small Christian Palestinian village of Taybeh, Madees Khoury is busy bottling beers at her family’s microbrewery when I visit. www.irishexaminer.com/news/spotlig...

The Gaza genocide has almost disappeared from the news, even though it's still ongoing. If you live in Europe or the US (and many other places), your govt is complicit. Write about it, post about it, speak about it. Demonstrate, donate, organise. Doing something is better than doing nothing

Glutamate is the primary molecule that neurons use to communicate with each other. Previously, scientists have mostly recorded when neurons fire output signals, but now with a new glutamate indicator, they can record the many inputs that causes cells to fire. 🧵 #neuroskyence

Alternative theories have been proposed: - 'There is no Santa' by Grinch et al. Phys. Rev. NP 001/1965 - 'There are no good children' by Ruprecht et al. Phys. Rev. NP 013/1816 - More speculative ideas… 8/12

What would really be the implications of taking Santa Claus seriously? It's the time of the year to review the current state of the physics of Santa Claus 1/12

New study on axon initial segment plasticity by Chloé Benoit and Dan Ganea. Using a deep brain imaging approach, we find that AIS length changes dynamically during associative learning. Thank you to the wonderful team and collaborators who made this work possible. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Incredibly moving interview with Sydney philosophy professor Peter Slezak, son of Holocaust survivors. “Recognising Palestine was the right thing to do - in fact it was long overdue. How on earth can that be connected to two mass murders who commit an atrocity?”

He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

Our colleague Katherine Wright, who began as an editor for PRL and went on to explore her passion as a great writer for @physicsmagazine.bsky.social, passed away this fall from cancer, far too young. Here is a tribute to her: physics.aps.org/articles/v18...

Hibiscus in Singapore 🇸🇬

My wife's watching some programme about chefs getting Michelin stars and I wasn't very interested until it turned out when you get awarded one the actual Michelin man turns up

How Willie Nelson Sees America On the road with the musician, his band, and his family www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Another end of year review has been released, focusing on a selection of four albums recorded by BBC Philharmonic Orchestra! Our intrepid blogger Kathleen McGowan offers rich insights on these releases here: wophil.org/wpa-2025-in-... #womencomposers #britishwomencomposers #allmusicmatters

Catholic Bishops is Florida want a holiday moratorium on immigration enforcement so people can go to church and celebrate Christmas and New Years.

Remembering a particularly challenging infection my father had -- both for him, and for me. (And featuring drawings by my sister Anne!) #IDSky #Medsky paulsaxmd.substack.com/p/son-as-doc...

Could LRRK2 be a hidden switch in Parkinson’s even beyond genetic forms of the disease? Lang and colleagues describe in a new paper in Movement Disorder that LRRK2 biology may help drive Parkinson’s even in folks who do not carry LRRK2 mutations. @parkinsondotorg.bsky.social