I can't describe how bad Minneapolis feels right now. My neighbors are pulling kids out of school. The public schools are offering remote learning until 2/12. We are having conversations in our alleys about how to protect ourselves. It feels like a military occupation with a blockade.

WSJ investigation: In the past 6 months ICE agents have fired at vehicles 13 times, leading to: * 8 people shot * 5 of which were U.S. citizens * 2 died * no victims drew a weapon The playbook: Agents box in a vehicle, block attempts to flee, then fire www.wsj.com/us-news/vide...

The sound of underground When scientists put sound sensors into the ground, they couldn’t believe their ears. Life in the soil was thought to be silent, but it is anything but. Soil bioacoustics offers new ways to study life underground: buff.ly/VBePQCT

I talked to @latif.bsky.social at @radiolab.bsky.social about brain organoids for their new episode. Listen here: radiolab.org/podcast/brai...

New #research alert! #ScientificReports has a new paper exploring how sparse an #EEG can be while still decoding the #brain. The study shows reliable neural decoding with as few as 16 electrodes, even for complex, natural images: https://go.nature.com/4snqzk2 #neuroscience #neurotech

Best TikTok thing going is the two dudes trying food from every country without leaving NYC. If you haven’t seen them yet, it’s incredible. My favorite so far is last week’s. Legit got me emotional.

House passes minibus bill to fund science agencies www.politico.com/news/2026/01... headed to Senate next

Sea anemones and jellyfish don’t have brains, but the way their neurons behave during sleep shows some surprising similarities to humans

The data shows BlueSky is a great replacement for science-Twitter! There’s no need to stay on the bad place (which is getting worse by the day).

The U.S. Congress has delivered another rebuke of President Donald Trump’s plans to slash this year’s budgets of several science agencies. https://scim.ag/49G7Zwe

“We wanted to improve the removal of noise from fMRI data. Other work had attempted to do this before…using generative AI we were able to improve by more than 200% over previous methods." Denoising fMRI data with contrastive autoencoders Nature Methods www.nature.com/articles/s41...

They're going to invade Greenland, blow up NATO, and alienate all of our allies. bbc.com/news/article...

Astrocytes put the brakes on brain plasticity in mice by secreting the protein CCN1 to stabilize existing circuitry, a Nature study shows. By Holly Barker #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/astrocytes/a...

“the new organizational chart contains the clearest evidence yet that the Trump administration has seized control of an agency that has historically been mostly free of White House interference.”

What can the Brain Knowledge Platform do for you? 🧠📈 Join us on Jan. 14, 11am-12pm PT for a webinar on the new features and data in world's most comprehensive brain cell atlas. 🔗 https://alleninstitute-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Le5E4CXGSA2clMJ2VesyBw#/registration

New preprint. We show that in addition to reward prediction errors (RPEs), dorsal striatal dopamine signals encode sensory prediction errors (SPEs), the difference between sensory prior & observed stimulus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Flocean, a Norwegian company, is set to open the world’s first commercial-scale subsea desalination plant, an approach that could cut the cost and energy used to make seawater drinkable

An analysis of ongoing trials suggests that mRNA cancer vaccines have the potential to deliver health benefits worth $75 billion each year in the US alone

We just submitted for publication 📝 our work on neonatal sensory prediction (83 premature neonates 👶🧠, tactile ERPs ✋⚡📈) that took many years of labor 💪 and hope 🥹 ! If you are asked to review it, please say yes 😁 or let me know of any thought on the preprint ⤵️ Thank you 🙏💛 arxiv.org/abs/2512.23301

𝗦𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 If we leave aside the more extreme discussions about "everything everywhere" and modularity this is a very cool paper. So much can be done with data from 260 regions and 60K neurons. doi.org/10.1101/2025... #neuroskyence

Cancer research costs too much but we have the money to run Venezuela

a level of realpolitik here: the United States is unlikely to face serious international consequences for being lunatics acting with impunity, in large part because we are lunatics acting with impunity at the end of the day this is going to be up to us to solve, domestically

Excited to share new work from our lab showing, for the first time, a link between breathing dysregulation, stress responses, and energy metabolism via a neuropeptide receptor mechanism. This opens new ways of understanding #brainbody interactions! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

So nothing they just said in that press holds any water, they are just winging it

Chairman JCOS: “Months of planning…” soooo not an imminent threat justifying self-defense

There's too much to read in the world to bother with arxiv drafts, but Gill Pratt on FB ( @gillpratt here?) just (re)posted arxiv.org/abs/2512.24497 so it might be important. ( @yann-lecun.bsky.social is an author, too.)

So for months they have tried to blame the entire fentanyl crisis on Venezuela and the indictment only mentions cocaine, which they pardoned a different guy for weeks ago

🤔 I'm old enough to remember a few hours ago when this was supposedly about drugs.

If the US plans to put Maduro on trial, the US says its courts can try other country's presidents for crimes, but not their own.

With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins. go.nature.com/49fOOrP

🧪More good news on science advances in 2025: 1. A small clinical trial harnessing gene therapy caused a 75% decline in Huntington's disease progression. 2. The ozone layer may be healing. Scientists at MIT & Cal Tech confirmed this retrospectively. 3. We are close to removing forever chemicals.

Really beautiful + elegant study: theory, psychophysics, and careful behavioral modeling lead to super clean dissection of #EEG topographies during perceptual decision making. Crazy variance makes sense when you have the framework and predictors to explain it! elifesciences.org/articles/108...

The world must boycott the World Cup and the Olympics. It is both the only moral choice and will actually get the attention of these dead-eyed clout demons.

After this, the EU should absolutely proceed on the assumption that Trump meant what he said about Greenland. Nothing is off the table anymore.

hey remember when a bunch of middle-aged drunk korean lawmakers climbed the locked gates to the national assembly to hold an emergency session after the president gave illegal orders to the military, all of which ended with said president being sentenced to prison

Researchers in the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network have unveiled their next endeavor: comprehensive and multimodal cell-type atlases of the developing human, mouse, and non-human primate brains. Check out the work from the @alleninstitute.org and their colleagues: https://go.nature.com/4hT3yRj

In Dumfries, Jamaica, beekeepers lost many of their hives after Hurricane Melissa. Without bees, crops suffer—and so do the farmers and families who depend on them. WCK stepped in with sugar and equipment to help feed surviving bees and support local beekeepers as they rebuild. #ChefsForJamaica

From a study that upended astrocyte research to one that reignited the field of spiking neural networks, experts weighed in on the papers that significantly shaped how they think and approach neuroscience. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/this-paper-c...

Seeing 2025 out the door with a 5AM NYE hike above Los Angeles

There are so many classrooms on Donors Choose that still have ZERO donations. If you want to get some charitable giving done before the end of 2025, this is the perfect way to do it!! Let’s help some kids!!!! I curated a list of classrooms in need here 👇 www.donorschoose.org/taylorlorenz

News and views article on SASS-fMRI from Nature methods. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“It's not the kind of grant review you're thinking of, and I don't know if it's good or not” Another Josh Fessel banger trying to sort out the continuing changes in the rules of the game at NIH substack.com/home/post/p-... Cc @jeremymberg.bsky.social

“In November, around 200 faculty members joined a Zoom call held by the Council of UC Faculty Associations, lamenting what they see as an increasingly centralized and isolated leadership that has refused to join in their fight against the administration.”

While much of machine learning is retrospective (learn the past distribution) learning in biology is prospective (learn for the future) - here we discuss some implications for neuroscience (with @tdverstynen.bsky.social, Josh Vogelstein, Pratik Chaudhari): www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Well now, would you look at that? A massive, 4-YEAR-LONG study of NEARLY 30 MILLION people in France found that individuals who received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine had a 74% LOWER risk of death from severe COVID-19 compared to unvaccinated individuals and ZERO increased risk of all-cause mortality.

Type-1 diabetes, IBD, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, coeliac disease and lupus are all caused by the body attacking itself. But new therapies that reset the immune system could offer lasting help