There are very few internationally competitive industries that the UK still possesses. Education is one of them. Successive governments have blocked access to worldwide demand for UK university education by slamming potential students with visa restrictions and costs. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Speaking of prosthetic limbs, check this wild one out - no electronics or computers, but impressively useful!

It's an open question whether de-growth is feasible and whether it could avert environmental catastrophe. It could rescue humanity or condemn us to poverty and social unrest. We just don't know. The UK's (UKRI) response: de-fund research into it www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

Something deeply troubling & shocking is happening at Exeter University*, where a mass cull of staff is planned, even though it's in surplus. No good justifications given. @jamesgdyke.info provides the details: www.technosphere.earth/the-bonfire-... *Disclosure: I have a Visiting Fellowship here. +🧵

Some data to back up creeping suspicion: Gift article: Students are doing worse than you think economist.com/internationa...

nationalist governments are gradually strangling exchange of ideas and talent. The UK began this in earnest by financially penalising foreign researchers and students, and by imposing export control on a laundry list of tech research. The result always seems to be meek compliance. This is all done

Wonderful story about my mom, Avis Cohen, in @thetransmitter.bsky.social, by @sarahthau.bsky.social, who put in serious work to do this so well:

What is interesting about psychology is that they did the whole replication crisis one time before in the 1970s. It is so similar to the 2010 one, you would not be able to tell if a paper on the replication crisis was published in 1972 or 2012. See rips-irsp.com/articles/10....

NIH, NASA place limits on foreign co-authors. @science.org

This is why cities need trees. Hard surfaces and parked cars can reach extreme temperatures, while shaded grass and tree-covered areas stay dramatically cooler. This is the urban heat island effect in one image: hard surfaces absorb and radiate heat, while vegetation and shade reduce it.

I wouldn't even have a PhD much less an academic career if it were not for the public scholarship, the guidance & the friendship of Prof. Francesca Stavrakopoulou, but she's bafflingly at risk of redundancy because of cuts at @exeter.ac.uk. The world needs her work now more than ever.

A new tool lets researchers probe brain circuit function without requiring some kind of external stimulation as in optogenetics and chemogenetics. #neuroskyence By Simon Makin www.thetransmitter.org/synapses/des...

For my Bluesky friends, here is a summary of the Twitter war between medical doctors and tech bros over the Midjourney ultrasound vaporware.

Very interesting paper finds that when South Korea suspended its “low-skilled” guest worker program, the result was not a rise in wages for native Koreans doing those jobs, it was the opposite; current employees got reassigned to those jobs and took pay cuts and firms went under.

Episode #42 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On neuronal identity and representational drift – with Timothy O'Leary @timothyoleary.bsky.social theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn42 How do neural and network functions stay the same while things change on the molecular and circuit levels?

7/ The takeaway: if you only model the variables you built the task around, you may miss what steers behavior and what the circuit normally does Sometimes "nuisance" variables *are* the behavior. E.g. history-dependent "lapses" only look irrational in artificial worlds where nothing changes!

Cervical cancer deaths fall to zero in young women given vaccine. 🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

BHL is featured in @theguardian.com's Age of Extinction series. The article highlights the extraordinary value of BHL and the urgent need to ensure it remains free and open into the future. Please read and share: www.theguardian.com/environment/... 🧪 🌎 📖 🔗 🐟 💚

"Claude, generate a RNN that reproduces all measurements so we can put it in Fig 8 please" This could go either way.... depends on whether we actually read and absorb results or continue treating them as badges.

Is neuroscience a quantitative discipline? I don't think so, partly because it is so disparate, partly due to culture and background of researchers. This is a delicate moment as it coincides with the rise of AI. A rush to leapfrog reasoning and treat models as explanations could move us backwards.

"Charles Darwin looked back on his early repugnance for mathematics ... ‘I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics; for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense’" link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I know we’re all on board with this but I’ve had a good morning of writing and writing is thinking, kids, don’t offload this to AI. I’ve drafted a bunch of text that I’m pretty sure I’m going to delete and replace tomorrow but I know what I’ll replace it with *because* I spent the time writing it

also see: Editors trying to find you to review a manuscript.

Campbell, 1988, explaining why he disliked working in Chicago and almost considered leaving academia (which would have been a huge loss) due to the highly competitive environment and the idea you should write only brilliant papers.

a cell that can't sense can't survive

Meanwhile, not one of the groups so far known to have been orchestrating the violence in Belfast and Southampton has been banned as a terrorist organisation.

Question for in-vivo physiologists: which is worse for neural circuit function - random loss of a few spikes or random gain of a few spikes? Intuitions as well as hard data/facts welcome!

One of the things that perplexes me most about human memory is how we can recall distant events with sustained effort. Sometimes it can take minutes, hours or several days of dwelling on episodes in the past before a vivid memory appears that was manifestly there all along. We don't seem to have

Thursday PSA: What's the first experimental observation of excitation inhibition balance? Probably (very likely) the (somewhat understated) (& undercited) Moore 1998 JNeurophys paper, Figure 7/ 8, in wich they casually observe E/I interactions, no drama. journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Even if they don't dismiss the evidence of its existence, a big chunk of neuroscientists don't seem to get a key question that representational drift raises. The whole point is that responses reconfigure *without* loosing representational fidelity. This means *of necessity* that any geometric/

Here's the cheat code for generating impact from your academic journal publication:

Losing one side of Superior Colliculus is bad, but losing both sides seems fine. Wait, what? Flora & team discovered why: both sides press for contra actions and against inaction, obeying an incredibly simple additive rule. Out today in bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

For thirty years of my career studying this, I considered the #AMOC tipping risk serious but low probability. Why I've changed my mind. ⬇️ youtu.be/Cg0N9MWw9Vk?...

This afternoon's reflection on AI and the dying internet.

Incredibly disturbing story broken by @medpagetoday.com team. www.medpagetoday.com/special-repo...

Excellent and thought-provoking essay by Ted Chiang. [gift link] www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

Neuroscientists reach divergent conclusions after analysing the same data. Is this surprising? Would be nice to know how specific the analysis questions and conclusions were, as it isn't obvious there is a serious problem here.

Important advance commented in @nature.com reporting the first successful application of base editing approaches to human embryos. Both impressive and potentially worrysome. Study is not yet peer-reviewed, nor published, but deposited in @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...

What are your plans for the weekend? :

The sweeping new regulations proposed by OMB would subject *every federal research funding decision* to political review. Peer review has never been formally binding, but this proposal would drastically expand the power of political appointees to *override* expert assessments of scientific merit 1/4

Question about social norms and animals: in countries besides the UK, is it seen as acceptable to let your dog to bound up to a toddler and lick his or her face, or eat her sandwich, and then declare "oh don't worry my dog is very friendly" as the child ingests ass germs and develops cynophobia?

Scarcity is supposed to be a shitty business model

This is also tied to our intuitions about free will: we feel like decisions are "free", because after the fact we can ponder plausible alternatives. We confuse the *hypothesis* that we could have acted otherwise with a powerful *sensation* that this is the case. The painful fact: it isn't the case.

I think this question goes to the heart of what conscious experience is. There is certainly a real-time, "in the moment" aspect, but it seems dominated by the reflective, after-the-fact component, the story we tell ourselves about how it felt, not how it feels. This confounds a lot of accounts of C.

Declaration for AI use in mathematics: Some thoughts.... 1. This turning point could in fact be a healthy wake up call for research and math in particular. There's a sense among some that research is all about the results and the certainty around mathematical proof. This is misguided:

This is an education and cultural issue and will take >1 generation to solve. To begin fixing it we need to stop treating teaching and grade school education as a menial job. Teachers should be paid the same as doctors. Can't have one without the other.

Norther Spain ancient forest 🌳 in spring.