Bluesky needs polls: 🔘 agree 🔘 disagree 🔘 show me the results

“Too often people go to university to ‘explore research and knowledge’.” - business secretary, Peter Kyle. What do they want knowledge for? Heaven forbid that students go to university to learn something!

UK guts public spending, wrecks research training, exits largest economic bloc on Earth, adds red tape to talent-based visas, wonders why it can't recruit "top AI talent" to help cut even more costs: on.ft.com/3Kl9tBJ AI ‘hit squad’ set up to drive Whitehall efficiency struggles to hire top talent

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025... Harvard Funding Cuts Endanger the Massive Fruit Fly Database That Powers Genetic Research

Brain chauvinists: here's the signalling, control and computation that really matters most of the time :) Congratulations Ginny - this is not only a technical tour de force, it brings systems neuro to the rest of the body.

BBC coverage of Reform is becoming increasingly problematic. And goes beyond the usual white noise. Continuous soft balling is not balance, it is a fundamental abdication of duty. Farage's tax issues, cranks given platforms at their conference, climate change denial. All need coverage. Most haven't.

Clinical statistical meta analysis making the same grade school statistical error that the original studies make? What do we call this? Meta effect size effect size inflation?

We're going to see a lot of bullshit in the coming days and weeks about "causes of autism", and most will be based on flawed, over-interpreted observational studies (1/n)

Yes, the media should ask these questions. They don't. They can't. They lack the training and work inside rigid rules about how to capture attention and storytell. They have mantras for "what the public understands" that don't include science or data. Politics runs on media, hence our world today.

The Reform UK conference gives a standing ovation to "special guest" Lucy Connolly, who pled guilty to stirring up racial hatred after she called for asylum hotels to be set on fire with people inside them.

Why is it difficult to accept that our awareness of having made a decision can only follow in the wake of our decision-making apparatus having done its job? And that the same order of events must therefore hold for any coherent thought?

Having lied to congress earlier in the week, Farage flew back to the U.K. to lie to his party conference. Populists don’t like having to deal with reality and truth. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/univers...

UK academics, be aware that what's happening to universities in the US is coming to us in a few years, in the (unfortunately quite likely) event that Reform wins. Labour needs to get it's act together and give people a reason to vote for them.

Yes, yes, yes. This is coming. It caught voters in the US by surprise. The same will happen in the UK. Once we dismantle institutions base decisions on evidence and reason, we lock in a culture of authority, ideology and oppression. History shows this lasts generations, or until society collapses.

Extinction Rebellion using tried and tested Brazilian Jiu Jitsu technique.

We all know that correlation doesn't imply causation. So we took some correlations and tested if they were causal. Here's what happened: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

I love this! It reminds me of Maurice Sendak’s best ever fan mail:

Brain as a computer arguments in shambles. Brain as toilet arguments reign.

Finding correlates of the same signal in different brain areas is not evidence against specialisation, it is evidence for interconnection. When I flush my toilet, the level in the tank and the flow rate in the supply pipe become perfectly correlated. Yet these toilet areas have distinct functions.

Feedback is everywhere in biology. This insightful review shows how feedback is central to evolution and ecology. A big challenge is that every subfield invents its own name for feedback, some pretend it isn't there, and some (especially in neuro) believe that dealing with it is intractable.

Feels like UK is just one term behind the US: Trump 1 = Boris/Truss/Sunak Biden = Starmer's Labour Trump 2 = you know who...

Wearing a t-shirt is now terrorism in the UK

BREAKING: Award-winning Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty has been arrested after wearing a T-shirt reading 'Genocide in Palestine, time to take action' Police arrested the I, Daniel Blake writer in Edinburgh this morning

Is this really the dominant view in science?

Happy 10th to @nwb.org! 🎉 Amazing to see how open data has brought the neurophysiology community together — here’s to even more discoveries ahead.

ML researchers rediscover the internal model principle:

My cartoon in this weeks @newyorker.com

I had to do it

Worms deserve a little more credit I feel...

Now *this* is impact. UKRI should have a column.

In other swearing news, j made @vizcomic.bsky.social again. These occasional appearances are by far my proudest achievements.

Oooh! Now that's a cool result. Look forward to reading this.

A much-needed joint effort from five labs to see which behavioral effects of psilocybin in mice are reliable, and which may be spurious 🐁🍄 @theborislab.bsky.social @mazenkheirbek.bsky.social @indigenerd.bsky.social Vikaas Sohal and Stephan Lammel 👏 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Francis Crick called it “impossible” in 1979. Now it’s real. A 1 mm cube of mouse brain, 200k cells, 500M synapses, all mapped alongside neuronal activity. This new MICrONS dataset maps brain structure and function in a way that we've never seen🧪 🔗 www.microns-explorer.org 📄 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

I just can't remember the story of Charles Darwin writing On the origin of species being that he sliced it into 40 papers while supervising four PhD students, answering 70 emails and attending 4 Microsoft Teams meetings a day while completing an e-Learning course about fire safety in the background

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Does anyone have any good news?

Interested in graduate studies in science? Was your admission to a US program just rescinded? Well, Canada is now offering doctoral scholarships to qualified foreign students www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/NewsDetail-D...

Who is more replaceable, the Machine Learner or the Domain Expert? Asking on behalf of grad students everywhere.

Some flesh on the bones of the case against IIT

Even in the 'good' days, students/PDs on visas were always worried that they would run afoul of the law and be asked to leave. I know - I was on a student visa myself. I can't even begin to imagine their fear and anxiety now. Time for all university leaders to collectively step up and speak out!!

Hi friends, If you haven't seen it already, I was part of a mess this week — about science in the United States, and about NIH research aimed at understanding things like Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, autism, and depression. 🧪 Thread with some details. 🧠📈 🧠🤖 1/10

As Trump Goes After Universities, Students Are Now on the Chopping Block. Gift link: nyti.ms/4bzcAzB

It is the *pretence* of asking questions that is the problem, and the noise that it generates. Follow any of these questions honestly in any depth and you get to the right answer. Enlightenment thinking is based on this. The iconoclasts are turning this on its head. Don't fall into that trap!

The Scottish have won the AI Wars.

It took only one working lifetime of stability and prosperity for a generation of spoiled, entitled blow hards to entrench their power by wrecking the very institutions that nurtured their rise, pretending to do so in the name of those who missed out and who will never have the same opportunities.

This is good precisely because it is saying obvious things - because they are things that much of the (especially US) media seems to have found unfathomably hard to say. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/o...

The UK press says scientists shouldn't portray themselves the way the UK press portrays them.