Apropos of nothing, if I was a PI and my lab was publishing papers on the regular where our spike waveforms indicated we were sorting noise and others were finding completely hallucinated references in our published manuscripts, I might take a beat and pause to think about WTF I was doing.

👀 miniMORPH: A Morphometry Pipeline for Low‐Field MRI in Infants onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

This mirrored my experience with a recent paper from my lab that I ran through QED for curiosity’s sake. It basically suggested experiments that would have turned it into a 20-author Cell paper from an HHMI lab, rather than the solid paper in Development that it actually is.

Prenatal circadian rhythm disruption induces sex-specific substance use and mood-related phenotypes in mice https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.22.733807v1

NIH grants have been under political scrutiny since early 2025. But what does the screening process actually look like? What is being flagged? I spent a month digging into leaked docs and emails. We've published the 235-word list that are being flagged by an internal AI tool. And so much more. 🧵

“I have posted many preprints to bioRxiv, but had not really considered that this implies consenting to commercial AI scoring and ranking. There is no opt-out mechanism...Honestly, this makes me a bit less enthusiastic about posting preprints.”

Look at that dinosaur reading and reviewing claims himself rather than asking Claude how good it is, as we all know now proper independent review should be done /s

«The biases do not disappear; they get encoded into the model and then laundered into outputs that feel objective because they are numerical. Replacing one prestige filter with another that is harder to see or challenge is not progress toward equity in science; it’s the opposite. »

“The biases do not disappear; they get encoded into the model and then laundered into outputs that feel objective because they are numerical. “

Reminder: giving an AI the prompt "You are a world expert in X" doesn't make it a world expert. It doesn't give the model additional knowledge or improve its reasoning. All it does is change the *style* of the output, so it sounds like an expert, even when it's wrong.

This is just so wonderful. “Africa had a historic 10 nations qualify for the 2026 World Cup. After Congo's 3-1 victory over Uzbekistan and Algeria's stunning 3-3 draw against Austria on Saturday night, nine are headed to the knockout stage. The previous record was two.” #WorldCup

"This is why LLM AI will not solve cancer or climate change. Those problems require long time horizons, willingness to fail publicly, cooperations across competitors, and subordination of short-term returns to outcomes that may take decades to materialize." www.tomorrowsmess.com/p/the-fox-an...

“Ranking all life science preprints on a single scale simultaneously, across neuroscience, structural biology, bioinformatics, and plant biology, assumes a commensurability that does not exist.”

Thrilled to share that our latest paper investigating how mPFC-LC projectors contribute to sustained #attention is now out in @npp-journal.bsky.social This is so meaningful to me and the team, Its @rehg-j.bsky.social first first-author paper and my first corresponding one. rdcu.be/fqBJp

Great analysis of this situation- tho I have some quibbles with #3: work is always appraised (scored, if you will) by others when we publish- thats not the consent issue. Rather it’s: “The product being built on your unpublished science is a commercial one”. If you don’t consent to that dont use it!

I looked at this but left it out of the post, because the gender inference tool could only classify 44% of first authors and 31% of last authors. But given this caveat, this is the distribution: First authors: 71% male, 29% female Last authors: 83% male, 17% female

I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

The cease fire is not ceasing. Two regimes that believe in “eye for an eye” is a recipe for disaster. History will document that we had detente. Then Trump screwed the whole world.

Note that although the article is US-based the same things happen in Canada. Also many grad students don’t know that if they are on parental leave they no longer receive scholarship $$ and parental supports vary wildly across institutions

Having kids in grad school comes with more costs for women than men. "Citation scores for women who started to have children before the age of 30 were 14% lower than comparable men and 21% less than women who waited until their late 30s to start having children." www.science.org/content/arti...

Slightly surprised that @kordinglab.bsky.social are still printing their simulations out on paper to be honest.

📣 Congratulations to the 2026 Douglas Foundation Student Awards recipients! buff.ly/4OSRVZe 📣 Félicitations aux lauréats et lauréates des Prix étudiants 2026 de la Fondation Douglas! buff.ly/9xUEBt8

More reporting from @maxkozlov.bsky.social on the political screening process that is slowing public investment in science to a crawl www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I am curious about AI and have tested many forms including QED, I continue to be unsurprised so far by its normative outputs. All of this is normal development; it will get better over time. This unsolicited exploitation however must stop.

Amid chaos in US science and geopolitical turmoil, Europe wants to position itself as a research haven — but questions about funding and innovation remain go.nature.com/3Ssl3PL

Found an interesting conference you’d love to attend but aren’t sure how to finance? 🔬 Get up to £1000 towards your travel costs with our international conference travel grant. Deadline 31 July 2026 Apply: neuroendo.org.uk/grants

Exploiting the preprint system that many of us value and cherish, which when used right bring communities together instead of separating them into the 1 vs 99%, is clearly done with an eye for future profit.

to challenge it, to revolutionize it as claimed, then this effort (do we call it an effort when you turn electricity into a one-sided metric that unsurprisingly lacks creativity and any conceptual novelty?) would be directed towards the published literature.

something that has taken so long to build is destroyed in no time mixed with the feeling of being exploited. I won't even talk about how damaging the 1% rhetoric is to science (I mean, just read the room). If the purpose were to find a better alternative to the current publishing system,

I have been thinking since yesterday about why I find the 1% thing so, so disturbing. It's a visceral reaction of 'just no', which goes beyond the general yuck towards the enshittification of/via AI. I have finally put my finger on it: it is the feeling you get when

🧵 Thread with my favourite quotes from: 📝 Guest, O., Suarez, M., Müller, B., et al. (2025). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 1/🧵

I believe the frame that minoritized scholars are helped by unethical tech is a trap to avoid. We better fight the system of inequities ourselves & not buy into industry frames trying to sell their discriminatory, polluting, and exploitative tech as "inclusion". bsky.app/profile/iris...

When you show up for the qualifying exam without even having read the first page of the paper to be discussed…

Excited to see this study from @darshanakapri out in @npp_journal showing norepinephrine regulates mitochondria within hippocampal neurons via a β2-AR–Gs-cAMP–PKA-PGC-1α cascade, suggesting links between NE effects on mitochondria and cognition. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A piece of good news for basic scientists in training!

Periodic reminder that publishing papers is not the goal in and of itself. The paper is a mechanism for sharing what you have learned--sharing processes and outcomes that others should be aware of/should think about too. 1/3

OMB crushing hopes and dreams for scientists just like Ecuador did to Germany today 🇪🇨⚽️ @standupforscience.net @mayor.nyc.gov @aoc.bsky.social @superkash.bsky.social @drjkhokhar.bsky.social

"I have enough money to do research," says Shu, laughing. Meanwhile HHS shut off the NIH grant that funded related work on gene therapy for deafness at Harvard Medical School, because “woke” or something like that Shu trained in the very same lab that HHS defunded

Dopamine projections to the basolateral amygdala enable reward prediction https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.21.733629v1

I just got #CIHR grant results back for an institute specific #ECR call. The success rate was 4.7%. While I appreciate ECR funding opportunities, what is the point at a success rate so low? This should have just been put in to the project grant competition.

It's THAT time of year again: we have begun the search for our next NPP Editorial Intern🤩 The Intern works closely with NPP Principal Editors, Publishers, Special Projects Team & Social Media Editor + gets an invite to ACNP2027 Applications due July 30! More info: pmg.joynadmin.org/documents/10...

Needed some help troubleshooting at the rig today. Our PI, Tom, came dressed for the occasion!

Use of AI for grant applicants: so glad to see that more & more funders are being explicit about if & how. an example (this one has text only, no graphics are allowed)

Women are just as likely to achieve success in negotiations, and importantly, research finds that people prefer to negotiate with women because women foster more trust and better inter-personal relationships www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

"Johns Hopkins University lays off over 100 employees, cites federal funding cuts" #DOGECuts www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

Scoop with @mercohn.bsky.social: Johns Hopkins University is laying off more than 100 employees in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Carey Business School and central administration. Hopkins is suffering "debilitating" decreases in federal research funding www.thebanner.com/education/hi...

Ah yes, because in this day and age, we all have warm and fuzzy feelings about the 1%.

Important finding showing that individualized brain-based location for #rTMS for major #depression can make it more effective than a one-place-fits-all approach based on skull anatomy.

Well worth reading through here for a range of responses to the 1% club. FWIW, I think this kind of ranking is a bad move and the communication in particular has been fairly poor. Though not at all surprised this is the direction qed has taken, sadly.

Science tweeps: If you were refining NIH grant review for the consolidation of IC panels into CSR, would you advocate for R01 review