Happy Mole Day for all who celebrate

The common take on this is "autism diagnosed late is a different disorder bc it has shared genes with depression, PTSD, etc". OR, maybe, if you have autism that doesn't look like the textbook, you get masking-related trauma/anxiety and get misidagnosed! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very weird thing happening here, wondering if anywhere else. Award gets canceled for being on a Bad Topic (vaccines). Reinstated due to lawsuit. Now NIH proposing not to find Y2+, asking us to agree to "bilateral termination". Smells wrong... anyone else seen this?

New paper out! A review of prefrontal mechanisms involved in deep brain stimulation, bringing together our work of the past few years and a foreshadow of where we're going next. Plus some cool rodent stuff! www.jneurosci.org/content/45/3...

I dare you to go to Annunciation School and tell our grieving community, in effect, guns don’t kill kids, antidepressants do. Just shut up. Stop peddling bullshit. You should be fired.

In between the science funding nonsense note this proposal to end student loan forgiveness for anyone whose *organization* is deemed to have done unlawful things. Like, oh, ANY UNIVERSITY WITH A DEI PROGRAM? I can't find the public comment link so hoping someone can. apnews.com/article/stud...

"The freedom to live fearlessly, the opportunity of liberty, and the American dream. That is all Plaintiffs seek. Instead, they are told to atone for their race, leave because of their names, and purify their blood. The Court disagrees. " Mic drop. www.nationaltpsalliance.org/wp-content/u...

I’m hearing a lot of despair and “what’s the point”-ing. Here’s the point: ONE less person kidnapped by ICE. ONE more child vaccinated. ONE grant reinstated. ONE more PEPFAR treatment. ONE more meal to a hungry kid. ONE more person covered by Medicaid. One life is ALWAYS worth resistance.

People with clinical depression have limited options if meds don't work for them. One technology that has long been on the horizon is #deepbrainstimulation. Elie Dolgin did a deep dive on the most cutting-edge versions of these brain implants🧵 spectrum.ieee.org/deep-brain-s...

New paper! (Something went right!) It turns out that if you want to auto-optimize neuromodulation for a low-SNR situation (pain, psych, anything subjective), standard Bayesian optimization breaks. Evan Dastin van Rijn shows how to fix it! iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Very grateful to have had the chance to attend the Science Fair of Cancelled Grants today. As a program officer overseeing health equity research, I’ve heard far too many stories of lost science, lost careers, and lost jobs.

So important! Please contact your Republican senators, especially Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL), and Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA). 🙏 amplify!

The Democrat (former) Speaker of the Minnesota house was murdered today. In her own home. With her husband. By a white man (allegedly) in body armor. But tell me again why "criminal illegal aliens" are the threat to our democracy? www.startribune.com/melissa-hort...

A friend just texted me from LA that this was happening at the park she was at

It is a proven scientific fact that this whole crisis would be solved if the protestors just went over to the San Andreas and jumped up and down in unison. California would break off, float away, and become a sovereign nation. Science, people, science.

This is one of the dumbest things I've seen this week that didn't come from a Trumpist. RDoC was suggested 15 years ago. It takes time to do new science, let alone translate. Also, who says new psychiatric treatments should be drugs? Ever hear of this thing called neuromodulation?

Cool image from www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... . X-axis, economic adversity. Y-axis, 20 years later, propensity of that state towards "D", for personality traits associated with being generally jerkish towards others. You kinda assume that it's high D in red states, low D in blue, but that's wrong!

Major team effort on phase-locked stim of human hippocampal theta rhythms finally out in the wild! W/ @jkragel.bsky.social @alikwidge.bsky.social and a cast of many. Thanks to the BRAIN Initiative for making it possible. rdcu.be/ej7VE

What is the word for when autocorrect gets it wrong again but the word kinda fits so you keep it? Like when my phone chose "divergent direction" over "different", or "over" over "instead" that I tried to type just now, but I liked the style.

People! You're not catching the bright side of this! We finally found a way that Republicans are willing to raise taxes and raise the revenue we need to support social programs! Oh, yeah, sure, it's ultra regressive, whatever, you just are NEVER satisfied, are you?

Trans Day of Visibility should be a day of joy, but it feels somber this year. The onslaught of attacks against trans folks seems endless, so I just want to say this: Trans people deserve respect, freedom, and autonomy. They deserve to live their lives as their true selves without fear.

In Minnesota-specific news, one of the woman-protecting state legislators who introduced the bill promoting "Trump Derangement Syndrome" as a mental illness... was just arrested for soliciting sex from a teenage girl. Why IS this such a pattern? www.startribune.com/justin-eicho...

Courtesy of a 13yo on spring break

For those who do mental health research, an open letter you may wish to sign on to: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

For those who do mental health research, an open letter you may wish to sign on to: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

When my 13yo is seeing this meme before I am, a) I have raised that kid right b) needs more sharing Of course most of us are currently focused on 'please stop breaking the engine of American greatness' but let's not forget they are trying to erase our trans students, kids, and colleagues.

Great letter from my colleagues @sbagen.bsky.social, @mjschlanger.bsky.social and other legal scholars across the country explaining why it is not necessary to start eliminating university programs because Trump

University leaders need to hear a truth of where we are: The very existence of academia is threat to Trump's regime. There is no amount of caution, or silence, or appeasement that will "shield" you. They are coming for the endowments next. The only option left is to fight.

This is important to understand, and anyone with an (R) after them (#mnleg I'm talking to you too) should understand this clearly. Most of the "administrative bloat" that's so often complained of is there specifically because of compliance with laws that fail to prevent serious fraud.

OK, for once, something amidst the doom and gloom! My very awesome First Graduate Student Ever just published her first first-author paper w/ me, on mechanisms of cognitive flexibility! (Of course not her first first-author overall, bc she's awesome like that.) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It occurs to me as an ML engineer that if a list of banned words were to be used to scrutinize proposals for Federal funding, then if everyone used as many as possible, most ML/AI approaches would barf at the low-SNR problem and be unable to find what they were seeking.

Pleased to see that my hospital sent out an all-hands email reminding us that even if ICE shows up, even if they have a warrant, health care spaces are protected and they don't get to interview anyone here, employee, patient, or other. Not the University, but it's a start.

Has anyone had to figure out whether NIH's policy on foreign subcontractors needing to turn over copies of "notebooks and data" also applies to code and other engineering artifacts? I am at odds with a colleague's legal department and evidence of actual guidance would help.

I find it hilarious that these are the top 10 checked out kids' books in my city. And this isn't even counting Captain Underpants. Forget crypto, I wanna buy stock in Dav Pilkey.

A piece that dropped just before the new year -- an argument that the path to closed loop DBS depends on cortical recordings, and a call for manufacturers to make the hardware we need to do those recordings. trebuchet.public.springernature.app/get_content/...

Out today: cross-species improvement of cognitive flexibility www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... The TLDR: remember when we improved human cognition with deep brain stimulation? (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34725508/) Well, now we did it in rats, and it works the same! Specifically... 1/

It is not possible to buy off the internet a Rick Astley ornament that sings when you push a button. I don't understand. Capitalism has failed us all.

Yes hello, there certainly are a lot of you all of a sudden, but it isn't Science Twitter until Bob Greybeard shows up.

Crud like this is why I love being a scientist. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Start from weird question: why do wasps bother your beer, but never bees? Turns out wasps can tolerate the human equivalent of 5L of liquor. The world is better bc this science was done.

Now out: decoding of rat defensive behavior from IL-BLA circuits. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... This got WEIRD. Among other things: - You can't decode freezing from LFP. At all. - Theta and gamma aren't as important as high gamma - Different behaviors encode in totes diff bands.

I often try to explain what I do to my 13yo. Last night, we were discussing writing and I explained how I have to explain complex concepts in exactly 12 pages. "So when you're young, they make you write more, then you get older and they make you do the opposite." Exactly, kid.

My entire lab slides manual in a skeet. Well done.

Both Neurology and Psychiatry are actually certified through the same medical specialty board. It's nice to see my "other half" having to learn about the Goldwater Rule. Welcome to medicalized politics!

So do we really wonder why we can't find people to be grad students/postdocs/staff scientists/professors when it is an open secret that grad school does not actually pay you enough to eat AND expects you to work >40hrs/wk? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Any #neuroskyence folks at #sobp2024 or do I get to claim first use of that hashtag over here?

I have outstanding graduate students.

As a reviewer, I consider this incredibly dumb/annoying. My workload just went up 30+ minutes per grant because now I have to search for responses to critiques. Also, who precisely was harmed by the method of highlighting changes? How does this help anyone? grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

A conference for all the prefrontal obsessed. In this context, we really appreciate that while everyone involved is very goal-directed, they were all flexible, and showed how dynamic they could be in helping to plan this program.

People. This is a holiday now. The world is better. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Cre...

Minnesota xkcd.com/2887