The NIH's MYF policy in 2025 resulted in 4000 fewer grants and fellowships that touched every area of biology and medicine; continuing it in 2026 would be disastrous for science, technology and health in the United States 🧪 www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

arxiv.org/abs/2601.11432 I want to share an astonishing result. LLMs can "translate" Jabberwocky' texts like 'He dwushed a ghanc zawk” & even and even 'In the BLANK BLANK, BLANK BLANK has BLANK over any BLANK BLANK’s BLANK' This has profound consequence for thinking about.. 1/2

Someone please show him a non-mercator map.

I think we’re nearing the end of civilization

Moving forward 🇺🇸. “When asked if the president would sign the bill, the White House directed NBC News to a statement earlier this month from the White House Office of Management and Budget. The statement said that the administration supported the bill.” 🧪🏠 NO MAJOR CUTS

Maybe the real "free inquiry" university was the one we had all along

This is the height of pathetic loserdom

"He said he saw guards choking Lunas Campos and heard Lunas Campos repeatedly saying, 'No puedo respirar' — Spanish for 'I can’t breathe'..." www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

New paper in @elife.bsky.social led by Tianhe! Motor errors shape everyday actions—from spilling milk to missing a hold while climbing. Why are some errors systematic? We show motor biases arise from misalignment between visual and proprioceptive reference frames. tinyurl.com/t7h786m5

What should be the responsibility of a functional federal government is instead falling on academics and nonprofits. And they are heroically rising to the challenge. 🙏 www.eenews.net/articles/all...

So, if I'm reading this right: 4 prosecutors at the Dept of Justice Civil Rights division quit because the Trump-appointed leadership won't investigate Good's killer, and 6 from the Minnesota US Attorney's office quit when they were told instead to investigate her widow. (HT @benjaminkabak.com)

As a statistical educator, it had not occurred to me that I need to caution students against regressing a variable on a function of itself. My naivete is unbounded. The Peri & Sparber paper (linked below) looks really good! It has synthetic data analyses and everything.

Breaking News: The EPA will stop considering lives saved when setting pollution limits and instead calculate only the cost to businesses.

semi-regular reminder that ICE was only created in 2003 when you are asked to imagine a world without ICE, you're basically being asked to remember where you were when Lilo & Stitch came out

NEW: It appears billionaire Bill Ackman has donated $10k to a GoFundMe for Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Renee Good. Ackman has reposted the fundraiser but hasn’t posted about his own donation.

“IT WAS MURDER” Several hundred people have formed a human banner at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach today (Sat Jan 10, 2026) 👏👏 (📸 Erik Castro)

www.thenation.com/article/acti... Hit them where it hurts them - boycotts can work

Thousands here now. Absolutely enormous crowd. People are chanting, "ICE out! Fuck ICE!" Organizers are taking the street but it's a slow process because there is SO much ice (the water kind). People helping each other up left and right after slipping.

What solidarity looks like. This is the most American thing that I will ever be proud of. Downtown Minneapolis 1/7/2026

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

The implication is severe: careless responding on MTurk isn’t rare noise; it’s systematic enough to flip the sign of relationships and generate results that are the opposite of what they really are. Wow; this is pretty damning. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

@kim.senate.gov @hassan.senate.gov @kaine.senate.gov @peters.senate.gov @fetterman.senate.gov @shaheen.senate.gov @slotkin.senate.gov all voted to confirm her

Minneapolis.

1. New #measles numbers out from #CDC. Confirmed cases for 2025 stand at 2,144, the highest single year count since 1991. A decision was taken in 1989 to make measles vaccination a 2-dose regimen; after it was implemented, it & high vaccination rates brought measles to very low levels. Not now.

a project I really like, now officially out! "Shape Guides Visual Pretense" by Qian and me paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... I'll walk through a quick version here To get a sense of it, first consider: Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

amazing how the entire machine can pivot within 24 hours. no need to slowly upsell the argument; just issue new marching orders

🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!🚨 The 'Design Features' of Language Revisited (w/ @mperlman.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social Koen de Reus & @limorraviv.bsky.social) Feature Review out now in #OpenAccess in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! #language #linguistics Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

ExxonMobil and Chevron are about to bestow Donald Trump with a Peace Prize momentarily.

looks like someone is about to win the “fell for it again” award

Whether it’s Barack Obama being the editor of Harvard Law Review or Donald Trump narrowly passing a cognitive test used to detect dementia, there’s plenty of serious intellectual accomplishments on both sides of the aisle.

During one interview, the student admitted that she merely looked at the topic and then rushed together a response based on her personal feelings regarding a tangential issue that was the main thesis of the assigned article, because she was in a hurry to go see a play that evening with her friend.

On delayed application review, the NIH grant terminations lawsuit appears to be headed for a settlement. Both plaintiffs and defendants have submitted a joint document outlining their agreement. Judge Young must sign off on it before it takes effect. Here's what it says and what all this means 🧵

The science breakthrough of 2025 is Solar Energy, not because it is new but because of how successful its deployment has been. This year renewable energy surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide. Hopeful sign for what’s to come. www.science.org/content/arti...

New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press. This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...

A must-read review. It argues that brain areas are only one of several organizing principles and are not especially central, given their weak correspondence to function. Cytoarchitecture and connectivity are a starting point, not the endpoint. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A

Four-byline alert: 🚨 @nytimes.com #DOGE @fahrenthold.bsky.social @sangerkatz.bsky.social @emmbadger.bsky.social @aliciaparlap.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...

Imagine interviewing a victim of torture and independently confirming the details of his torture and then being told you can’t broadcast it because the people who ordered the torture wouldn’t give their side of the story.

Oliver Sacks was a hero of mine. I couldn't let @rachelaviv.bsky.social’s brilliant piece pass without comment. My latest, on why Sacks's fictions are so much worse than those of your garden-variety journalist fabulist. . open.substack.com/pub/mariakon...

This has been made available, so for purposes of commenting on Bari Weiss's decision to spike the story, here's a live-post of that segment. It begins with a "you may recall" summary of the deportation to el Salvador. Describes the admin's claim that it could deport the men without due process

This is also the Jay Bhattacharya and Vinay Prasad story. While many scientists and doctors today do feel responsibility to their profession and to the public, some self-promoter contrarians who worship power have been elevated to the upper echelons of science. 1/

Imagine trying to explain this to someone in the future "There were these people who talked about free speech in prestigious publications all the time and they promoted the career of a woman who turned CBS into state media."

I knew that FIRE and Reason and the rest of the “free speech” bros were spineless reactionary centrists. But they have been even more reluctant to criticize Trump’s war on the free press than I would have guessed.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

"Ellison is currently making a hostile bid to ... acquire the media behemoth Warner Bros. Discovery. ... the president has used recent episodes of 60 Minutes to suggest he is displeased with Mr. Ellison’s stewardship of CBS." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...