Access to vaccines is not a privilege — it is a human right. In @statnews.com today, Stefan Peterson and I write about using a human rights-based approach to deal with vaccine denialism and the return of measles, whooping cough and diphtheria www.statnews.com/2025/11/12/c...

Great that top Canadian universities are hiring top scholars (why wouldn't they?) but the Ontario Progressive Conservative government has starved the post-secondary sector and the province has the lowest per-student funding of any Canadian province. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/educa...

Get your Covid booster. SARS Cov-2 is relying on ignorance and misinformation to continue to infect and injure and kill. Don’t let it.

Extended fear learning enhances excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission onto amygdala engram cells www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My latest post: "Canada’s Measles Setback Is a Symptom of a Larger Illness" medium.com/@deonandan/c...

Incredibly weak statement from Canada at COP30. It says “effective action starts with detailed planning” and points to this week’s climate competitiveness plan as proof of Canada’s efforts. Weird given that plan has no target, no GHG modelling, dismantles policies policies and calls LNG low carbon.

It’s hard not to feel insulted by the Canadian federal budget’s implication that researchers currently working in Canada aren’t good enough, so they’ll spend a bunch of taxpayer money to bring in “top talent” from elsewhere.

New issue of Nature - with NINE studies on #brain #development from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) 🧠🧪🔬 An amazing set of resources for all scientists working on the brain! 🧠 Immersive feature: www.nature.com/immersive/d4... 🧠 Perspective: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The 🇨🇦 Standing Committee on Science and Research passed a modified resolution this afternoon that the requested ricouncil applicant and reviewer data can be aggregated and anonymized. Thanks to the many researchers who signed letters pointing out legitimate data privacy concerns. 👏👏

Study permit exemption for graduate students...

This feels like a fundamental realignment in Canadian politics. The Conservatives are completing their regression, begun in the 2015 “barbaric cultural practices” election, to their Reform Party roots. The Liberals now resemble not the Mulroney PCs but the Harper Conservatives. And the NDP is MIA.

So Canadian researchers are left fighting over the same ol’ 🍯 but we will attract more international talent w big bucks & no sustainability plan 🤔 #budget2025 3/

It’s insulting to tell 🇨🇦 scientists we need international scientists to run to our rescue & ensure innovation. 🇨🇦 scientists have exceeded expectations with paltry funding. If the gov funded Tricouncil > & sustainably; imagine how innovative we’d already be!! /End

Increasing support to researchers already in Canada by allocating this $1B to tri-council funding and infrastructure would go a VERY long way. Research labs provide training and employment, strengthen innovation, and produce findings that can benefit all Canadians. 2/

Two large studies have been commissioned by the @liberal_party on how to improve and enhance the Canadian research ecosystem, and it is almost as if they were after thoughts deemed irrelevant. Instead #budget2025 seems to focus more on provide tax breaks for industry. 3/

If #Budget2025 is supposed to be one that is "generational," it is a shame that investing in those who are already here and contributing to Canada's future have been completely overlooked. /fin

Those 1000 new researchers will also compete with the rest of us for the same amount of tricouncil funding. So, expect grant success rates to get worse

1 billion dollars for 1000 researchers means 1 million per researcher! Starting assistant professors in the US get 3x that! Imagine what this could have done tri-council success rates instead!

There are very real people who rely on Canada’s global health spending for their daily HIV medications, for contraception, for the midwife that delivers their baby, for food aid that keeps their kids alive It is callous to say we’re cutting lots of this but can’t say where, how much, why or when

A chemical extracted from carrot roots helped pave the way for flat-screen TVs, and six other discoveries that unintentionally changed the world. Perfect talking points for when you need to defend basic science, whether it’s to your grumpy uncle or your MP. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Canada budget update: A $2.7bn cut to international assistance over 5 years, or about 10-12% of the budget. Particularly focusing on global health, which is worrying because it's a core Canadian priority Not sure we need a resurgence of polio on top of everything, but what do I know

Congratulations to Sheena Josselyn @sjo09.bsky.social, contributing editor at @thetransmitter.bsky.social, on winning the 2025 Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize in recognition of her profound impact on memory research. #neuroskyence

The only reason to violate the confidentiality of peer reivew is to undermine it. The only reason to demand this kind of information is to abuse it.

a gross parliamentary overreach — article by @picardonhealth.bsky.social in the globe and mail; #academicsky #neuroskyence #psychscisky www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/91587b9...

When ChatGPT was asked to rate 40,000 résumés, it ranked the older male candidates as better quality than the younger female applicants.

The legitmacy of this depends on extending unearned trust to political actors who have demonstrated an unstated agenda completely orthogonal to "research excellence." It's an overreach of parliamentary authority, and there is no reason to seek personal/confidential information except to abuse it. /7

I encourage you to contact your MP, the Minister of Health, and your institution. This has already been bulldozed through with a 15 day requirement to meet the request. Watching politicians vandalize scientific institutions is distressing enough next door, let's not start here.

If you are a Canadian scientist 🧪 alarmed by the unfair targeting of academics working on research related to EDI in the US ➡️ Turn your attention to our own House of Commons' Standing Committee on Science and Research and consider signing this open letter: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Canadian researchers should be aware the there is a motion before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Research to force Tricouncils to hand over disaggregated peer review data on all applications: Applicant names, profiles, demographics Reviewers names, profiles, comments, and scores

Excited to share the latest from the lab on the molecular mechanisms of silencing and un-silencing a hippocampal engram ensemble. Was fun using a variant of the EPSILON technique developed by Adam Cohen's lab. (1/2) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I think a lot about the chance we had at the start of COVID to finally become a more compassionate, collectivist nation, and how profoundly we were failed not only by the sociopathic greed of the ruling class but by each other. It doesn’t mean we won’t get there, but the lost opportunity haunts me.

Parkland research manager Rebecca Graff-McRae exposes how Alberta’s new COVID-19 vaccine policy undermines the very idea of public health. #AxeTheVaxTax #Ableg #Abpoli www.parklandinstitute.ca/sabotaging_p...

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same. Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

Commentary by @needhibhalla.bsky.social et al. on the recent attacks on DEI in biomedical research. Data show that diversity in the science increases creativity & success in tackling challenging problems. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Finally read the paper and it's worth the buzz. mRNA vaccines saved 20 million lives in a global pandemic and the technology is opening up new avenues for the treatment of deadly cancers. This is really one of the most impactful scientific developments of our time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/8 🚨 💉 AMA WARNS NEW COVID-19 VACCINE POLICY IS A DANGEROUS MISTAKE 💉🚨 The Alberta Medical Association has grave concerns over Alberta's vaccination policy. Fees create a significant barrier to access, risking higher downstream costs from preventable hospitalizations. #AbHealth #Covid19 #ableg

People on twitter are losing their minds over this, including several scientists who I have to assume have either brain poisoned themselves or were always like this. People don't always cite what's best; they cite what they know & researchers from historically excluded communities get the short end.

New paper from the lab 🚨 Led by Ali Golbabaei, this study explores the how the composition of prefrontal cortical engrams changes with memory age: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lzT-3BtfH...

New paper from the lab led by Ali Golbabaei. If you’re interested in systems consolidation, generalization and hippocampal neurogenesis a short 🧵 follows: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lsO73QW8S...

PV-dependent reorganization of prelimbic cortex sub-engrams during systems consolidation www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

But even when we answer questions, we consume way less water per answer.

“Whichever figure you use, the numbers are enormous, rivaling conditions like ADHD and autism as one of the most common chronic diseases in American youth today”

In US adolescents, increasing social media use from ages 9–13 was associated with lower scores on measures of reading, memory, vocabulary, and composite cognition. ja.ma/42B8WCd

Orange Shirt Day is a time to reflect on Canada's continuing violence against Indigenous children. It is a time to remember that Canada still takes Indigenous children from their families. It is time to demand that these crimes stop. Not 150 years from now. Not a decade from now. NOW.

Excited to announce that I'll be moving to the Univ of California Irvine @ucirvine.bsky.social next Spring!🌴 Happily, this is not goodbye to Japan as I'll continue my lab @RIKEN_CBS for some time. Help spread the word: the new UCI lab will be hiring, DM or email ([email protected]) if interested!

Dr. Jane Goodall, 1934-2025 An exceptional scientist, and a singular woman in science #WomeninScience 🐒 www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/o...

Ohio State University scientists engineered a weakened SARS CoV 2 virus as a nasal vaccine that also carries RSV proteins. In hamsters it gave complete protection against both COVID and RSV after one dose. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I know I’ve been posting a lot about this, but it’s telling of how this government looks at society that at the very moment Mark Carney can’t stop talking about nation-building projects, he’s throwing the biggest nationwide service-delivery network on the scrap heap because it doesn’t make money.