Anastasia Christakou 💙
@christakou.bsky.social
Professor of Neuroscience 👩🎓 own views 🐙 anastasia.christakou.org https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4267-3436 children's welfare | science | 🧠 brains & their people
Evidence-based policy builds lasting change and political legacy. London is fortunate for its leadership.
Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan@london.gov.uk · 3w agoThis stopped me in my tracks. An independent study by @qmul.bsky.social has found that after ULEZ was introduced, children’s lungs grew faster in Central London and have now caught up with children outside of the capital. Incredible.
For all the green highlighting and the love hearts I leave in the margins, in reality, I am an uncharitable note-taker.
😮 Furiously revising my mental model of functional anatomy. What even is the brain... www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A non-canonical cholinergic pathway from the dorsal tail of the striatum to the auditory cortex - Nature Communications
Canonical models suggest that striatal communication to the cortex is indirect. Here, the authors identify a direct cholinergic pathway from the striatum to cortex, where striatal neurons directly exc...
nature.com
Hard agree, this is utterly joyful. Nick Cage is a treasure and I would watch him watching paint dry.
Joel Morris@gralefrit.bsky.social · 4w agoScouring the shelves for an extended-family-uniting film to watch last night, we randomly chose An Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and I’d like to share the discovery that this is never the wrong choice.
The obvious upshot of recent improvements in LLMs is that things we always knew were easy (theoretical physics, Fields-level mathematics, engineering and computer programming) are, in fact, easy, while the things we knew were hard (writing 8000 words on one sentence from David Lewis) remain hard
New Oxford Centre for Women’s Mental Health established www.psych.ox.ac.uk/news/new-oxf... "Funded by the Oxford Medical Sciences Division’s Strategic Research Fund, it will be led by a new Professor of Women’s Mental Health, the first post of its kind at Oxford" 👏
New Oxford Centre for Women’s Mental Health established
The University of Oxford is set to launch a new research centre dedicated to women’s mental health, bringing together expertise from medical and biological sciences with humanities for the first time.
psych.ox.ac.uk
To the surprise of no-one who considered the issue for more than a few minutes, "Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well’ modelling study predicts". The use of "less refined", a charitable euphemism lifting mountains in this context... 🤔 www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well’, modelling study predicts
Research suggests that the combination of incentives to publish and the use of large language models will lead to more papers, but they will be less refined.
nature.com
Another nail in the coffin of fetishisation of large data. I applaud the careful work that goes into this, but averaging physiological detail that in fact fluctuates at multiple timescales, all relevant to thought & behaviour, was never yielding insight. www.thetransmitter.org/sex-differen...
Brain’s sex differences are subtle and contradictory, large MRI study finds
Sex-based behavioral differences do not match with variations in brain activation or structure in a study of almost 1,000 people.
thetransmitter.org
Wilson seems to review a dismal literary adaptation rather than a blockbuster epic in @lrb.co.uk. I agree Nolan's dialogue-driven character development is poor, but she misreads the Trojan Horse sequence & Sinon's willing sacrifice - a smart cinematic device in my view. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Man
As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Christopher Nolan has read at least the first line of my...
lrb.co.uk
Kakistocracy in full swing. The lack of understanding is absolute. The damage inflicted on what was once a US super-power, its scientific ecosystem, is going to take decades to restore.
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · last mo.1. The new Trump / Kratsios plan for US science appears explicitly designed to destroy US universities. Diverting money to tech donors is probably just a bonus. Gift link.
Must be a nerve-wracking moment for Andy Burnham, waiting to meet his sovereign and kiss paws.
"The creation of robust human-curated scientific literature has never been more crucial." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive
There’s a saying in the management world, popularized by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the 1990s, that the goal of technological improvements is to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Alt...
science.org
Neuroscientist Brenda Milner turns an incredible 108 years old today! In the 1950s she uncovered the role the hippocampus plays in consolidating memories, and in the 1970s she published her seminal studies of speech lateralization. Wishing her all the best today! tinyurl.com/3am8syhf #WomenInSTEM
Building a Kingdom in the Brain’s Unfashionable District: Brenda Milner’s Century of Neuropsychology
There are scales and metrics you use to evaluate the lives of most neuropsychologists, and then there are those you have to invent in order to speak with any degree of justice about people like Brenda...
tinyurl.com
really thinking about this tweet as i’ve been struggling to breathe through nausea for the last 5 hours
Luke LeBrun@lukelebrun.ca · 2mo agoThese images of First Nations community members evacuating Collins, Ontario on motorboats are absolutely surreal www.facebook.com/reel/1548244...
Within-participants designs need 2-8x fewer participants than between-participants designs for the same level of precision. Ch 9 of Experimentology argues for making within your default. 🧵 experimentology.io
With respect, editors must consider whether their 'expert' on the future of science is in fact a practising scientist. Trawling data for regression coefficients, irrespective of the field of application, is applied computer science, i.e. engineering. Science and engineering are different things.
The hero we need. Only the English have the balls for this 🏴
Count Binface@countbinface.bsky.social · 2mo agoOn my way, Clacton.
#Wikipedia UNDER ATTACK At least 10 editors have been imprisoned. A Saudi pediatrician got 14 years behind bars after editing pages about govt surveillance & a women’s rights activist. Belarus sent one to a penal colony for editing a post about murdered journalists. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/b...
Wikipedia Is Battling for the Soul of the Internet
nytimes.com
In case you are similarly afflicted, someone sent me this recording of the best @radiohead.bsky.social gig (yes, better than Glasto'97), so now your weekend can start early too: archive.org/details/Radi...
Radiohead Live - 2003-05-25 Shepherd's Bush Empire, London, England [Video] : Radiohead : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Broadcast two weeks later on a Sunday night - the day before the new record Hail to the Thief came out - 45 minutes of Radiohead performing a London gig to...
archive.org
"we cannot agree that false things are true" 🔥 #NetZero
Dr Charlie Gardner@charliejgardner.bsky.social · 2mo agoToday's the day! The heat has relented and Reform finally have their chance to persuade King's Lynn and West Norfolk' Council to turn their back on climate action I'll be live-tweeting from the debate
Paging @diovicen.bsky.social 🎸
Leverhulme Trust@leverhulme.ac.uk · 2mo agoWith Black Sabbath Celebration Week starting on 2 July, here is an article that John Goodridge and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow @adambridgen.bsky.social have produced www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/stories/blac... And check out their book: uolpress.co.uk/book/british...
