"The act of prediction is more than just an objective, educated guess about the future: it’s often an exercise of power that can help bend the future toward a desired outcome." New from me, on the book "Prophecy" by @carissaveliz.bsky.social - buttondown.com/creativegood...

Big Tech predicts the future, to our detriment

When I was young graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, I came across this quote from computer scientist Alan Kay: The best way to predict the future is to...

buttondown.com

Grateful and honoured to have joined the Cam-CAN team later in the study and to have helped write this up. Real shout-out and credit to the many people who have designed, run, and cared for the Cam-CAN study over the past 15 years!

Cam-CAN@camcan-2010.bsky.social · 2w ago

Protocol paper for Phases 4-5 of CamCAN below (many thanks to @inadem.bsky.social). We hope to have data organised to share on CamCAN website by end of the year!

New protocol paper (https://doi.org/10.37349/en.2026.1006138) describing Phases 4-5 of the Cam-CAN study of healthy ageing, led by Ina Demetriou Includes MRI and MEG data up to 14 years after baseline. Data available soon on https://cam-can.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/dataset/

I think we just passed oops.

Does signed prediction error influence declarative memory? This recent study takes a closer look - replicating prior findings, but uncovering an alternative explanation along the way! Doi.org/10.3758/s13421-026-01864-8

APA no longer shows me the actual paper, authors, abstract etc when I click on a paper in a search engine. Everything gated now, including basic paper info. Screenshots: (1) search hit (2) resulting APA site. Tried for a few papers now. What on Earth.

I checked this too. *20 seconds* of Reform logo display. *No other* party logo displayed. In local election purdah. This is not normal. At all.

Alex Andreou@sturdyalex.bsky.social · 4mo ago

OMFG I had to go and check that this ACTUALLY happened. Since when does the BBC ever do chyrons with a political party's branding, rather than their own? Not to mention this is during a pre-election campaign purdah. (h/t @iainsol.bsky.social)

Given ChatGPT recommended this person should walk to the car wash to get his car washed it is hardly surprising to hear that it isn’t great at recommending when people should go to the hospital

Carl Zimmer@carlzimmer.com · 5mo ago

Study finds ChatGPT Health did not recommend a hospital visit when medically necessary in more than half of cases. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

I am so proud of the team that made the @brainhelpdesk.bsky.social and that continues to work very hard to answer all these fun #brain #questions!

BrainHelpDesk@brainhelpdesk.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Out now in Brain Structure and function: a practical guide for researchers interested in creating similar 'helpdesks'. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New preprint by @inadem.bsky.social dissociating cortical thickness and surface area in their effects on cognitive change in ageing: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

David Lammy: "... because Cyprus is part of NATO" erm, Cyprus is not a member of NATO. Maybe its just a slip of the tongue? Except he repeats the claim just a minute later "... Cyprus is a NATO country" Does the deputy PM not know that Cyprus isn't a member of a NATO?

“Thousands of Cypriots are living there. British personnel are coming and going according to the duration of their terms but Cypriots are there. And if you want to safeguard British interest, 5% of the population are British. So how could you differentiate whom you protect and where in the island?”

Cyprus: 'We don't want to be dragged into this conflict'

Cyprus' High Commissioner to the UK, Kyriakos Kouros, has told Sky News that Cyprus wants "coordination" with the British government so that they do not "take decisions that affect our lives".

news.sky.com

Do novel experiences shortly before or after learning improve memory for what was learned? They don’t according to Raza et al., but simply resting might. Read about novel VR experiences versus wakeful rest as ways to improve memory: https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218251346156

Over the years, I have written a few Jupyter/Rmd/Matlab notebooks that attempt to teach some statistical concepts, particularly in neuroimaging. You can find them here: www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/rik.h..., though I will say a bit more about each one in a number of posts over next few days.

Congratulations to MRC CBU’s PhD student Annalise Whines, who won the runner-up prize at the MRC Max Perutz Science Communication Awards in the video category. ‘Does motivation change across the menstrual cycle?’ https://www.ukri.org/publications/mrc-max-perutz-science-writing-award-2025/

Girls just want to have fun but make it Donna Strickland way

Nobel Prize on Instagram: "Throwback to 2018 when physics laureate Donna Strickland started her banquet speech by talking about Cyndi Lauper's song 'Girls Just Want To Have Fun'. Strickland told us ...

27K likes, 168 comments - nobelprize on November 22, 2025: "Throwback to 2018 when physics laureate Donna Strickland started her banquet speech by talking about Cyndi Lauper's song 'Girls Just Want To...

instagram.com

Why do some people lose memory faster with age? A mega-analysis of 13 longitudinal datasets (3,700+ adults, 10,000+ MRIs) shows that memory decline tracks brain atrophy, especially in the hippocampus, and that these links strengthen with age, but not APOE status: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ask anyone who moved to the UK (EU or non-EU) how many documents, pieces of evidence of “legal right” to reside in the UK, and (unnecessary) personal and biometric information they had to continuously provide to the UK government over the years. Proving identity clearly isn’t the goal here.

Dan Sohege@danielsohege.bsky.social · 10mo ago

The "Brit Card". Could they make it any more dogwhistly? Also, fundamentally ignores that undocumented workers already, drum roll please, lack documents. Adding another one makes little difference, but does make it harder for people to escape exploitation. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

Hello BlueSky - sorry it has taken us so long to move here from less-blue skies. Anyway please follow us if you're interested in healthy ageing of brain and cognition, including scientific outputs and news from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (www.cam-can.org).

King's College London launches the Atlas of Longitudinal Datasets, in partnership with @wellcometrust.bsky.social / @mqmentalhealth.bsky.social, a free platform with over 1,600 datasets, to support mental health research worldwide. 🌍 Read more and learn how to access: www.kcl.ac.uk/news/kings-l...

King's launches the Atlas of Longitudinal Datasets to support mental health research

Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London have launched a new free platform to allow people to discover hundreds of longitudinal mental hea...

kcl.ac.uk