In August, Jay Bhattacharya said “Training future biomedical scientists” was the 1st priority for his version of NIH. But talk is cheap. Let’s see how JB’s doing. 🤔 NIH supports trainees mostly via fellowship (F), training (T), and career development (K) awards. Here are funding curves for each.🧵

Whenever I’m reminded of Google and the company’s greenwashing, I also think of their Google Urban Forest outside Santiago, Chile.

molly taft@mollytaft.com · 6mo ago

NEW: air permit applications for a data center being built with investment from google shows it would rely on a natural gas power plant that emits more than 4.5 million tons of greenhouse gasses each year google has publicly touted its commitment to renewables but appears to be privately eyeing gas

There are very good reasons why our strongest scientific norms prohibit deliberately* deceptive data fabrication. Such behavior is literally career-ending. How anyone can endorse working with a system that does this, let wish to add it as a co-author? *not truly volitational but act as if etc.

Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Acetylcholine demixes heterogeneous dopamine signals for learning and moving

Nature Neuroscience - Jang et al. measured dopamine and acetylcholine release in the striatum of rats performing a decision-making task and found that the relative timing of cholinergic and...

nature.com

Our lab will be boycotting biotech vendors that have contracts with ICE (e.g., Fisher, Agilent), and telling them why. If you google “vendorname usa spending”, you can see purchases for specific depts including ICE on usaspending.gov. Please talk to your labs and email your vendors!

"there is little reason to doubt what the aim [of the massive investment in AI] is: to embed knowledge in machines—knowledge that previously belonged to the people working in these domains." 🧵

Hagen Blix@hagenblix.bsky.social · 10mo ago

In applying AI to material science, biology, etc, capitalism is trying to shed science. The point is to substitute the engineering of a machine that can generate what science has hitherto done, but without having people know things. Knowledge ultimately residing in private property is the dream.

A week after the arXiv was forced to tighten down on submissions because of overwhelming volumes of AI slop, bioRxiv is throwing the doors wide open.

samuel mehr@mehr.nz · 11mo ago

disappointed that @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social is implicitly endorsing the use of LLMs to replace scientific thought @richardsever.bsky.social this is a short-sighted move and a net negative for science

Undetstanding well your data is a key part of your analysis. It takes time. There are already too many papers out with poorly understood data that was run through a statistical model just to get a significant result. Adding llms to mix is just adding fuel to the fire.

Dr Abeba Birhane@abeba.blacksky.app · 11mo ago

the amount of academic research now using llms in research (synthetic data generation, to classify, annotate, or analyse large scale data, etc) is astounding. remember, just cus use of llms in research is becoming normalised does NOT erase the fact it degrades the research & undermine your results

That U.S. academics didn't collectively develop strong labor consciousness is really going to bite them in the ass as universities bend the knee to this administration. Politely worded letters to presidents and trustees are not going to count for much of anything.

we have the clarity to say it's obscene that a 21 year old named "big ballz" challenges government employees to prove their work isn't bullshit that a chatbot can do, but we apparently don't have the clarity to say the same when it's geoffrey hinton or bill gates talking about healthcare & education

Happy to have some good science news - our new study with @aqperkins.bsky.social is out in @plosbiology.org! dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Orbitofrontal cortex computes gaze-dependent comparisons between attributes rather than integrated values

When choosing between options with multiple attributes, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is thought to integrate across those attributes, aiding in value comparisons. This study shows in monkeys that OF...

dx.plos.org

"Asked to generate intervention plans for struggling students, AI teacher assistants recommended more-punitive measures for hypothetical students with Black-coded names and more supportive approaches for students the platforms perceived as white" www.chalkbeat.org/2025/08/06/a...

Annie and Lakeesha struggle in school. AI teacher assistants treated them very differently.

A Common Sense Media study found that prominent teacher assistants that use AI generated recommendations that appeared to be rooted in racial stereotypes based on students’ names. About a third of tea...

chalkbeat.org

and yet, we'll use behavioural and cognitive sciences language to mislead people into thinking AI models equate human cognition

Thomas Fuchs 🫯@thomasfuchs.at · last yr.

A very odd thing about Artificial Intelligence as a discipline in computer science is that it historically shifted from “understanding the human brain better” to “we give up on understanding the brain and will just replace humans despite having no fucking clue”

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/

Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature

An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.

nature.com

Teaching "A Critical Introduction to AI Images" this semester as a visiting prof at RIT's Humanities, Computing and Design department. Here's the reading list I have so far.

i genuinely try to be open about the usefulness and advantages of llms and try entertain ideas I deeply disagree with. and there’s a current trend that attempts to occupy a middle-ground position where people claims to find useful use cases while at the same time claiming to be critical 1/

In 2010, anti-copyright activist Aaron Swartz hanged himself after being prosecuted to the full extent of the law for making copyrighted academic publications freely available. Today, academic publishers are insisting those copyrights be lifted to feed the corporate AI slop machine.

Please Follow the Official Guardian Account@guardian-world-rss.bsky.social · 3y ago

‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says

Isoflurane is a beautiful name for a baby girl