A reminder that UC _faculty_ and Faculty Associations — not the universities themselves nor their administrators — are waging this battle in court, demonstrating great bravery and moral clarity.

White House admits it used keywords to kill billions worth of California research grants

Federal agencies that terminated more than a thousand research grants at the University of California last year admitted that they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COV...

apnews.com

Social sensitivity hypotheses! @tylerbonnell.bsky.social shows that dyadic interactions are most predictive of future grooming and these effects might be even stronger under *high* food conditions!

You press ‘send’ on a high-stakes email but hesitate when lifting your finger. You make a chess move but linger on the piece before letting go. Familiar? In @pnas.org, Hanbei Zhou @ruizhegoh.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social & I show that response *duration* tracks confidence! shorturl.at/A9NVe

Bullying and harassment are serious workplace problems, and excellence in research and a supportive environment are not mutually exclusive. We must prioritize a supportive research culture as an essential ingredient in research excellence.

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

Pigeons seem to defy a century-old psychology law about how rewards and consequences help us learn, according to research in APA's Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition. Read the article, highlighted in Springer Nature's Scientific American: https://bit.ly/4eGXJqe

A recent paper by Sheina Lew-Levy & @dorsaamir.bsky.social highlights the vital role of children in human cultural evolution. @katiemcauliffe.bsky.social and I argue that the same is true in other species. Youngsters are a powerful cultural force! tinyurl.com/2v75zevc @uniexecec.bsky.social

Our new article is out this week on social hair plucking, published as open access in JAAWS! doi.org/10.1080/1088...

I am giving away a free copy of the #BayesianWorkflow book by @statmodeling.bsky.social, @avehtari.bsky.social, @rmcelreath.bsky.social et al!! Please like, repost, and follow to enter. I will randomly draw the winner next Weds July 8. 😀 routledge.com/9780367490140 #RStats #DataScience #Bayesian

Fascinating talk on the history of peer review from Melinda Baldwin at @icssi.org, with some parallels to current crises. Also I hadn't realized peer review was such an American thing.

Happy “liberal arts professor helps save the Union” day to all who celebrate

🚨 Officially out at Child Development! A few years ago in Science, Ashley Thomas (ashleyjthomas.bsky.social) and colleagues argued that saliva could be a cue infants use to infer the strength of social relationships. academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

An associative learning account of how saliva becomes a cue for comfort

Abstract. A recent study by Thomas et al. (2022) showed that 8.5- to 10-month-olds use saliva sharing as an indicator of relationship closeness: infants ex

academic.oup.com

"Additional behavioral data can lead to the same improvement in the precision of inferences more cheaply and easily than collecting additional data from subjects in a neuroimaging study." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

“Contrasting with the hypothesis that urbanization selects for behavioral flexibility, our findings instead imply that vervet monkeys already had sufficient behavioral flexibility and cognitive capacities to successfully exploit the urban habitat.”

Sofia Forss@sofiaforss.bsky.social · last mo.

🚨New primate urbanization paper🚨We looked at weather anthropogenic experiences link to within population innovativeness. Our new results from @urbanvervetproject.bsky.social can be found here 👇🏼 Behavioral flexibility and its drivers in semi-urban vervet monkeys academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Very, very happy that our paper is finally out! We look at how tight a fit primates experience at birth, and found really cool results. It has been a long journey from collecting the first data seven years ago! A brief thread (1/8) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Comparative primate analysis shows that humans are not unique in having a tight cephalopelvic fit at birth - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Analysing cephalopelvic proportions among 29 extant primate species, the authors show that a tight cephalopelvic fit is not unique to humans, with comparable or tighter fits occurring in several non-h...

nature.com

Should the term 'personality trait' be really used in animal personality studies? With Sasha Dall and @dingemanselab.bsky.social we don't think so. We explain why in this commentary published in Animal Behaviour. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It's always a treat to read Ted Chiang's thoughts on AI. www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.

theatlantic.com

Incredible! Scientists receive a rare standing ovation after announcing that a new treatment can double the survival time for pancreatic cancer, the deadliest cancer which was once considered “undruggable.” When we fund and support science, we can achieve anything! (Video: Dr. Wish Dhillon)

Do you know how insane it is that every new generation of parents has to listen to Down By the Bay 1000+ times, and it doesn’t bother us? In fact we seek it out for nourishment? And invent new verses?

Two new @epfl-brainmind.bsky.social group reviews: The lab of Alexander Mathis @trackingskills.bsky.social: The behavior biopsy: Interpreting animal behavior as embodied, situated, and hierarchical doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

New preprint from the lab, led by Bradley Cutler. With the @james-gagnon.bsky.social lab we use zebrafish to show that fever is not a reduction in the perception of warmth. Immune signals instead increase the valence of warming stimuli while cooling turns aversive. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

TIL it wasn't just Clever Hans

Happy to have worked with Rosemary Blersch for her new article in a special issue of Animal Behaviour on multilayer networks for animal sociality. What is the interplay between social behavior and dominance rank change? Do these associations change with greater levels of social complexity?

Neuroscientists: "How natural should laboratory behavior be?" Pigeons: "fuck you, the world is a Skinner box"

Cristian Farias@cristianfarias.com · 3mo ago

“Not for rinsing or washing,” they said. (Seen at Union Station.)

“The researchers found a possible 9.2% increase in pregnancy-associated deaths in states with abortion bans, equivalent to an estimated 68 excess deaths by the end of 2023”

Study: Higher Maternal Death Rate in States With Abortion Bans | Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Findings point to potential 9% rise in pregnancy-associated and pregnancy-related mortality

publichealth.jhu.edu

Is bigger always better? For social animals, group size is a dilemma: big groups face more internal competition, yet hold an edge over smaller neighbors. 33 years of data on 12 wild capuchin groups reveals how these forces shape behavior. Out today in *Nat Eco & Evo*: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The normative fraud that Errington describes is something I've seen my whole career. A biologist once told me, if p is very small, it can't be a false positive. Teams condition on null being false, see anything that makes p small as truth-seeking. These traditions spread bc they get you published.

Randy Ellis@randalljellis.bsky.social · 3mo ago

SHOCKING stories of data fabrication Tim Errington shares a never-before-told story of data fabrication in cancer biology. Scientists go to extreme measures, even engaging in data fabrication, to secure a publication in prestigious journals. #science #truth #medicine #stem #shorts

1/2 Adult play Although phylogeny predicts which primates play as adults (if play exists in one species, it is more likely to exist in close ones), it is whether or not the society is tolerant (and not despotic) that best predicts this behavior (paper) royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...

Happy May Day everyone! A great time to celebrate not just spring, but also gains in workers' rights. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interna...

What is the role of social learning in adopting novel food? Study of urban #cockatoos by @julia-penndorf.bsky.social @clevercockierp.bsky.social &co shows that they rapidly adopt novel food via #SocialLearning, with juveniles showing conformist preferences @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4uq6NVq