Out last week in JAMA Open (doi.org/10.1001/jama...). In this huge study, they followed 30 million people for 4 years. The vaccinated people had 74% lower risk of death by COVID and 25% lower risk of death by anything, and the vaccinated people started out older with more heart disease. Tell RFK Jr.

COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality Among Adults in France

This cohort study uses the data from all adults aged 18 to 59 years living in France on November 1, 2021, to evaluate whether there is an association of receipt of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine with long-t...

doi.org

"Machine vision systems—which have neither bodily states nor conscious thoughts—can predict with remarkable accuracy how humans will feel about the things they look at." 👀🔥 The perceptual primacy of feeling (PNAS Jan 2025) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #neuroskyence #vision #affectsci

What's it like at some agencies right now? I'm fresh off a conference where I got to speak to a bunch of people still at some important agencies. What's the climate like? Why are you staying? Generally the responses felt like this, and we are all Maggie:

All of our neural dynamics tools, software, protocols, datasets, and even hardware plans are now available in one convenient place! Check it out and let us know what you'd like to see next: www.allenneuraldynamics.org/tools 🧠📈

Open Tools | Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics

We are doing science in the open. Our data and tools are openly available to the community.

allenneuraldynamics.org

So very excited [these](www.foundationalpapersincomplexityscience.org) arrived today!! I doubt I'll ever get through them all, but I always get inspiration and ambition from the complex systems perspective.

I found joy today, not cold, but slightly chilled, emerging from the shade into the warm sunshine.

Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions - rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking steps to make sure students can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope others follow suit.

Today I lost an NIH grant training clinicians to do research about intimate partner violence with perinatal women. More women are murdered in the perinatal period than die of obstetric complications. I didn't just lose a grant. We lost an entire cohort of people building careers to prevent that.

From 2010 to 2016 (latest data I have ), NIH research contributed to EVERY drug approved by the FDA

In a new Science study, cryo–electron tomography captures the in-cell architecture of the mitochondrial respiratory chain, illuminating how the coordinated action of molecular machines drives life’s fundamental energy conversion. Learn more in this week's issue: scim.ag/3FA3Ygq

I think we have enough evidence to now argue that AI is not getting exponentially better, or even linearly better. It is asymptotically converging on a level of inadequacy, and even that is only happening because the data thieves are still stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.

Colin Danby@cdanby.bsky.social · last yr.

I’ve lost patience with the claims that (a) AI will somehow get better (b) there are patterns of use that are genuinely useful. Maybe so, but those are not what I’m seeing. And the cheerleaders who tell my students that AIs are the future are, I think, morally culpable.

Last year, I was overjoyed to receive an NIH NRSA fellowship to study toddler brains and caregiving effects on memory at Columbia. Last night, my grant was terminated.

Have not been able to tear myself away from exploring these just received spatial transcriptomics data from the septum and surrounding nuclei in human 🧠. Fascinating to explore since there are no comprehensive spatial gene expression data across these regions yet available in human brain.

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust.bsky.social · last yr.

It's #SaturdayScience once again, where we remind ourselves what we are fighting for. What sciencey things are you excited about this week? Maybe something you're working on? Or a paper you read / a talk you heard?

I currently have two fully-funded PhD opportunities in my lab - both providing a chance to work on the incredible LEAF data set that we have been collecting the last couple of years (220 children followed longitudinally from 10-30 months on measures of attention and early EF). Please share!

RFK Jr. Vows To Make Measles Deaths So Common They Won’t Be Upsetting Anymore

RFK Jr. Vows To Make Measles Deaths So Common They Won’t Be Upsetting Anymore

WASHINGTON—Addressing the ongoing outbreak in Texas that has infected at least 124 state residents and killed one child, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed Thursday to mak...

theonion.com

Now accepted at Nature Computational Science: Nicole shows how #Bayesian #hierarchical #models can explicitly model major #source of #population #stratification in 10,000 ABCD subjects. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

This looks like amazing new work from my colleagues at Stanford demonstrating the opponent interactions of DA and 5HT in reinforcement learning.

𝗗𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘅 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝘄𝗼-𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗿𝗼–𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗿𝗼 𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Interesting paper but top-down causation seems to be way of capturing how micro-level entities respond to *aggregate state* of all other micro-level entities #complexity ht @evanthompson.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

💯 Hallucination is totally the wrong word, implying it is perceiving the world incorrectly. But it's generating false, plausible sounding statements. Confabulation is literally the perfect word. So, let's all please start referring to any junk that an LLM makes up as "confabulations".

Cian O'Donnell@cianodonnell.bsky.social · 2y ago

petition to change the word describing ChatGPT's mistakes from 'hallucinations' to 'confabulations' A hallucination is a false subjective sensory experience. ChatGPT doesn't have experiences! It's just making up plausible-sounding bs, covering knowledge gaps. That's confabulation

🚨New WP🚨 We examine news sharing on 7 platforms: 1)Right-leaning platforms=lower quality news 2)Echo-platforms: Right-leaning news gets more engagement on right-leaning platforms, vice-versa for left-leaning 3)But low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE, even BlueSky! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Good news everyone! A new version of graph-tool is just out! @graph-tool.skewed.de graph-tool.skewed.de Graph-tool is a comprehensive and efficient Python library to work with networks, including structural, dynamical, and statistical algorithms, as well as visualization. 1/N #networkscience

"Reproducibility is hard" - nice piece by @petebachant.me on trying reproduce one's previous work.

Pete Bachant@petebachant.me · 2y ago

I failed to reproduce my results from a decade ago: petebachant.me/failed-to-re... I want to start doing these little #reproducibility side quests with other people's work. Anyone have any suggestions?

Took me two solid days of data munging and coding but I finally figured out how to create these gorgeous connectome/circle plot diagrams. This is the Yeo 7-network brain parcellation, with major connections in a group of healthy adults.

Students should study the humanities not because it makes them better workers but because it rips you open and breaks your brain and changes everything you thought you knew. I *promise* you this. I *promise* it has this ability, no matter how smart you think you are. I have seen it countless times.

Lauren Donovan Ginsberg@laurenginsberg.bsky.social · 2y ago

Hearing the president of KU say that the way the humanities can protect itself - a question asked by a humanities professor of Spanish - is that her field should direct its public voice to how the Spanish language can impact AI versus the third study of an obscure play…. Just sigh.

We've been analyzing emotion regulation patterns of brain activity lately. Depressed people who regulate more when asked, after seeing negative images, regulate better. But those who regulate more when not asked think more about suicide after stress.

Nudge for scicomm (~spring) Many of you (& me) want to help with the next steps in the US. How? Science may take a hit in 2025. Spring is a great time for public-facing efforts that unpack what scientists do and why it matters. *Now is pitch time!* Imagine if we all did 1 thing? To consider:

“Cognitive flexibility as the shifting of brain network flows by flexible neural representations”, a solo paper by yours truly, making the case that brain activity flow shifts are essential to mental flexibility (and quite interesting too!) Open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

lmfao what

Max Kennerly@maxkennerly.bsky.social · 2y ago

lol China's state media is sad about Bluesky because it's not an easy propaganda distribution channel like X (and Facebook) www.semafor.com/article/11/2...

btw, just a reminder: do NOT buy this book! (it's free for download at the OUP website, coz it is open access) despite the title & cover art, it is a monograph written for nerdy researchers. don't let the false salesmanship fool you. you probably won't like it...

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust.bsky.social · 2y ago

I mean, you literally “wrote the book”! Once you do that, I’m not sure you can just opt out. That’s like academic anarchy! www.waterstones.com/book/in-cons...