New paper from the lab: we use longitudinal fMRI over the first two years of school to test theories of conceptual development in the math domain. “Initial organization and progressive expansion of the math-responsive brain network during the first school years” PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Initial organization and progressive expansion of the math-responsive brain network during the first school years | PNAS

The neural mechanisms by which the developing brain acquires higher mathematical concepts from elementary intuitions remain poorly understood. Thro...

pnas.org

Publication alert 🚨 & mini thread 🧵: Modulating corticospinal excitability with transcranial ultrasound stimulation: meta-analytic evidence of online and offline effects With @eester.bsky.social, Marietta Papadatou-Pastou, & @nkonstantinou.bsky.social 1/5 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Modulating corticospinal excitability with transcranial ultrasound stimulation: meta-analytic evidence of online and offline effects

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sciencedirect.com

In-scanner thoughts contribute to resting-state functional connectivity pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42365014/ I've long thought that this is the "elephant in the room" of resting state #fMRI esp. for comparing groups. If two groups think & feel differently in the scanner, of course rsfMRI will differ!

🧵 Thread: Does the internet threaten democracy? I argue that it does in my latest piece in Science: doi.org/10.1126/scie... Here's the short version. 1/9 1/10

The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy

Will democracy survive the internet? Do we need to choose between Facebook’s surveillance capitalism or democracy? Layered lines of evidence can inform questions like these. When considered together, the evidence gives rise to a concerning picture, as summarized in a recent report for the European Commission that I co-led.

doi.org

🚨New dataset just dropped🚨 Introducing Places in the Wild: 67,000 RAW-format photographs (45 mpix) densely sampled from 810 places (260 basic-level categories). This is 11x the number of pixels in ImageNet! Preprint is here: arxiv.org/abs/2606.02481 1/

Places in the Wild: A Large, High-Resolution RAW Photograph Dataset for Ecologically Valid Vision Research

Large image datasets have accelerated progress in cognitive neuroscience and computer vision. However, most datasets are low-resolution, internet-sourced JPEGs with unknown capture conditions and limi...

arxiv.org

If their goal is to choke off economic advantages from the US’s university system it’s hard to think of a more effective way. Scientists and other academics come to the US to study— then stay in the US often via green cards, to start companies, do unique work, and contribute to the US economy.

Green Card Seekers Must Leave U.S. to Apply, Trump Administration Says

nytimes.com

A big congratulations to the newly minted Dr. Yu (Joseph) Zhao. Feels great to have students graduate.

One year later - my reflections on what's happened to US science since the National Science Foundation grant terminations last year. The problem of misinformation isn't going away, but our ability to study and understand it is under attack. 1/ 🧪 www.tennessean.com/story/opinio...

I researched misinformation, until the government stopped me | Opinion

A researcher's NSF grant termination reveals a broader attack on science funding and misinformation research, despite rising AI-generated falsehoods.

tennessean.com

Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

“PAY OR LEAK”: Hackers Target Big Higher Ed Vendor

The criminal extortion group ShinyHunters breached Instructure last week. The hackers, who have also attacked individual universities, demanded the ed-tech giant pay up or face a data leak.

insidehighered.com

I’m in both boats, but my last download was a few weeks ago and my mechanism to turn in grades is through Canvas. This seems quite bad.

Jake Wright@bcnjake.bsky.social · 3mo ago

There are two higher ed Bluskies right now:

Yikes.

Russ Poldrack@russpoldrack.org · 4mo ago

"AI amplifies whatever is already there. Good discipline becomes great output. No discipline becomes technical debt at machine speed. Anthropic chose a direction. Go faster. Have Claude check Claude. And when it breaks, go faster still." substack.com/home/post/p-...

Another new one from the lab in J Neurosci: www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... Evidence accumulation is a core principle by which brains convert information into decisions. But what happens when the evidence the brain needs can't be directly read from an external stimulus or memory? 1/N

Very cool and inspiring! Progress toward a real application for brain decoding:

@jerrytang.bsky.social · 4mo ago

We're excited to share our new study on decoding brain activity in participants with post-stroke aphasia! We think this is an important step towards cognitive brain-computer interfaces for patients with language disorders www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/8

Happy Critical Thinking Day to all who celebrate

allen institute@alleninstitute.org · 4mo ago

The Orange Cat Brain Atlas is here. 🧠🐈 Today, we published the first comprehensive cellular map of the orange cat brain. The new atlas reveals a single, specialized neuron responsible for behaviors like staring at walls, knocking objects off tables, and the 3am "zoomies."

Did not have this in my radar.

Scientific American@sciam.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has trapped a third of the world’s commercial helium, threatening the irreplaceable coolant that makes MRI scanners and advanced microchips possible

NSF Update through March 13, 2026 1/2

We know about cosmological dark matter despite being unable to measure it because, without it, galaxies would fall apart. By analogy, let's talk about "cognitive dark matter" (CDM): brain functions that meaningfully shape behavior but are hard to infer from behavior alone. New paper! 🧵👇

Our work on bilingual language processing is now out in @pnas.org! Our fMRI study compares cortical representations btwn native and non-native languages. We find that representations are largely similar, but systematically modulated btwn languages www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New work from the Gallant lab mapping representation of semantic relations (has-a, is-a, found-at, etc) across the brain - super interesting stuff! V. related to one of the first topics I studied (tried to study) in grad school! Find the paper here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Jack Gallant@gallantlab.org · 5mo ago

We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another. doi.org/10.64898/202...

If you haven't yet changed how you teach and evaluate thanks to AI, you probably need to. This is not something that educators asked to happen, but it is worth noting what is out there - in this case an OpenClaw tool designed to cheat.

Yes please.

Culture Crave 🍿@culturecrave.co · 6mo ago

Tony Gilroy on his approach if he were President of Lucasfilm “If I did that job, I would rather go down swinging. I’d rather go down in flames. As low-risk as my life is, my creative life is pretty high-risk, so I’d like to swing away. Safety has never been one of my navigational principles"

NSD-synthetic, the out-of-distribution companion dataset of NSD consisting of 7T fMRI responses to 284 artificial images, is now published. #NeuroAI #CompNeuro #neuroscience #AI doi.org/10.1038/s414...

I finally got around to setting up a lab website! Have a look: the-steel-lab.github.io Just in time to start the new semester.

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

Eiko Fried@eikofried.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Would love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Well, this is an utter disaster for science. This gutting of peer review is very likely driven by Project 2025/OMB/Vought, very likely is about funding junk science, and very likely is coming for #NIH and biomedical research next. 🧪

Jeffrey Mervis@policyhound.bsky.social · 8mo ago

NSF plans to streamline merit review to heal self-inflicted staffing wound www.science.org/content/arti...

*shudder* Also, I feel like there is an analogy to LLMs here…

Chris Paxton@cpaxton.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Always important to remember that this is because these robots are "faking" being human Theyre actually capable of way more and way weirder stuff

"With the news that the administration plans to link the COVID vaccine to child deaths using data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), it’s worth revisiting how we actually detect whether a vaccine is causing harm." Excellent explainer from @drjenndowd.bsky.social from 9/2025😷🛟🧪

When “Stuff Happens” After Vaccination

How scientists separate coincidence from true side effects

jenndowd.substack.com

I am glad about the election results, but yes this 👇👇👇

Leah Greenberg ❌👑@leahgreenberg.bsky.social · 9mo ago

serious note: they're gonna try 5x harder to sabotage the midterms after tonight and we're gonna have to organize on a literally historic scale to stop them

*siiiiigh* what hope do any of us have, in the face of this? www.npr.org/2025/10/31/n...

What does '67' mean? Dictionary.com's 2025 word of the year has no definition

"67," pronounced "six seven," spread from a rap song, through sports and social media, to classrooms and homes across the U.S. But even the artist who coined it struggles to define it.

npr.org