Alison Adcock
@ralisonadcock.bsky.social
Psychiatrist Neuroscientist of memory, motivation, and the architecture of hope. Committed to joy, courage, and mental flourishing as outcomes for graduate research training! adcocklab.org dibs.duke.edu
In his 2019 memoir The Threat, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe quotes first-term Trump saying Venezuela was “the country we should be going to war with, they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.” zeteo.com/p/venezuela-...
Trump's Venezuela Attack: It’s All About the Oil, Stupid!
Here are five times Donald Trump himself admitted that illegally attacking Venezuela and toppling Nicolás Maduro was aimed at seizing the country’s massive oil reserves.
zeteo.com
“History is full of people who out of fear, ignorance, or a lust for power, have destroyed treasures of immeasurable value which truly belong to all of us. We must never let it happen again.” -Carl Sagan, Cosmos Episode 13 “Who Speaks For Earth”
Matt Oliver@sameo416.bsky.social · 7mo agoExcellent commentary. Thanks for the Sci Amer reference! @panaccindex.bsky.social One gift of the pandemic was meeting such an interesting and diverse community of people. One other gift was getting an editorial in SA - I grew up reading it and marvelling.
Turkish participants in this study on loneliness cite government control of their lives and policies, leading to economic hardships, thus also the need to work longer hours, as limiting their opportunities to spend time with others. Democracy helps mental health.
Neil Lewis, Jr.@neillewisjr.bsky.social · 8mo ago"loneliness, beneath its many cultural expressions, is often a structural failure disguised as personal failure. The solution isn't fixing individuals. It's transforming the conditions under which we attempt to connect." www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/body...
Remember: Almost all of us are the descendants of immigrants who fled persecution, or were brought to America under duress, or sought better lives for themselves and their descendants. Politicians who stoke fear and hatred over immigration want you to forget this. Do not.
Dear Rec Letter Portals designers: Please explain this choice.
Our python workshop is returning! Undergraduate educators, join us on July 27-30 for "Coding with Allen Institute Data." No prior coding experience needed. Travel, meals, & stipend included. Apply by Feb. 2 at: https://alleninstitute.org/events/educator-coding-workshop-2026/ #iTeachBio #EduSky
Shameless plug: For a year, I've been working on a series about the vast systems that underlie our lives. Built up over decades, these systems are the cathedrals of our time--but all too few of us know about them, and they're all at risk. Here's the latest:
Two Hundred Years to Flatten the Curve
How generations of meddlesome public health campaigns changed everyday life — and made life twice as long as it used to be
thenewatlantis.com
Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea
Before the midterms of 1866, President Andrew Johnson called his congressional opponents traitors and said they should be hanged. Voters were so profoundly moved by his words... that they gave his opponents a supermajority in Congress, and the nation got the Fourteenth Amendment.
“Survival of the fittest” is often used to justify capitalist society, but this wasn’t a phrase that Darwin used. He described it as “better designed for an immediate, local environment" and wrote of groups that survived through empathy and sharing rather than greed. We must change Or die
So the Border Patrol announced that they arrested >250 people in their North Carolina invasion, but that only 44 had any criminal record at all. Some of those "criminal" records include shoplifting and driving with an expired registration. Some were U.S. citizens. www.wunc.org/2025-11-19/b...
Epstein survivor: "Today we stand in a moment that will decide whether our government still belongs to the American people or to those who prey on them."
Breaking: An Epstein survivor just silenced press conference attendees when she delivered the following remarks: “Today we stand in a moment that will decide whether our government belongs to the American people, or to those who prey on them.”
NEW: Epstein survivors release the most powerful PSA I have ever seen. Make this go viral so every member of the House of Representatives sees it.
Don't be evil? "Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officers..." www.404media.co/google-has-c...
Google Has Chosen a Side in Trump's Mass Deportation Effort
Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, while simultaneously removing apps that report the location of ICE officials because Google sees ICE as a vulnerable gr...
404media.co
jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-o... "The world of print is orderly, logical, rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected to make arguments, and propose theses..with print culture came the prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, and the rapid development of science"
The dawn of the post-literate society
And the end of civilisation
jmarriott.substack.com
Happy to see this work out today www.nature.com/articles/s41... @dukebrain.bsky.social @neurosciencenow.bsky.social
Dopamine dynamics during stimulus-reward learning in mice can be explained by performance rather than learning - Nature Communications
VTA dopamine activity control movement-related performance, not reward prediction errors. Here, authors show that behavioral changes during Pavlovian learning explain DA activity regardless of reward ...
nature.com
NYT is looking for scientists to tell them about their projects that were cut by the administration for a new series on “lost science”: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/c...
Has Your Scientific Work Been Cut? We Want to Hear.
nytimes.com
Hello world! Only a year late, but I am now at the NUS Centre for Sleep and Cognition, where I will be directing the Dynamic Brain & Memory lab!
🚨 New paper in Nature Methods: HippoMaps: multiscale cartography of the human hippocampus Open-source tools & data to explore structure and function of the 🍤🧠 (histology, in/ex vivo MRI, iEEG) Led by @jordandekraker.bsky.social docs: hippomaps.readthedocs.io paper: doi.org/10.1038/s415...
🧪 👇 read the 🧵 for all the posts being cut - health statistics in US will disappear
Alt CDC (they/them)@altcdc.altgov.info · 10mo agoMore CDC Cuts :: NCHS Edition 📊🔫 At least 1/3 of the staff at the National Center for Health Statistics has been cut (and remain cut). This is catastrophic for our nation’s health data. Say goodbye to national health statistics that you can trust, healthcare surveys, NHANES and data systems.
Motivations are like emotions about (what we know about) possible outcomes. Sometimes incentives spur urgency to act, other times to comprehend. Neuromodulatory systems reflect these motivational moods and shape memories. Out now w @jiahou-poh.bsky.social! www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
Motivation as Neural Context for Adaptive Learning and Memory Formation
Our memories shape our perception of the world and guide adaptive behavior. Rather than a veridical record of experiences, memory is selective. An accumulating body of work suggests that motivational ...
annualreviews.org
How does motivation shape learning and memory? In a new review w @ralisonadcock.bsky.social, we propose that under different motivational ‘moods', neuromodulators set distinct neural contexts to determine information processing and memory formation. doi.org/10.1146/annu... #psychscisky #neuroskyence
Motivation as Neural Context for Adaptive Learning and Memory Formation
Our memories shape our perception of the world and guide adaptive behavior. Rather than a veridical record of experiences, memory is selective. An accumulating body of work suggests that motivational ...
annualreviews.org
For decades the NRA and other gun nuts told us that their guns were to protect us all from a tyrannical government. So a tyrannical government is here, they are all sitting on their asses, and the people who want gun control have taken to the streets to defy the tyrannical government instead.
The #BethesdaDeclaration stories are now up on the front pages of both the New York Times and the Washington Post. Thanks again to the brave folks at NIH who stood up and worked together to make this happen. 1/n
a black background with the words heroes at work
ALT: a black background with the words heroes at work
media.tenor.com
Very smart, high ROI initiative from the Spencer Foundation. Providing bridge funding for canceled NSF grants: 1) directs funds to projects already screened by a top-noch review process. 2) avoids imposing proposal prep costs on researchers. 3) ameliorates the disruption from GOP sabotage.
Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program
In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rap...
spencer.org
My quote of the day I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it. Abraham Lincoln
Obituary: Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat (1923-2025) mathematician who established that Einstein’s equations mirror the real world https://go.nature.com/3HtgQpy
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat obituary: mathematician who established that Einstein’s equations mirror the real world
Pioneer of general relativity and gravitational-wave theories saw her work confirmed by observations 65 years later.
go.nature.com
