Christos Constantinidis

q.e.d Science Critical Thinking AI for constructive criticism and science evaluation

Here's the link to the system, try it! qedscience.com
@qedscience.bsky.social

Relationship between fire severity (dNBR, x axis) and early postfire recovery (y axis) for the different vegetation types affected in the Bermeja, Culebra and Hurdes wildfires (Spain). A: based on the Spanish Forest Map (MFE) data; B: based on the Spanish National Inventory (IFN). Dashed lines correspond to global means.

Pine plantations burn more severely & recover more slowly than other vegetation types. This is observed using the forest map (L) or the forest inventory (R), Spain
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
jgpausas.blogs.uv.es/2025/10/16/p...
🧪🌎🔥🍁🌳🔥 wildfire @jappliedecology.bsky.social

Student government leaders of MIT, UVA, U of AZ, Dartmouth, UPenn, Brown, and Vanderbilt united in their opposition to the "compact" proposed by the Trump administration.

Image: A variation on Benjamin Franklin’s “Join, or Die” engraving, originally published in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1754. Each segment of the snake has the name of a university sent Trump’s “compact”: Texas, AZ, Vanderbilt, USC, Dartmouth, UVA, Brown, Penn, MIT.

Shared courtesy of my Penn History colleague, Ben Nathans

Study section would have wrapped up this week. No idea when it will restart after the government shutdown.

Developmental & Brain Sciences PhD UMass Boston's Developmental and Brain Sciences (DBS) PhD is a research-intensive program focused on understanding cognition, perception, and behavior when underlying neural and hormonal mechanisms ar...

Faculty colleagues, please let your students know about our PhD program in Developmental and Brain Sciences at UMass Boston! Online info session coming up on 10/22 at 4.30 pm. Applications are due 12/1/25
www.umb.edu/academics/pr...
#devpsych #devsky #AcademicSky

Minimally invasive implantation of scalable high-density cortical microelectrode arrays for multimodal neural decoding and stimulation - Nature Biomedical Engineering A 1,024-channel microelectrode array is delivered to the brain cortex via a minimally invasive incision in the skull and dura, and allows recording, stimulation and neural decoding across large portions of the brain in porcine models and human neurosurgical patients.

Precision Neuroscience published their high-density ECoG in Nature Biomed. Eng.

The startup shows a 1,024-channel grid implanted through a cortical slit in pigs, and intraoperative neural recordings and stimulation in five humans at sub-mm resolution.

#neuroskyence @precisionneuro.bsky.social

loki giving a thumbs up and saying `` you had one job '' . ALT: loki giving a thumbs up and saying `` you had one job '' .

US government shutdown

Huntington's progression slowed by experimental gene therapy An experimental gene therapy slowed Huntington’s by up to 75 percent in a small clinical trial. While not a cure, it may give patients longer lives.

In reporting this piece on the new trial for a Huntington's treatment, I was struck by one thing in particular:

The joy.

One of my sources wept for joy. He has spent his entire career studying this disease, he said it was the happiest day. www.sciencenews.org/article/hunt...

is anyone working on cortical waves (traveling, rotational, etc) looking for a faculty position? we'll soon be hiring in Korea, at our center where multiple labs (ephys, optical imaging, human neuroimaging) are interested in collaborating w/ theoreticians

pls DM/email for informal inquiries

🧠📈 🧠💻

Poorly conceived, vaguely worded, abruptly imposed. There is going to be a total mess in the landscape of H1 visa holders, including foreign postdocs and professors in the US.

Open positions in Vanderbilt BME!

Five year outcomes for Vercise deep brain stimulation (DBS) in Parkinson's disease are in, and they look very good. Specific features: independent control of each contact, rechargeable batteries, directional leads to steer current and MRI compatibility. @parkinsondotorg.bsky.social

I wouldn't really call this good news, but better than the alternative of NIH not spending its appropriated budget

Feel free to use and disseminate NERV! (10/10)

Kyle is graduating this year. I expect great things from him! (9/10)

GitHub - kylecoutray/NERV: Neuro-Experimental Runtime for Vanderbilt [NERV]: A Unity-Based Framework for Rapid Neuroscience Experiment Design and Execution Neuro-Experimental Runtime for Vanderbilt [NERV]: A Unity-Based Framework for Rapid Neuroscience Experiment Design and Execution - kylecoutray/NERV

Code is available in Github: (8/10) github.com/kylecoutray/...

We have already been using it in human and animal experiments! (7/10)

Benchmarking confirmed excellent real-time control of stimulus presentation and alignment with behavior. (6/10)

The development workflow is illustrated below (5/10)

Kyle put together a very impressive environment that allows rapid prototyping of tasks even for non-experienced programmers, while offering flexibility for those who want to customize task design more fully. (4/10)

A talented undergraduate student who spent the summer in my lab, Kyle Coutray (not in BlueSky), undertook the challenge to bring us to the 21st century. Behold Neuroscience Experimental Runtime by Vanderbilt (NERV) written in C# and using the Unity engine. (3/10)

Presenting stimuli and synchronizing task and behavioral events with neural activity has always been a challenge. We have been using a MATLAB based software for quite a while, but it was obvious that it had reached the end of its useful life. (2/10)

NERV: A Comprehensive Framework for Rapid, Reproducible, and Hardware-Synchronized Neuroscience Experiment Design and Execution Background: Behavioral neuroscience experiments require precise stimulus control, millisecond timing, hardware integration, and robust data provenance. Increasing use of 3D environments and multimodal...

New (methods) preprint from the lab!
NERV: A Comprehensive Framework for Rapid, Reproducible, and Hardware-Synchronized Neuroscience Experiment Design and Execution (1/10)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Resources for Research This section provides brief summaries of selected resources for research that have been published in journals of the Psychonomic Society, typically Behavior Research Methods. These resources consis…

Need to control visual similarity in your experiments? A new open database by Robbins and colleagues @michaelhout.bsky.social @haywardgodwin.bsky.social, published in #psynomBRM, maps similarity among 1,200 objects in 20 categories using MDS—validated & ready to use.

Opinion | The Future of AI Lies in Monkeys, Not Microchips Neuroscience research on primates will help us learn how to build an efficient thinking machine.

Very timely and insightful OpEd by Prof. Cory Miller on WSJ. It lays out an important point - Advanced AI cannot be developed in a vacuum without understanding the sophisticated machines we have in our brains.
www.wsj.com/opinion/the-...

I had never heard of Niche before. But if it ranks Vanderbilt in the top 10 universities in the US, it must be legit.

www.niche.com/colleges/sea...

Public service announcement: Turn off generative AI features in Adobe Acrobat

helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/usin...

“Kennedy would be less hazardous if he decided to do cardiac surgery. Then he would kill people only one at a time rather than his current ability to kill by the thousands. Why is it that killing a single person is seen as murder but killing masses is excused if you are a politician?”

Was that a dig at ChatGPT?