Roberto Toro

ERC-Plus: jackpot science or missed chance to fix academia? My reflections on ERC-Plus, Europe’s newest ultra-competitive research grant and what it tells us about the academic culture we’re…

I just published: ERC-Plus: jackpot science or missed chance to fix academia?

My reflections on ERC-Plus, Europe’s newest ultra-competitive research grant and what it tells us about the academic culture we’re building.

medium.com/p/erc-plus-j...

*Snowflakes: A Chapter From the Book of Nature* (1863) A collection of poems, extracts, anecdotes and reflections on the theme of snow and the snowflake, in addition to a series of wonderful illustrations of ice crystals.

try this one:
publicdomainreview.org/collection/s...

Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service Comments

«Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service» - welcome to @Codeberg instead 😊

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/zig_quits_github_microsoft_ai_obsession/

plus, no ferret 😞

in a 'class A' list approach, you wouldn't forbid to publishing somewhere else, but those publications would not be considered as equally prestigious as 'class A' ones. The idea would be force selected open/community journals into the same tier as the default Nat/Sci/Cell

Thank you! that's really interesting. Is the list of journals available somewhere? Would it be possible that a more stringent curation of 'class A' could solve the problem? In the end, if one effect is that researchers migrate to open community journals (weak links?) that could even be a plus.

Maybe institutions could provide a clear list of journal they will considered as *equally excellent* during evaluations for hiring/funding: include there your usual NSC, but also top community and open journals

A list of Nature XY journals

Brand extension: have a very reputable journal? Just conjure out of thin air new journals inheriting its name. Wine watered down a notch, everybody buying it.

Nature >> Nature XY

*Not* in the grey zone, but the strategy is clear: money = reputation + many papers.

There are 72 Nature XY journals.

Honestly, when will unis and other research orgs collectively say enough is enough, and invoice them for all our unpaid labour that drives publishers MASSIVE profits?

The Money in Scientific Publishing danielroelfs.com/posts/the-mo... @danielroelfs.com

#KnowledgeSlavery

Having witnessed many HHMI labs during my postdoc, my impression was that many of them struggled to even productively spend all their money.

At some point it seems logical that you just hit diminishing returns; systematic studies have come to the same conclusion. www.science.org/content/blog...

In a satirical commentary, @ofgulban.bsky.social examines the widening gap between traditional publication norms and emerging channels of science communication:
doi.org/10.52294/001...

@ohbmofficial.bsky.social
#FutureofPublishing #SpecialIssue

Y’all are reading this paper in the wrong way.

We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere:

This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA

It’s quite the opposite!

(thread)

Brain-wide mapping of developmental trajectories of cerebellar efferent projections | PNAS Long-range cerebellar outputs are critical for shaping brain-wide functional architecture, influencing motor, cognitive, and affective domains. Pro...

Nice cerebellum development paper 👀

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered Not with a bang but with a whimper

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

The Brain, In Theory Why engineering and computational analogies are poorly suited to the study of biological cognition

My book "The Brain, in Theory" on the publisher's website (out in April 2026):
press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Axonal pathfinding of zebrafish retinal ganglion cells forms the optic nerve. Credit to Dr. Matthew Bostock @houartlab.bsky.social. #ZebrafishZunday 🧪

GarganText semantic maps made with love @CNRS Mapping textual corpora of all types with the free CNRS software GarganText http://gargantext.org

For semantic map lovers, update of maps.gargantext.org with few exciting topics : #glyphostate, #acetamiprid, #disinfo campaigns, #Mastodon debates on #ClimateChange, #opinionDynamics literature ... #GarganText

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1939

New Phil Trans B issue on the ‘Evolutionary functions of consciousness’

royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

At Sfn? Join us at the Cajal Club Social! Sunday, Nov. 16th, 6:30PM–8:30PM. Salt & Whiskey bar@Horton Grand Hotel, www.hortongrand.com/dine-bar. We will learn about an exhibition on Cajal's Work and give out this year's awards to outstanding trainees and established scientists in our community!

Estimation and mapping of the missing heritability of human phenotypes - Nature WGS data were used from 347,630 individuals with European ancestry in the UK Biobank to obtain high-precision estimates of coding and non-coding rare variant heritability for 34 co...

First time on Bsky and first big announcement!

I am excited to announce that our new study explaining the missing heritability of many phenotypes using WGS data from ~347,000 UK Biobank participants has just been published in @Nature.

Our manuscript is here: www.nature.com/articles/s41....

I have always wondered if there is a best method/software to process T1w image (at a vertex/voxel wise level). Elise Delzant has some answers in her first published paper from her PhD. She compared FreeSurfer, CAT12 and FSL across several traits and analyses (association, prediction).

Brückner, D. B., & Tkačik, G. (2024). Information content and optimization of self-organized developmental systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, #EpithelialMechanics www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Adaptive landscape and the evolution of flight in mammals

A big review of the evolution of bats:
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
🧪 ⚒️ #Paleobio #EvoBio

Our intelligence and cognitive abilities are perhaps due to an expansion of our cerebral cortex. But surprisingly, compared to highly intelligent birds, primates have many more neurons in their cerebellum as compared to the cerebral cortex.

doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

We just published a paper in PNAS, showing microstructural changes to the hippocampus in aging and presymptomatic Alzheimer's disease - in humans, in vivo.

We continue to show the value of structural MRI beyond simply measuring large-scale atrophy!

Read here: ow.ly/1NvV50XkXnX

Une mère et son garçonnet, dans la rue. Un SDF leur demande : « une petite pièce… ». La maman, sans un regard pour le pauvre hère, déclare à son fils : « Tu vois Thomas, il faut bien travailler à l’école ». Sans un regard non plus, le SDF répond : « J’ai un doctorat de sociologie ». Ce à quoi la mère lui re-répond : « taisez-vous ». Puis elle lui donne une pièce (non je déconne). [fin]

une petite pièce

It's once again Friday at @institutpasteur.bsky.social !!!
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

y.e.s!

it would be like having a robot eating my ice cream. Even if a robot could do it better than me, I like doing it myself 🍦🥰

I'm worried about outsourcing to a machine something that's part of our common endeavour to figure out the world. It's not enough that stuff is figured out, it's about **us** figuring it out! I don't remember phone numbers anymore – I outsourced that to my phone. I don't want that for my science.