Demetrio Ferro

Is academic research becoming too competitive? Nature examines the data Applications for European research grants increased in 2025. Scientists say they’re feeling the competition.

“Is academic research becoming too competitive?”

Alternative framing:

“Is academic research becoming too unsupported?”

The former suggests the blame is on the researchers. The latter highlights underlying causes.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

New article “Disentangling Metabolic & Neurovascular Timescales Supporting Cognitive Processes” by CIMeC_UniTrento in collaboration with leading partner institutes
Congrats F.Saviola, S. Tambalo, L. Beghini, A. Ferrari, B. Cassone, D. Van De Ville, J. Jovicich!
#PNAS: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2506513122

This is the kind of public intellectualism that makes the public hate intellectuals. Instead of showing what ideas have to teach us about life, Pinker holds a gun to life’s head and demands it conform to his thought experiments. And he does it with the patronizing tone of someone telling his readers what to think from on high. In one passage, prompting us to imagine increasingly higher-order levels of knowledge about knowledge, he virtually pats us on the head. “Now let’s try four layers,” he writes. After we’ve tackled four, he asks, encouragingly, “Think you can handle a fifth layer?”

This new book sounds interesting

Public engagement: building common ground How can we help to bridge this divide? Simply producing more excep­ tional science will not be enough to rebuild public trust. Rather, we must adopt a new model that recognizes communication and advocacy as core pillars of science, on a par with rigor and reproducibility. Public engagement efforts should be valued for faculty promotions, much like obtaining grants and publishing our findings in scientific journals. Researchers should be recognized and rewarded for activities such as giving public talks, working with local schools, engaging with policy­ makers, developing social media campaigns and platforms or writing accessible articles for general audiences. Developing these skills must be an integral part of scientific training, reinforcing the notion that the responsibility to champion science lies with us. Courses that teach graduate students and postdocs to communicate complex ideas clearly, to use social media effectively and to advocate for evidence­based policies must be deemed critical and supported by our universities. These efforts should not be viewed as distractions from research but woven into the fabric of what we do as scientists. Rebuilding public trust requires a cultural paradigm shift: scientists must see themselves not just as producers of knowledge, but also as its ambassadors and translators. Such a fundamental change will occur only if it is embraced by our scientific leaders and institutions, emphasizing the critical role of public engagement for science to succeed.

A thought-provoking piece in Nature Neuroscience by many neuroscience colleagues: "Science must break its silence to rebuild public trust". Lots to think about here.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Postdoc depression and anxiety rates are rising, finds survey of 872 researchers The Max Planck Society is good at attracting international postdocs but struggles to retain them, survey finds.

'Postdoc depression and anxiety rates are rising, finds survey of 872 researchers' @nature.com Career News 🧪🎓

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

3000 genes to understand autism and other neurological disorders - El·lipse An international collaboration between researchers at the PRBB and at Yale University shows how genetic alterations happening during early neurodevelopment can translate into neurological pathologies later in life.

🧪 @grib-barcelona.bsky.social & Yale scientists analysed 3.000 genes linked to brain disorders, finding early-life origins for autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and more.

Read the full article 👇

La carn i els lactis, els principals culpables alimentaris dels danys ambientals que afecten a la nostra salut - El·lipse Un estudi liderat per investigadors i investigadores d'ISGlobal ha quantificat per primera vegada els danys a la salut causats pels impactes ambientals de la nostra demanda d'aliments.

🍽️ Segons un estudi d’@isglobal.org, a Espanya la carn i els lactis generen més de la meitat de l’impacte ambiental de la dieta sobre la salut.

Llegeix-lo ara!👇

Un estudi del Clínic-IDIBAPS ha demostrat que, en animals sans, càrregues moderades d’exercici físic poden desencadenar fibril·lació auricular, una alteració del ritme cardíac caracteritzada per batecs auriculars ràpids i irregulars

👉https://f.mtr.cool/yghyhfyhij

#CCN2025 was fantastic!! It was great to meet and catch up with many of you in Amsterdam – Feeling really inspired now by all the cool work I've seen over the past few days @cogcompneuro.bsky.social! Until next year!

CCN has been fantastic so far! Such a nice community and great science! Including two neurosmiths posters so far. Last one today: @ C89 Alex Price presenting on shared algorithms in human neurons and RNNs. #CCN25 #CCN2025

Camila is doing a very good job at presenting her poster "Long Range Cortical Interaction during comparison of sensory and cognitive information" today at #CCN2025!

Sad to miss #CCN2025. It will be the 1st conference where a PhD working w/ me will speak 😭

go see Lubna's talk (Friday) about distributed neural correlates of flexible decision making in 🐒,

work done in collaboration w/ @scottbrincat.bsky.social @siegellab.bsky.social & @earlkmiller.bsky.social

If you are around for #CCN2025, come to B71 poster to know more how we (internally) forage for information and how RL can explain it!

@davidpoeppel.bsky.social points out the elephant in the conference: whichever direction of the planet we look, things are bad.

Einstein, chomsky and arendt point out to us that silence is not neutral

👏 #CCN2025

Oh look, tech company emissions are already up 150%, and the AI data center build out has just gotten started.

BARCCSYN 2025 - Centre de Recerca Matemàtica DEADLINE FOR TALKS OR POSTER PRESENTATIONS April 21st, 2025 REGISTRATION FEE 130 € (100 € for Members of the Catalan Society of Mathematics or Members of the Catalan Society of Biology) Barcelona Comp...

🎉 Excited to announce #BARCCSYN2025 – May 22–23 in Barcelona!

Keynotes by:
🧠 Matteo Carandini ( @carandinilab.net )
🧠 Megan Carey ( @megancarey.bsky.social )
🧠 Chris Summerfield ( @summerfieldlab.bsky.social )

Submit your talk/poster by April 21 & register by May 11!
🔗 crm.cat/barccsyn-2025

Accumulation of virtual tokens towards a jackpot reward enhances performance and value encoding in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.03.640771v1

Just posted a @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social preprint! 📝
Accumulating tokens towards a jackpot enhances decision speed and accuracy, as well as value encoding in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex 🧠. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Thanks to @morenobote.bsky.social, @benhayden.bsky.social, and @upf.edu

Accumulation of virtual tokens towards a jackpot reward enhances performance and value encoding in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.03.640771v1

Yes, Southern Europe and other regions shaded grey here will face extreme heat at 2.7C (and already are even at 1.2C). Grey does not mean OK. This study is focused on serious extremes, like 80+ days per year with max temps above 40C.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01132-6

This image breaks me. At 2.7 degrees of warming, which is our present policy trajectory, two billion people will be exposed to extreme heat.

99.7% of those people live in the global South. People who have done nothing to cause this crisis. The injustice is staggering.

Basal ganglia components have distinct computational roles in decision-making dynamics under conflict and uncertainty journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Cognitive neuroscience: How the brain navigates abstract task spaces Humans and other animals learn the abstract structure of a task and then use this structure to rapidly generalize to new situations. A recent study reveals how the brain builds and uses abstract task ...

Cognitive neuroscience: How the brain navigates abstract task spaces
www.cell.com/current-biol...
#neuroscience

Large-scale interactions in predictive processing: oscillatory versus transient dynamics How do the two main types of neural dynamics, aperiodic transients and oscillations, contribute to the interactions between feedforward (FF) and feedback (FB) pathways in sensory inference and predictive processing? We discuss three theoretical perspectives. First, we critically evaluate the theory that gamma and alpha/beta rhythms play a role in classic hierarchical predictive coding (HPC) by mediating FF and FB communication, respectively. Second, we outline an alternative functional model in which rapid sensory inference is mediated by aperiodic transients, whereas oscillations contribute to the stabilization of neural representations over time and plasticity processes. Third, we propose that the strong dependence of oscillations on predictability can be explained based on a biologically plausible alternative to classic HPC, namely dendritic HPC.

Large-scale interactions in predictive processing: oscillatory versus transient dynamics
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
#neuroscience

YouTube video by iC1 - Instituto Carlos I de Física Joaquín Torres: La conexión entre la física y la inteligencia artificial: El premio Nobel de Física

For all those Spanish-speaking neuroscientists who want to know about why this year's Nobel Prize in Physics is so relevant for neuroscience, my past PhD advisor gave a nice talk about it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=owVu...

‘A place of joy’: why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky Researchers say the social-media platform — an alternative to X — offers more control over the content they see and the people they engage with.

Researchers say Bluesky offers more control - but they're mostly here for all the chat www.nature.com/articles/d41...

‘Huge influx’ of neuroscientists migrates to Bluesky Daily neuroscience-related posts on the social-media platform this week have increased more than 400 percent, on average, compared with October.

Huge influx of neuroscientists migrates to Bluesky
www.thetransmitter.org/community/hu...
#Neuroscience

Registration for #COSYNE2025 is now open!

www.cosyne.org/registration

#neuroscience #NeuroAI

Really looking forward to having CCN meeting in Amsterdam next year --and even better, with full paper submissions!

Gaze-centered gating, reactivation, and reevaluation of economic value in orbitofrontal cortex - Nature Communications Neural mechanisms underlying the canonical computations underlying economic choice are not fully understood. Here authors show that gaze is highly relevant in decision processes, both at the behaviora...

My research is out on @NatureComms! 🎉 #NatureCommunications
nature.com/articles/s41...
We found that gaze👀 plays a crucial role in #decisionmaking, allowing dynamic encoding for offer evaluation in the orbitofrontal cortex🧠. Sincerely grateful to coauthors @MorenoBote, @NeuroPolarbear and supporters