Brian Umberger

A stochastic world model on gravity for stability inference Empirical experiments and computational modeling reveal a stochastic world model on gravity for stability inference that represents gravity’s vertical direction as a Gaussian distribution.

This is a cool study. The idea is that perceptual understanding and prediction of gravitational effects implies the existence of an innate(?) internal simulation world model, with some representation of gravity (the study probes the nature of this representation). But... 1/2
doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Flyer for the 2026 IMSI Summer Institute: Recruiting research interns. Join our interdisciplinary research training internship and study biomechanics, muscle physiology, biophysics, neurosciences, rehabilitation sciences and engineering. All career stages welcome, undergraduates especially encouraged to apply. Full time paid opportunity. Intensive research experience, practical skills development, supportive mentorship. Learn more at CIMS.uci.edu. One photo show a lab member collecting motion capture data as a person jumps. Another photo shows IMSI researchers setting up a camera for data collection in at a field research location showing a desert landscape in the foreground and a mountain range in the background.

Call for applications to the 2026 Integrative Movement Sciences Summer Institute!

 This is a funded research internship, open to all career stages.
We especially encourage undergraduates to apply. 

Application deadline is March 21.

More details here: cims.uci.edu/imsi-si-2026/
Please share!

This sound is why I’m required to keep the volume low while watching basketball 🏀 if my spouse is in the room 😂

As a US senator, I'd find it tragic if Americans replaced vaccines with psychedelics and scammy supplements. But it would be even more tragic if I lost in a Republican primary. Therefore, I will be voting to confirm the kooky wellness influencer that Trump nominated for surgeon general.

There's no better feeling that having some major thing I know that I need to fix or update in my upcoming lecture, and then discovering that past me already did it the last time I taught the course! #AcademicSky

Meet Autumn Routt, a PhD student at Georgia Tech studying how pregnancy impacts balance. She uses computational modeling and human-subject research to examine fall risk and prevention during pregnancy.

Part of our Women at IMSI spotlight series. Follow along for more.

#WomenAtIMSI #WomenInScience

This #PictureOfTheWeek emphasizes just how high figure skaters jump. Discover the physics behind the sport’s hardest skills with researcher Deborah King, from reducing the moment of inertia midair to the g-forces endured when landing a quadruple axel. Learn more with our podcast: buff.ly/EthY5Zl

Have a good visit. Near Central Campus: Comet Coffee or Lab Cafe. Both good but very small with limited seating. Ondo is also good with lots more seating.

Excluding the completely unobtainable options, the Quattro was late 1980s me”s dream ride.

Are you interested in the role of visual information in controlling gait stability? In this new paper from our group we exploited optic flow perturbations to study the relationship between gait stability and gait speed. First-authored by Chunchun Wu, read it open access here: doi.org/10.1016/j.hu...

Brain cells drive endurance gains after exercise JAX team helped show that a set of hypothalamus cells are required for mice to improve their endurance in running.

When you finish a run, your muscles may feel like they did all the work, but new research from JAX and the @upenn.edu have discovered that what happens in your brain after a run may determine whether you gain endurance over time. 🧪🧠 https://go.jax.org/brain-exercise

Come join the summer research institute hosted by @movementscience.bsky.social. Lots of great opportunities to start (or continue) your research career in a supportive environment tailored for you!

"Wearable robotics is blurring the boundaries between human body and machines, yet how humans perceive the new body when adapting to these wearables remains unclear." Check out our new PNAS Nexus paper "Projecting the new body: How body image evolves during learning to walk with a wearable robot"

Frog walks through the woods, looking for spring, which, his father told him, is right around the corner. From "The Corner" In *Frog and Toad All Year*

“I walked down a patch in the woods until I came to a corner. I went around the corner to see if spring was on the other side.”

La Retraite de Hugues de Payens, by Georges Mathieu, 1958 (rotated), 📸 by @tiltoncreative

Ho-lee Shit. This is phenomenally good news. Department of Education rolls back— for now— its attempts to destroy Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility initiatives. Keep an eye on them, of course, and watch for the hidden knife, always, but for now: Fantastic news.

Experienced Post-Doc in Skeletal Muscle Molecular Physiology and Epigenetics (296037) | The Norwegian School of Sport Sciences Job title: Experienced Post-Doc in Skeletal Muscle Molecular Physiology and Epigenetics (296037), Employer: The Norwegian School of Sport Sciences , Deadline: Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Now recruiting an experienced Post‑Doc in Skeletal Muscle Molecular Physiology @nih-sport-sciences.bsky.social Oslo, Norway

Join our multi‑omics EMMA project on mitochondrial epigenetic memory in human muscle aging

4‑year position

Start May

Apply at Jobbnorge: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Join us in welcoming @jennicholsphd.bsky.social to our group of Associate Editors handling Musculoskeletal Biomechanics papers. Dr. Nichols directs the Musculoskeletal Biomechanics Lab and co-directs the AI-Powered Athletics initiative at the University of Florida.

Meet Hansol Ryu, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech and Emory University, whose research bridges physiology and control theory to understand human sensorimotor adaptation.

Part of our Women at IMSI spotlight series. Follow along for more.
#WomenAtIMSI #WomenInScience #Biomechanics #STEM

For International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we’re kicking off our Women of IMSI spotlight series. Stay tuned for more!

#InternationalDayOfWomenAndGirlsInScience #WomenOfIMSI #WomenInResearch #STEMCommunity #Biomechanics #ScienceMatters

Our federal leaders, punching down on the next generation of U.S. scientists 😡

This is a graphic showing the path of a quadruple axel jump. The axel is considered the most difficult jump because the skater takes off facing forward, meaning they must complete an extra half rotation to land facing backward. This diagram shows counterclockwise turns, but skaters may also perform clockwise jumps.

Ilia Malinin, the Quad God, became the first—and still, the only—skater to land the quadruple axel in competition in 2022.

Here is a diagram showing the path of this difficult jump. spklr.io/6048DVWu2

📊: @unamandita.bsky.social

Professorship in Early Hominin Evolution at the University of Tübingen:

uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...

Application deadline: 11/03/2026

RVC will be advertising 2 new faculty posts soon, broadly in comparative biomedical science (our department name). Email me jhutchinson@rvc.ac.uk to get informed (I am not on the search panel; just helping). www.rvc.ac.uk/about/the-rv...

Psychology needs a… humility revolution | BPS Madeleine Pownall argues that Psychology is ‘necessarily limited and incomplete’.

Humility Revolution

"Humility is not a threat to scientific authority; it is a strength. It shows disciplinary maturity, intellectual honesty, and methodological pluralism. A humility revolution must, surely, lead to better science."

By @maddipow.bsky.social

#PsycSci #MetaSci #Methodology

These data show that the NSF terminations targeted STEM Ed and Soc Behav and Econ Sciences almost exclusively with an 11.4% drop in active EDU grants and a 7.4% drop in SPE from FY2024 to FY2025 and most other Directorates essentially unchanged (with an overall drop in the number of active grants)

A line grant showing the number of active grants in each NSF Directorate for the years 2021-2025.

More on NSF

Here are the number grants that were active in each year (at least part) including the effects of grant terminations (data from grant-witness.us) by directorate from 2021-2025.

The only directorates showing losses are STEM Education and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.

Statistical Tests as Thought Experiments

“The only populations that can be referred to in a test of significance have no objective reality, being exclusively the product of the statistician’s imagination through the hypotheses which he has decided to test” (Fisher, 1956, p. 77).

"Big Tech has taken the social out of social media, it's just media." — @seabass.bsky.social

a picture of a person in the water with the words call of the deep below it ALT: a picture of a person in the water with the words call of the deep below it

More on NSF funding data

A deeper dive into the numbers of awards by Directorate.

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