Tjeerd Boonstra

De faculteitsraad Health, Medicine and Life sciences sprak dinsdag opnieuw over de werkdruk. Passen de normuren nog wel bij wat docenten feitelijk doen? De raad vroeg het bestuur om uitleg.

#Werkdruk #UniversiteitMaastricht #Normuren #Faculteitsraad

www.observantonline.nl/Home/Artikel...

Hoe ik vertrok uit Gaza – en voor het eerst oog in oog stond met een Israëlische soldaat Mijn leven lang kende ik het Israëlische leger alleen van veraf: van de vliegtuigen, raketten en drones die de dood over ons in Gaza uitstorten. Maar tijdens mijn evacuatie naar Nederland zag ik voor ...

Hoe ik vertrok uit Gaza – en voor het eerst oog in oog stond met een Israëlische soldaat decorrespondent.nl/16372/hoe-ik...

Restricties?

Launched in 2023, Imaging Neuroscience is now firmly established, with full indexing (PubMed, etc.) and 700 papers to date.

We're very happy to announce that we are able to reduce the APC to $1400.

Huge thanks to all authors, reviewers, editorial team+board, and MIT Press.

Arnold: a generalist muscle transformer policy Controlling high-dimensional and nonlinear musculoskeletal models of the human body is a foundational scientific challenge. Recent machine learning breakthroughs have heralded policies that master ind...

We developed Arnold - the first control policy that learns multiple motor skills across detailed musculoskeletal models. A small step towards understanding the computational principles behind motor intelligence.

De druk op de Maastrichtse woningmarkt voor studenten lijkt een stuk lager dan voorgaande jaren. Het totaal aantal studenten stijgt nauwelijks, waardoor er geen extra kamers nodig zijn, zegt het hoofd van Maastricht Housing.

www.observantonline.nl/Home/Artikel...

#Studentenkamers #Maastricht

China added 256 GW of solar in H1 2025—over 2× the rest of the world combined (124 GW). With ~80–85% of new solar investment happening in China, it dwarfs nuclear builds & makes short-term coal bumps irrelevant. Exponential change is cementing China as the world’s energy leader. #Solar #BESS #SWB

Somato‐Cognitive Action Network in Focal Dystonia Background The central pathology causing idiopathic focal dystonia remains unclear. The recently identified somato-cognitive action network (SCAN) has been implicated. Objective We tested whether ...

🚨 New paper alert!
Excited to share our latest work in Movement Disorders:
“Somato-Cognitive Action Network in Focal Dystonia”
👉 doi.org/10.1002/mds....

We found asynchrony between SCAN and cerebellum in different dystonia subtypes. Thread below.
#dystonia #fMRI #PrecisionFunctionalMapping #neuro

Job alert 🚨 Fully funded PhD position available in our Maastricht lab! Are you interested in predictive processing, individual differences, and computational modelling of behavioural and neural data? Please apply! #NeuroJobs vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...

Expression of Interest in Serving as a PsyArXiv Moderator As you might have heard, PsyArXiv is having some issues with an increase in low-quality submissions, ranging from AI generated manuscripts to inflate citation metrics, incoherent or nonsensical docume...

PsyArXiv is seeking new moderators to help combat an increase in AI submissions! If you've ever posted a preprint to PsyArXiv, please consider joining. Minimum commitment 1h/month, there's a training session this Monday @ 1pm ET. More info here: forms.gle/9LB1rEtxHAeZ... #PsychSciSky

‘What if it’s just good enough, useful to many without being revolutionary?’

Great read on the current status of genAI and how it may further develop and affect our near future

1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research.

This is wrong.

And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.

These are the most challenging times for early-career scientists and engineers.

My team is doing its bit to help by maintaining and even expanding our database of funding opportunities for early-career researchers.

We found 437 of them.

Download it freely here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

Start your morning with two minutes of the testimony of Samuel Garcia, an average American who drove 3 hours to speak truth to power to the Texas legislature. Let’s decide that we are all Samuel Garcia. Get in their faces and make them listen. Mr. Garcia is a great American.

Correlation is not cognition.[1] Stop with the nonsense.

Everyday we slip further into the abyss. I often regret reading emails from other academics.

[1] Guest & @andreaeyleen.bsky.social (2023). On Logical Inference over Brains, Behaviour, and Artificial Neural Networks. doi.org/10.1007/s421...

Meta brought AI to rural Colombia. Now students are failing exams When Meta embedded AI bots in its apps, even students in the most remote corners of Colombia gained access. But rather than boosting learning, it’s getting in the way.

the enshittification of education is underway

restofworld.org/2025/colombi...

Congrats on the nice paper! Haven't read it yet. Do you mean predict in a correlational or causal manner?

Why AI chatbots lie to us A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine needed to collect and format some data from a website, and he asked the latest version of Anthropic’s generative AI system, Claude, for help. Claude cheerfully agr...

LLMs don't lie because they want to. They lie because they're trained to role-play, reinforced to please and lack grounding in truth.

This misalignment isn't just theoretical: it’s showing up in fabricated data, hallucinated praise, even red-teamed blackmail.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The Commission is pushing for a massive increase in funding for Horizon Europe 2028-2034. If I understand correctly, Pillar I, which includes @erc.europa.eu and Marie Sklodowska Curie fellowships, would go from the current €25 billion to €44 billion. Let's hope it happens!

My feeling is that it is stimulated by shallow contact with many students and countered by in-depth contact with a few. If you’re coordinating entire cohorts you mostly hear about the negative outliers

‘The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it’: the terrifying truth about why Tesla’s cars keep crashing Elon Musk is obsessive about the design of his supercars, right down to the disappearing door handles. But a series of shocking incidents – from drivers trapped in burning vehicles to dramatic stops on the highway – have led to questions about the safety of the brand. Why won’t Tesla give any answers?

‘The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it’: the terrifying truth about why Tesla’s cars keep crashing

More broadly, this sentiment plays directly in the cards of populists who argue the same point and want to therefore reduce public spending on research. I just don’t understand why someone who received so much public funding is now making public statements that academics should not be trusted 😟

Spending so much time and effort to try to find and share accurate and unbiased information about the things I study, I am actually a little offended that my colleague says (or implies) I (or my research) shouldn’t be trusted.

Hi Joe, I also saw this post from my Dutch colleague and was very close to respond. I wasn’t so much triggered by the idea that you should trust tech companies but that he said that you shouldn’t trust academics (aka us (as well as himself))

Frontiers | Neural control meets biomechanics in the motor assessment of neurological disorders: a narrative review The emerging concept of “neurobiomechanics” embodies an integrative approach, bringing together insights from functional anatomy, the physiology of the muscu...

Neural control meets biomechanics in the motor assessment of neurological disorders: a narrative review doi.org/10.3389/fnci...

Peripheral neural interfaces for reading high-frequency brain signals - Nature Biomedical Engineering This Perspective argues that neural activity from the central nervous system that is not directly correlated to force production can be sensed via peripheral neural interfaces.

Peripheral neural interfaces for reading high-frequency brain signals doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Always nice to see scientists claim that 90% of their work is research waste

Deciphering disordered regions controlling mRNA decay in high-throughput - Nature Using high-throughput functional profiling, how disordered regions control mRNA stability and translation is explored.

Now I've looked more closely at these two recent papers in Nature, and they are both excellent examples of why we need new narratives for talking about molecular biology to non-specialists. 🧵
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

At #ISPGR2025 we were fortunate to have @olekiehn.bsky.social as keynote today, sharing with us his cutting edge research on context-dependent locomotor pathways, with implications for understanding locomotor impairment in people with Parkinson’s disease and #DBS opportunities to treat those.