Ritchie Brown

Slow-wave sleep is associated with nucleus accumbens volume in elderly adults Slow-wave sleep (SWS) is essential for restorative neural processes, and its decline is associated with both healthy and pathological ageing. Building…

Slow-wave sleep is associated with nucleus accumbens volume in elderly adults

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

maybe you want to escape the US for a while, happy to host you.

a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on ALT: a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on

Bluetorial: My NIH grant got funded; The money is in the bank

What happens behind the scenes with NIH fund transfers

Looks amazing

I was happy to #standupforscience2025 yesterday. And of course, I have been thinking about things I didn't have a chance to say.

Like because of the chaos at NIH (and the freezing of funding), how my team has been waiting for NOAs for two non-competing renewals since mid-January.

1/

Want to work in another country?

The HFSP postdoc fellowship supports proposals for frontier, potentially transformative research in the life sciences and cross-disciplinary. high-risk projects are encouraged
LOI opens March 13, 2025

#neuroskyence #academicsky 🧪🧠🪰🌱🧬
www.hfsp.org/funding/hfsp...

NIH ban on renewing senior scientists adds to assaults on its in-house research Policy follows firings of tenure-track scientists and suspension of training programs

Of the 4000 researchers at NIH, only 20% are tenured. They’re going to fire all the rest as their contracts come up for renewal, absolutely decimating research at the NIH. This is catastrophic, not just for Americans, but for the whole world.

www.science.org/content/arti...

share of americans who say the federal department of veterans affairs should be expanded: 46%

reduced: 5%

-yougov

Senior researchers in the US looking for a new job check this out with Canadian Universities. These are prestigious chairs with 7-10 year research support. Salary is not linked to grants in Canada.

Federal Employee Firings Threaten the Future of American Research, Scientists Fear After widespread government layoffs, scientists worry about the uncertain future of research and advocate action to rise above the situation.

New article up in The Scientist

the-scientist.com/federal-empl...

VA Research Funding Slashed Though not as prominent as the NIH, VA researchers play a major role in advancing basic health science. Hundreds of projects have been cut.

NIH cuts are getting the press, but VA research is getting slashed too. What do we lose when VA research goes away? Here's some greatest hits: The nicotine patch, invention of the cardiac pacemaker, first successful liver transplant, development of the CAT/CT scan

prospect.org/health/2025-...

Hippocampus and basal forebrain degeneration differentially impact cognition in Lewy body spectrum disorders Rau et al. investigate the effects of degeneration of the hippocampus and basal forebrain on cognition in Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia. They

"The basal forebrain & hippocampus were differentially associated with distinct neurocognitive domains, thus providing an intriguing biomarker for neurocognitive staging in Lewy body disease or individualized treatment concepts"
academic.oup.com/brain/advanc...

Opinion: A century of research improving veteran health Downtown Iowa City aerial looking south on Tuesday, May 29, 2012, in Iowa City, Iowa. Veterans Administration Hospital is at …

Great article by @eliowa.bsky.social saying thank you & discussing importance of the Department of Veterans Affairs, VA researchers & our nations veterans for 100 years of service on the battlefield & their commitment towards improving medical care through research
www.thegazette.com/guest-column...

Anger, despair, and defiance from a voice within the US federal research system People around the world are watching with disbelief as the new US government closes down its aid programme, withdraws from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris agreement on climate change...

"The very fact that I am having to publish this anonymously in a country that has the right to free speech written into our Constitution is an indictment of what is happening."
www.bmj.com/content/388/...

Just very happy to have our paper out today! A big thanks to all our co-authors, and to Nikolai and @steinaerts.bsky.social for the teamwork over the past years. If you are interested in using our models for cross-species enhancer studies, check out crested.readthedocs.io/en/stable/mo... 🙂

Opinion | Trump Wants to Destroy All Academia, Not Just the Woke Parts (Gift Article) The administration’s war on universities defies rational self-interest.

"the extremely strong desire is to just punish universities [..] It’s not based on any kind of coherent policy agenda. It’s just a desire to inflict pain."

This, is critical to understand. Pointing out "it's hurting us" won't do, since it's the whole point.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/o...

I lost my job. USDA Forest Service. My probation was up next week. I did everything right. I took a GS-7 role with a master’s degree just to get my foot in the door. I spent years doing seasonal fieldwork for low pay, working in remote places, gaining experience, and building skills, just for a chance at a permanent position. I was about to be a GS-9. I wrote NEPA reports. I conducted field surveys. I worked fire support. I dedicated myself to this work because I believed in it. Public lands don’t manage themselves. The wildlife, watersheds, and forests we protect don’t just stay protected without people on the ground making it happen. My coworkers and I took on that responsibility, often in places most people never think about but that matter more than they know. And now? Just like that, I’m out. Edit: I’ve consistently supported progressive policies and have voted Democrat in every national and local election since I was 18. I do appreciate folks asking, I have some coworker having a serious 'leopards ate my face' moment right now.

This comment on r/fednews really stood out to me. Trump and Musk want people to think they're firing do-nothing "bureaucrats," but they're really getting rid of people dedicated to serving this country and keeping it operational. I hope these stories get told.

Are the Trump team’s actions affecting your research? How to contact Nature Use this form to share information with Nature’s news team, or to make suggestions for future coverage.

Use this form to tell us how the new US administration is affecting your research, or suggest future coverage

https://go.nature.com/42SyoUu

DOGE vs. the NIH: Say goodbye to the greatest engine of biomedical research ever created | Science-Based Medicine Friday, the Trump administration slashed indirect costs for NIH grants. What does this mean, and why could it be so disastrous for biomedical research?

When DOGE meets the NIH, nothing good comes of it. sciencebasedmedicine.org/doge-vs-the-...

The White House specifically exempted VA from the hiring freeze, but it sounds like the DOGErs at OPM have different ideas.
By controlling core government systems (IT, payments, personnel), Musk is controlling the government.

Beautiful thread, thank you, I couldn’t agree more

My lab strives to reduce infertility, miscarriages, and birth defects. We want y’all to have healthy kids.

I know it sounds weird, but indirect costs pay for lights, HVAC, maintenance, cleaning, safety, and admin.

It’s really hard to reduce birth defects in the dark.

Call your representatives

Watch a professor explain the evolutionary war that gave us caffeine - Berkeley News Through the eyes of UC Berkeley professor Noah Whiteman, the food we love is the product of four billion years of coevolution between plants and animals.

Coevolution in 101 seconds! news.berkeley.edu/2025/02/06/w...

Steeped in Science: The Chemistry Inside Your Perfect Cup of Tea - American Chemical Society Learn the chemistry behind the different styles of tea and how to use science to brew a better cup!

Come hear me spill the tea on caffeine versus theophylline and what in tea might ease anxiety. And of course, what salt might do to improve a cup. Registration is free. www.acs.org/acs-webinars... #chemsky

Title page of the paper "Hypoxia as a medicine"

Figure 2 from the paper: Physiological responses to and pathological consequences of hypoxia for different organ systems. Quantitative estimates are based on studies of healthy adult volunteers in the first 48 hours after moving from sea level to a 13% normobaric hypoxia chamber or the altitude equivalent to this oxygen concentration (hypobaric hypoxia) (107–110). CMRO2, cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen consumption. CREDIT: A. FISHER/SCIENCE TRANSLATIONAL MEDICINE

🧪 #medsky

Oxygen is essential for humans. But breathing less oxygen long-term shows surprising healing powers in pre-clinical (animal) studies.

It's intriguing to think that one day 'oxygen diet' may become a treatment for some genetic (mitochondrial) diseases, heart damage, and brain disorders.

Federal employees you may have already received this tip. It was shared in a group chat and I was given the okay to post on my support group.

Tell any feds you know: Word from AFGE is that we should all download our eOPF file ASAP. They are taking it offline tomorrow to "amend" performance reviews

National Science Foundation suspends salary payments, leaving researchers unable to pay their bills An NSF online payment system remained down after the federal funding freeze was lifted, leaving early-career scientists scrambling to pay bills

“One scientist texted his landlord to say February rent would be late. Another wasn’t able to pay her credit card bill. Yet another wondered how much longer he could afford his mortgage.”

@ericboodman.bsky.social on NSF’s payment system being down 🧪🔬🦠

www.statnews.com/2025/01/30/t...

The locus coeruleus norepinephrine (LC-NE) system regulates arousal and awakening; however, it remains unclear whether the LC does this in a global or circuit specific manner. We hypothesized that sensory-evoked awakenings are predominantly regulated by specific LC-NE efferent pathways. Anatomical, physiological, and functional modularities of LC-NE pathways involving the mouse basal forebrain (BF) and pontine reticular nucleus (PRN) were tested. We found partial anatomical segregation between the LC->PRN and LC->BF circuits. Extracellular NE dynamics in BF and PRN exhibited distinct sound-evoked activation during sleep, including a fast sound-evoked NE peak specific to PRN. Causal optogenetic interrogation of LC efferent pathways, by retro-ChR2 activation or PdCO silencing of synapses in target regions, revealed a pivotal role for early LC->PRN activity in driving arousal and sound-evoked awakenings. Together, our results uncover a prominent role for early LC-NE PRN activity in connecting sensory and arousal pathways and establish LC heterogeneity in regulating arousal.

An early surge of norepinephrine along brainstem pathways drives sensory-evoked awakening

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy to see this great work (and some PdCO application) out in the wild.

📢 New preprint from the lab:

We are very excited to report the discovery of an oscillation in the Central Thalamus using rare direct recordings of human thalamic electrophysiology.

The novel oscillation is tightly coupled to specific, natural states of consciousness.🧵