"I got my PhD by writing prompts instead of doing research, I'm winning"
got some bad news, there still no jobs and now you also know nothing
Very happy to share our new paper in #ScienceSignaling revealing that importin β1 isn’t just important for nuclear transport or neuronal growth.
We now show it is key for presynaptic plasticity in the hippocampus, local translation, and memory!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Coincidence of thalamic HD signal and retrosplenial visual input is detected in the Presubiculum! 🎯 This may be the neuronal basis for landmark anchoring of the HD signal. Pleased to announce the VOR is now available elifesciences.org/articles/92443 Congrats first author Louis Richevaux 🙌
Finally, if you're looking for a postdoc who can do it all, Vinh is currently finishing a round-the-world cycling trip and is interviewing for positions! Please reach out if interested.
If you prefer a talk to a paper, I walk through the full results and the story in this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNQY...
While the complex spike error signal from a single pull can only provide miniscule LTD/LTP of parallel fibers onto a Purkinje cell, the combined effect across the population of Purks is robust enough to influence the very next joystick pull.
Imaging complex spikes in populations of Purkinje cells during learning reveals the answer: bands of cells respond similarly. Together, these cells encode both the magnitude and the direction of the behavioral error.
But how can mice learn and form a memory so quickly if climbing fibers only provide a binary error/no error signal to Purkinje cells (as in classic supervised learning models)?
Like humans wearing prism goggles, mice learn to adapt their behavior in only a few trials (dark blue). They retain a memory of this adaptation, which they need to "unlearn" when returned to control conditions (light blue).
We trained mice to use a joystick to retrieve water. To test their cerebellar learning, we imposed a perturbation (gain = 2x; lower panel) that they needed to overcome to retrieve the reward.
Excited to share our new article in @natneuro.nature.com with two amazing students in the lab, Vinh Nguyen and Capucine Gros! 🐭🕹️
We investigated how mice learn a joystick task to retrieve water rewards and adapt to sudden perturbations. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Europe's MSCA postdoctoral fellowships are now attracting many researchers who would have gone to the US. So the payline has dropped below 10% (~1,600 fellowships to 17k applicants). Super tough situation. One more reason to double the next Horizon budget, as proposed by the EU Commission.
okay maybe *one* king
Yes, yes, Europe has its benefits. Walkable cities. Cultural heritage. Amazing food. Little gun violence. Healthcare. Governments that are not shut down. But the number of website pop-ups asking one to accept cookies renders the continent pretty much unlivable.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/s...
“If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed…”
Uh, really?
I can’t imagine one of these papers ever influencing my lab’s research. Curious if folks studying noncoding RNA see it differently.
Grateful for the invitation from the Royal Society — and heartening to see the growing momentum, evident throughout the meeting, behind separating evaluation from publication.
Academia may be a prestige economy but it wasn’t some choice of scientific leadership- we do it to ourselves, every day. Leadership rarely makes tenure criteria too down - it’s a committee of peers that sets it up for institutions. Leadership doesn’t sit on study sections - it’s peers doing it!
Almost as impressive as the brown trout you can find in the water just outside.
Grateful for the chance to join this webinar series—great questions and engaging discussion.
Brandon Stell puts it powerfully - and accurately: 'We value publications more than what's inside them.'
It's not something we wanted to hear, but it's something we needed to.
White House Health Report Included Fake Citations www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/w...
The Trump administration just dropped an executive order, "Restoring Gold Standard Science" and there's lots to unpack. This EO reveals more about how the Administration will approach scientific integrity and science in regulatory contexts. Some initial thoughts. 🧵
www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...
📣 Save the date for the 11th PCI webinar on June 18, 2025, at 4 PM CET!! Brandon Stell (CNRS, Paris) will present "Elevating Scientific Standards: Community-Driven Assessment on PubPeer ". For more details and registration, visit: buff.ly/XuownT0
Learn more about the PubPeer Monthly Prize—made possible by the Einstein Foundation (@einsteinberlin.bsky.social)—and explore past winning comments to see what makes a strong entry so that you can win the next one!
pubpeer.com/static/award
Hoping to see Horton's heat at Citi field tonight.
open.spotify.com/track/1QlzrF...
@cubsbot.bsky.social
OK we all get that this is literally impossible though, right? Europe and Canada do not have the resources to absorb 75% of US scientists and btw getting jobs in these places was already competitive for the people who live there.
I still think the best solution is to pay good reviewers—randomly. The more of your reviews an editor flags as useful, the higher your chances of getting paid.
Pet peeve: I hate how often ppl claim “all the researchers will just move to Europe/Canada!” You vastly under-estimate how little money there is there vs the USA- and unless that changes ASAP this loss is just going to decimate global science, full stop. 🧪🔭
Is everyone huffing paint?
Crypto guy claims to have built an LLM-based tool to detect errors in research papers; funded using its own cryptocurrency; will let coin holders choose what papers to go after; it's unvetted and a total black box—and Nature reports it as if it's a new protein structure.
How bad this is depends on how far they are willing to go. Are they willing to fabricate evidence to attack vaccines? My guess would be yes.
