Tim Verstynen

This is called “chain refoulment” and it’s illegal under both U.S. and international law. And the State Department and ICE know very well what Ghana is doing and simply don’t care.

A third infant in Kentucky has died of whooping cough this year.

Reminder: The best way to protect against whooping cough is to get vaccinated. Adults should get a Tdap booster every 10 years, so please check, you may be overdue!

Administrators gave themselves uncapped "performance" raises while the rest of us have a 4/4 load, no research or travel support, and no way to fill lines left empty by retirements.

Administrators got housing stipends while most of us can't afford to live near the institutions we work at.

How cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic subnetworks can shift decision policies to increase reward rate Author summary The task of selecting an action among multiple options can be framed as a process of accumulating streams of evidence, both internal and external, up to a decision threshold. A decision...

You can think of decisions as evidence accumulation, and the accumulator as an RL policy. Then, dopamine in the basal ganglia works by dynamically changing policy to maximize reward rate 🤯 A tour de force modeling paper by @tdverstynen.bsky.social and team! journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Awe, thanks!

So they use something else then?

So we now have likely mammal-to-mammal transmission of the bird flu at the same time that our national health agencies leadership is actively attacking public health.

This is a bit terrifying.

Well that’s terrifying, along with being extremely sad.

I regrettably stopped following this a while ago. Does this mean there is now mammal to mammal transmission?

🙄

Air Pollution From Industrial Facilities Is Far Worse Than Estimated The Trump administration has put a stop to EPA rules that would have required more than 130 industrial facilities to install air monitors to measure pollution. Millions of people living near these pla...

About 90,000 people living near larger chemical plants face an unacceptable risk of developing cancer, the EPA says.

New rules adopted last year could’ve cut that number to 3,000 residents — a drop of 97%.

But Trump has halted those efforts.

neuroimaging | Satterthwaite Lab | UPenn www.satterthwaitelab.com Homepage for Satterthwaite lab neuroimaging | neurodevelopment | adolescence | psychiatry | machine learning | network science

#PenNLINC is recruiting a clinical coordinator / lab manager!!! Looking for someone who is good with both people + code, wants to learn to acquire + analyze imaging data. Alumni in this role have written 1st author papers + gone to top grad programs.

Website: www.pennlinc.io

Job: bit.ly/4ojvCir

Our new paper is out in Nature Communications! nature.com/articles/s41...

We combined psychophysics, 7T fMRI, and computational modeling of vision with placebo, 5mg, and 10mg psilocybin, in the same group of participants, to clarify the computational mechanisms of psychedelics. 🧵

I remember talking to Michael Silver (UC Berkeley) a long time ago about how he found a similar effect in people with schizophrenia. Not sure if he published it or not, but it was really puzzling him at the time.

In other words, we found that psilocybin altered a fundamental computational building block of contextual processing in the human brain: divisive normalization, particularly in the form of visual surround suppression.

Enter the divisive normalization population receptive field model. The parameter governing surround suppression systematically dropped with psilocybin! This could not be explained by noise or HRF changes alone, which are also included in the model. 🤖

Umwelt - Wikipedia

Isn’t this just umwelt?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt

No

This paper provides guidance and tools for conducting open and reproducible systematic reviews in psychology. It emphasizes the importance of systematic reviews for evidence-based decision-making and the growing adoption of open science practices. Open science enhances transparency, reproducibility, and minimizes bias in systematic reviews by sharing data, materials, and code. It also fosters collaborations and enables involvement of non-academic stakeholders. The paper is designed for beginners, offering accessible guidance to navigate the many standards and resources that may not obviously align with specific areas of psychology. It covers systematic review conduct standards, pre-registration, registered reports, reporting standards, and open data, materials and code. The paper is concluded with a glimpse of recent innovations like Community Augmented Meta-Analysis and independent reproducibility checks.

There is no reason why systematic reviews can't be open. The data used for synthesis is *already* open and there are many excellent open source tools that can facilitate the easy sharing of analysis scripts.

Here's a nice guide for performing open systematic reviews doi.org/10.1525/coll...

Dale Partridge on Twitter writes: "Feminist media is BIG mad about me saying that women shouldn’t wear underwear (leggings and sports bras) as outerwear. As Pearl says, “It’s amazing how hard women will fight to be naked.” Immodest ladies, read 1 Tim. 2:9, repent, and follow Christ." Attached are two images. Image 1 headline: “Outraged pastor slams worker at quaint coffee shop for wearing ‘sinful’ leggings and sports bra in front of kids” Image 2 headline: “‘Make sin shameful again’: Pastor sparks row after sports bra complaint”

A friend who teaches theology shared with me a post about CS Lewis's Mere Christianity, which discusses foundational Christian logic across denominations. It reminded me of Dale's tweet below, and I wanted to share some thoughts here regarding modesty and respectability, which are often hot topics.

Raccoons In Cities Are Changing—And Getting More Petlike A new study finds that fluoride is safe for kids’ brain—and linked to slightly better test scores.

A new study finds that fluoride is safe for kids’ brain—and linked to slightly better test scores.

First revealed in spy photos, a Bronze Age city emerges from the steppe An unexpectedly large city lies in a sea of grass inhabited largely by nomads.

First revealed in spy photos, a #BronzeAge #city emerges from the steppe

An unexpectedly large city lies in a sea of grass inhabited largely by nomads.

arstechnica.com/science/2025...

#archaeology #Kazakhstan

In Monrovia, California, protesters are purchasing 17¢ ICE scrapers from Home Depot and immediately returning them to create long lines and slow down the entire store. Their aim is to disrupt sales and convey a message opposing ICE raids occurring in their neighborhood.

crab

“I asked ChatGPT” “I asked Claude” I asked this horseshoe crab and he said your ass wouldn’t have lasted two seconds in the Triassic

The only difference between this and the Better Way antivaxxer conference I covered in 2022 is that now it’s absolutely ascendant in the most horrifying way possible.

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

Heard an established successful neuroscientist dismissing junior scientists as "people at the bottom" 🤦‍♀️

You folks with lots of research funds & power: young scientists more than ever need our respect and support even if you don't agree with their ideas and approaches
#sfn2025

As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses, and researchers striving to improve the lives of others, I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world's largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings. Hundreds of N.I.H. grants and clinical trials were cancelled, affecting thousands of patients. I worried about funding for leukemia and bone-marrow research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. I worried about the trials that were my only shot at remission. Early in my illness, when I

Just an absolutely gutting essay by Tatiana Schlossberg, a writer, mother of two young children, and cousin of RFK Jr who is dying of leukemia.

www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

I wonder how many people sincerely believe that it is real?

I genuinely believe that Trump has no idea what an oath to the Constitution means.