Luke Sjulson

YouTube video by UChicago Social Sciences LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively

“If I can communicate all of my math”

Respectfully, you’re making the same mistake that all PhD students make, which is thinking that the goal of your presentation is communicating what you have done. Watch this first, and your presentation will be 5x better www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIz...

The NIH institute director firing last Friday is very bad.

I made a video explainer about why.

Stay for last post, w link to @science.org story from @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social

1/4
🧪

Once you learn the minimal basics with an online course or book or whatever, transition away from exercises to mini-projects for yourself that are things you actually want to get done. Reorganizing your photos, automating things, whatever it is, write code to do it

I made a video about the shutdown, and why this government worker won’t be a pawn.

When the president and Supreme Court are both acting lawlessly, Congress must stand up and stop it.

US science is collapsing and Congress needs to act.
🧪
Full video here: www.instagram.com/reel/DP1tXXE...

Congrats!

Nolan was the developer of the SNT TMS protocol, the most promising new treatment for depression there is. It’s a real tragedy

Public engagement: building common ground How can we help to bridge this divide? Simply producing more excep­ tional science will not be enough to rebuild public trust. Rather, we must adopt a new model that recognizes communication and advocacy as core pillars of science, on a par with rigor and reproducibility. Public engagement efforts should be valued for faculty promotions, much like obtaining grants and publishing our findings in scientific journals. Researchers should be recognized and rewarded for activities such as giving public talks, working with local schools, engaging with policy­ makers, developing social media campaigns and platforms or writing accessible articles for general audiences. Developing these skills must be an integral part of scientific training, reinforcing the notion that the responsibility to champion science lies with us. Courses that teach graduate students and postdocs to communicate complex ideas clearly, to use social media effectively and to advocate for evidence­based policies must be deemed critical and supported by our universities. These efforts should not be viewed as distractions from research but woven into the fabric of what we do as scientists. Rebuilding public trust requires a cultural paradigm shift: scientists must see themselves not just as producers of knowledge, but also as its ambassadors and translators. Such a fundamental change will occur only if it is embraced by our scientific leaders and institutions, emphasizing the critical role of public engagement for science to succeed.

A thought-provoking piece in Nature Neuroscience by many neuroscience colleagues: "Science must break its silence to rebuild public trust". Lots to think about here.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The basis of synaptic transmission was worked out at the frog neuromuscular junction, and most of what we know about ion channels used frog eggs as a heterologous expression system

The mechanistic basis of action potentials in squid axons by Hodgkin and Huxley is pretty much the basis of neuroscience and cardiology

sounds really interesting, thanks!

Thanks, I'll check it out. As a molecular biologist, I find Gallistel's ideas about molecular memory storage to be beyond ludicrous, and I haven't dug deeper into his stuff because of that. But I know that's a little unfair because it's not his area, and I should probably give him another chance

Thanks. This is really interesting, but I am having trouble wrapping my mind around it. Do you have any ideas for a model that could explain this?

This might be a dumb question, but if T is longer than I, could the animal be forming an association with the cue in the next trial instead of the current one?

So I get that a Neuroscientist Couldn’t Understand a Microprocessor, and TBH I’m ok with that. But could a neuroscientist understand a deep RNN? Because that seems like a more pressing issue.

*assuming you think the brain operates through the parallel activity of many connected input/output units

💯and I’m surprised by how many people that insight seems to have escaped. I have a lot of respect for Konrad, but I was baffled by the superficiality of the argument

Awesome news, congrats!

Anyone interested in optics needs to check out this wild story of how those gigantic photomultiplier tubes were made:
www.hamamatsu.com/jp/en/why-ha...

Development of 20-inch PMTs:Why Hamamatsu? | Hamamatsu Photonics

@tdverstynen.bsky.social check this out www.hamamatsu.com/jp/en/why-ha...

I love that you saw that and also immediately recognized the need to photograph it

at the time

that was available at the time. In some cases the clinician makes an obvious error, but in a case like this where the correct diagnosis was made and it's a choice between two different treatment options, there can be a lot of gray area, and wrong-in-retrospect does not necessarily mean it was wrong

I'm glad to hear that your mom is doing well. Without knowing anything about the specific details of your mom's case, I would say that in situations like this Monday morning quarterbacking is easy, and it's not always clear cut what the "right" and "wrong" choices were with the information

Yeah, clinicians (including myself) are wrong sometimes, no question. Medicine is intrinsically hard, and it isn’t easy to stay up to date. That doesn’t mean that professional clinicians don’t have knowledge and insight that laypeople don’t

Often the worst examples are people who’ve experienced an illness first hand and think they understand the entire scope of that illness better than professional clinicians

You’re right, and I think a key difference is that professionals see thousands of people, and laypeople (even those with direct personal experience) tend to overgeneralize from small N examples and underestimate the complexity and heterogeneity of mental illness

It can be very easy for people who have never professionally sat with people (and their families) who experience the devastation of mental illness to pontificate about its existence and treatment from an armchair.

I think everyone in my lab wants to do that with the entire building we’re in

I think so. But I’m not sure that PMTs have changed that much since then, other than GaAsP electrodes

Good question, I don’t know. I suspect it’s one of the PMTs from the Super K neutrino observatory