Lucas C Parra

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

1/10

The impact is already hitting science agencies hard. The NIH—the world's largest public biomedical research funder—has had to rely on leftover stopgap funds.

New grant awards have slowed to a trickle — exacerbating the effects of a record-long shutdown in October.

(h/t @jeremymberg.bsky.social)

12-3pm Mar 7 Parkman Bandstand Boston Common

😂😂😂😂

"Post-Learning Offline Pauses Support Consolidation Beyond the Mind-Wandering State"
www.preprints.org/manuscript/2...

𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁/𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰
So we model the dynamics.
Version of record of our paper is available.
#neuroskyence
elifesciences.org/articles/102...

CCN Proceedings submission deadline coming up soon!

Feb 9 - abstract and metadata
Feb 12 - full paper PDF

A multi-region recurrent circuit for evidence accumulation in rats Gupta et al. demonstrate that the rat prefrontal cortex and striatum jointly accumulate sensory evidence through recurrent, bidirectional communication rather than a feedforward hierarchy. Combining m...

Very cool work on how distributed, recurrent neural circuits cooperate to implement evidence accumulation. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Another horrific ICE shooting in Minneapolis. Man wrestled to the ground by federal agents, then shot multiple times.

www.reddit.com/r/Minneapoli...

@startribune.com is there: www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi...

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

A long, absolutely must-read article from Cory Doctorow: www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Wanna compare dynamics across neural data, RNNs, or dynamical systems? We got a fast and furious method🏎️
The 1st preprint of my PhD 🥳 fast dynamical similarity analysis (fastDSA):
📜: arxiv.org/abs/2511.22828
💻: github.com/CMC-lab/fast...
I’ll be @cosynemeeting.bsky.social - happy to chat 😉

🚨 New paper in @pnas.org to end 2025 with a bang!🚨

Behavioral, experiential, and physiological signatures of mind blanking
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

with Esteban Munoz-Musat, @arthurlecoz.bsky.social @corcorana.bsky.social, Laouen Belloli and Lionel Naccache

Illustration: Ana Yael.

1/n

Cortical field coupling (aka volume conduction) lamina-to-lamina (1) and column-to-column (2).

(1) www.jneurosci.org/content/41/3...

(2) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Link? Would love to read.

Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species

1
To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Well done Swissuniversities! @snsf.ch et al. once again leading the charge (see previous special issue announcement).

Funders and institutes hold the cards. If they don't pay the profiteers, we researchers will just adapt.

We don't need Nature. Nature needs us.

#SciPub #ResearchIntegrity

Sure, it is still well defined that way. But the claim about internal/external thought associated with more/less neural activity in the DMN seems to be flipped now.

And here I thought naively that my uptick in citation in 2025 on Google Scholar was due to my terrific scholarly contributions. Turns out, EVERYONE I know has had an uptick in citation in 2025. 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Academic publishing is broken.

Anyone in the business of stringing words together is on notice.

Horrifying glimpse into a possible future of the scientific information ecosystem.

Fake papers cited dozens of times in real journals, and indexed in our most commonly used databases -- As this grows, it could become a corruption of the literature impossible to undo.

1/2

#academicsky 🧠🟦

Wow. In fMRI, up is up and down is down, sometimes, but sometimes it's the other way around. This finding trashes the main claim on the default mode network, which states that it's brain areas have higher neural activity during internally oriented throught. Turns out, it's the other way around. 😂😂

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Interesting. Reminds of this ...

www.psycharchives.org/index.php/en...

We should just use standardized test scores + grades to admit students into college.

Everything else is way too easy to game, allowing the extremely rich to dominate access to prestigious colleges. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I've been saying this for a long time, but the data makes it clear.

Taming the chaos gently: a predictive alignment learning rule in recurrent neural networks - Nature Communications The study presents Predictive Alignment, a local learning rule for recurrent neural networks that aligns internal network predictions with feedback. This biologically inspired method tames chaos and e...

Taming the chaos gently: a predictive alignment learning rule in recurrent neural networks

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

Obituary – Jonathan Smallwood

Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social was a beloved friend and mentor. He was taken from us too soon. His was a beautiful mind who understood the beauty of minds. As ever before, his kind voice guides me and his work will continue. We miss you Jonny. www.cbs.mpg.de/news/obituar...

Immunometabolic dysregulation in depression predates illness onset and is associated with lower brain gray matter volume - Nature Mental Health In this study, Tian et al. use data from the UK Biobank to investigate the course of immunometabolic changes in depression and its impact on structural brain changes.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma.

It's *scientific publishing*.

We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_...

Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

The Authoritarian Stack How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next

Please take a minute to scroll through this—and share it.
It's the story of our time.

The Authoritarian Stack: How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic American—And Why Europe Is Next.

www.authoritarian-stack.info

Black-and-white portrait of Maria Skłodowska-Curie, 1903. She is seated in a chair, wearing a dark dress with a light, patterned collar, resting her head on one hand and looking directly at the camera. public domain

Lise Meitner around 1906 in Vienna. She is wearing a long dress and a hat, standing among large plants and looking to the side. public domain

Today we celebrate the birthday of not one, but two amazing women in science! 🤗🎉Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1867), who discovered #radium & #polonium & pioneered #radioactivity, & Lise Meitner (1878), whose brilliance uncovered the physics behind #nuclearfission. Happy birthday, trailblazers! ✨