Flavia Mancini

Cambridge neuroscientist joins UK programme to develop next-generation neurotechnologies for chronic pain The EPIONE programme – Effective Pain Interventions with Neural Engineering – is a six-year, £11 million project backed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). It is led by ...

Cambridge #neuroscientist Dr Flavia Mancini has joined a landmark #research consortium aiming to revolutionise the treatment of chronic pain through personalised #neurotechnology

www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/cambrid...

The 6-year, £11m project backed by the EPSRC is led by @ox.ac.uk

#ChronicPain

A cartoon-style illustration of a brain and a computer having a conversation. The brain has eyes and a mouth, and is animated to look like it's talking. It says, 'Have you heard about this comp neuro thing happening at Imperial College?'. The computer has a friendly face on its screen and is replying, 'Yeah it's going to be pretty hot'.

Almost last call to register for UK neural computation conference in London July 10-11. Registration deadline is July 1st. We have some great talks and posters as well as a session on funding with ARIA. 🤖🧠🧪

Look forward to seeing you all there. Now click here 👇

neuralcomputation.uk

Astrocytes sense neuromodulators to orchestrate neuronal activity and shape behavior Astrocytes serve as crucial mediators of neuromodulatory processes previously attributed to direct communication between neurons, four new studies show.

Beyond housekeeping duties, astrocytes also coordinate complex computational tasks during modulation, expanding their role in the brain.

By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/astrocytes/a...

Call for 20 Assistant Professor positions Karolinska Institutet is a world-leading medical university with a long and proud history of ground-breaking research. We are now recruiting outstanding early-career researchers with particularly exce...

Karolinska is looking for 20 (!!) assistant professors and offering 6 year appointments with ~1M USD startup packages.

ki.se/en/about-ki/...

GCSEs harm our young people. Ministers should have the guts to abolish them – and start again | Simon Jenkins A report out this week highlights how destructive the cult of the exam is in Britain’s schools. But it doesn’t go far enough, says Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins

GCSE are more harmful than useful - they should be abolished

Amazing

Congratulations!

"The UK's upfront immigration costs now vastly exceed other leading research nations, so the UK is struggling to compete. EU countries can more easily attract talent from the EU due to free movement, and from non-EU countries due to their relatively low visa costs. "Non-EU countries are also attractive to global research talent due to lower comparative immigration costs than the UK." British scientific institutions are having to spend huge sums on visa costs for cancer professionals they wish to attract and recruit. The Francis Crick Institute, one of the world's leading biomedical research centres, is now spending more than £500,000 a year on visas for cancer scientists. Cancer Research UK institutes are spending almost £690,000 a year, up 44% from £470,000 in 2022-23.

Another report on how our high visa costs deter top R&D talent
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

A neuroimmune circuit mediates cancer cachexia-associated apathy Cachexia, a severe wasting syndrome associated with inflammatory conditions, often leads to multiorgan failure and death. Patients with cachexia experience extreme fatigue, apathy, and clinical depres...

1/ Why do patients with late-stage cancer lose motivation & sink into apathy?
🔥 Our new Science paper shows chronic inflammation activates a cytokine-sensing brain circuit that lowers motivation. Huge team effort: Aelita Zhu, Sarah Starosta, Pignatelli & Janowitz labs! 🧵
🔗 doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Two rather surprising results from the lesioning analysis of the model:

1) Removing the behavioral modulation module led to only a modest (2.8%) reduction in predictive accuracy. Surprising given the known effects of locomotion etc. on mouse visual responses. (1/2)

UCL and King’s College to merge and become ‘super university’ due to increasing costs From September 2025, the two universities will join together and become known as 'London Universities’

There are rumours of a UCL-KCL merger thetab.com/2025/04/01/u...

A second child has died of measles in Texas.

Measles is both dangerous AND preventable. In fact high childhood Vax rates (>95%) can eliminate it completely from a country.

Please read and share our recent report on once common childhood diseases.

independentsage.org/wp-content/u...

Synaptic and neural behaviours in a standard silicon transistor - Nature A standard commercial CMOS FET can exhibit synaptic-like long-term potentiation and depression or neuron-like leaky-integrate-and-fire and adaptive frequency-bursting behaviour when biased in a specif...

The line between brains and computer chips just got blurrier. Everyday chips made to work like neurons with a simple modification. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Great Depression sparked the rise of extremism in the past, and history may repeat itself. Economic turmoil often fuels radical ideologies.

🚨CALL FOR ABSTRACTS & REGISTRATION🚨
Join us in Cambridge for "Exploring Interdisciplinary Frontiers: Cognitive Science, Computational Modelling & AI", sponsored by @acceleratescience.bsky.social @cambridgec2d3.bsky.social
🗓️ 9–10 May 2025 | Hybrid format
🔗 sites.google.com/view/capbs20...

Network renormalization - Nature Reviews Physics The renormalization group (RG) is a theoretical framework to transform systems across scales and identify critical points of phase transitions. In recent years, efforts have extended RG to complex net...

𝗕𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
Wait, that works with simple systems in physics where small scale signals ("details") average out. But how about more "interesting" complex systems?
New approaches are breaking ground there. Great review paper.
www.nature.com/articles/s42...

How flawed data is leaving the UK in the dark Trouble at the Office for National Statistics means policymakers cannot rely on key economic numbers, including on employment

Big piece on how the UK is not getting the data it needs and how this is affecting policymaking. A key issue seems to be that the shift from surveys to admin data has not worked well as govt departments have not allowed the ONS access to the data it needs
on.ft.com/3WSCN6h

@altnih4science.bsky.social @laurenatlas.bsky.social do you have any information please?

Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC) - Montréal, Quebec (CA) job with University of Montreal (UdeM) | 12838461 Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC)

Fantastic opportunity if you are interested in moving your lab to Montreal, Canada! Through this program, Chairholders will be awarded up to $1 million per year for a period of 8 years.

Contact me if you are interested.

www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Is it true that the NIH Office of Pain Policy and Planning (OPPP) has been closed today? How does this affect NIH funding for pain research?

Applications Open for 2025–2026 Undergraduate Research Fellowships in Neuroscience The Simons Foundation is accepting applications from undergraduate students for its Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience program.

Applications are now open for the Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (SURFiN) program for the 2025–26 academic year. This program aims to spark interest in #neuroscience among undergrads who have not had access to research opportunities. www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/3/27/ap...

Chart showing Change in annual income as a result of tax and benefit policy changes announced since the 2024 general election, by income vigintile and whether a household includes a disabled member: UK, 2029-30 (2024-25 prices)

Policy changes this Parliament will be felt very differently across the income distribution depending on whether households contain a disabled member.

How not to build an AI Institute What went wrong with the Alan Turing Institute?

Excoriating insider blog on the Alan Turing Institute. A root cause identified is the governance.

I remember at the time it was set up it was done very quickly with little reflection on structure or strategy, in order to have an announceable. Evergreen lesson
www.chalmermagne.com/p/how-not-to...

'Serious breakdown A review of A&E at a Glasgow hospital found disrespectful behaviour from management towards staff.

This will resonate across the UK #NHS

All eyes on #ScotGov to see if they actually follow the recommendations and #NHSGGC likewise

Damning findings on management culture - a frequent root cause of safety issues not being dealt with as we know now from endless #NHS failures

Huge thanks to Julia Gillard, chair of #Wellcome and former PM of Australia, for her inspiring lecture at #Pembroke marking 40 years since the admission of women. Her motto, “Resist, Reflect, Re-energise,” truly resonated with all of us!

Neural ensembles that encode nocifensive mechanical and heat pain in mouse spinal cord - Nature Neuroscience Zhang et al. identify unimodal neural representations in the spinal cord of cutaneous mechanical and heat stimuli gated by a shared feed-forward local inhibitory neuron type and a neural transition du...

How is the input of the different kinds of primary sensory neurons responding to heat and mechanical stimuli summarized in the spinal cord? Check out our recent study.

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

ARIA Opportunity Space: Scalable Neural Interfaces

Looking for an exciting fellowship in AI & Neuro, with competitive salary (~£100k)? We got a new position in the lab at Oxford, working with @somnirons.bsky.social and me! 🧪

Our project: encode.pillar.vc/projects/beh...

General info: encode.pillar.vc

#compneuro #neuroai #neuroscience #sciencejobs

Closed-loop modulation of remote hippocampal representations with neurofeedback Animal models of memory retrieval trigger retrieval with cues and measure retrieval using behavior. Coulter et al. developed a neurofeedback paradigm that rewards hippocampal activity patterns associa...

Two cool papers out in Neuron today on memory.

1. Animals can be trained to activate specific remote memories at will:

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

2. Interactions between cortex and amygdala during reactivation in NREM sleep help enhance perceptual memories:

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

🧠📈 🧪