Marcello Solinas

Bordeaux Summer School – Philosophy in Biology & Medicine (1–5 June 2026)

Join us in collaboratively exploring the conceptual foundations of scientific research at the crossroads of philosophy, biology and medicine!

Apply by March 15
More information: bss-philinbiomed.u-bordeaux.fr/en/

Do you work or study in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence, or philosophy?

What does the term 'representation' mean to you?

We invite you to participate in a brief survey on key conceptual questions across fields.

eu.surveymonkey.com/r/VX9GNXM

Very happy to share a new paper in
@npp-journal.bsky.social I thought I knew what would predict escalation of cocaine use. Well, I was wrong. After tracking behavior daily for weeks, the answer turned out to be the opposite of my prediction, and it changed how I see addiction.

Talia Lerner and Jun Ding, backdrop of mountains in Italy at the GRC site

#GRCBasalGanglia co-chairs 4 life 🫶🏼

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Since the Namboodiri lab isn’t on Bluesky (I think?), I’d like to amplify this cool paper which I and others in the Janak lab made a small contribution to.

Neurochemical and Behavioral Evidence of High Abuse Liability of 3F-NEB, a Novel Synthetic Cathinone Synthetic cathinones constitute a major class of New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) with significant abuse potential. Within this class, 3F-N-ethylbuph…

Excited to share our new publication: Neurochemical and Behavioral Evidence of High Abuse Liability of 3F-NEB, a Novel Synthetic Cathinone

Grateful for the support and teamwork during this journey. @msolinas.bsky.social

Read it here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Matthias Michel, Consciousness doesn't do that - PhilPapers The question of which mental functions require consciousness has recently come to the forefront because of its relevance for investigating animal consciousness. Finding out that an animal can perform ...

New paper coming out in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research: "Consciousness doesn't do that". I explain why I believe that animal sentience research is in large part built on sand. In my opinion, we should be skeptical of many of the claims made in this field. philpapers.org/rec/MICCDD

I’m very happy to share the latest from my lab published in @Nature

Hippocampal neurons that initially encode reward shift their tuning over the course of days to precede or predict reward.

Full text here:
rdcu.be/eY5nh

💔

According to Podcast Jay, he can silence anyone or anything as long as he calls it “DEI.”

It’s his magic censorship phrase.

Book cover of “Health and Disease: Experimental Philosophy of Medicine” by Somogy Varga, Andrew James Latham, and Edouard Machery, in the Cambridge Elements: The Philosophy of Biology series. Against a black background, the title is surrounded by Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations of marine organisms—radial, symmetrical forms in vivid blues, oranges, reds, and greens.

New Element in the #PhilBio series by Varga, Latham & @edouardmachery.bsky.social—free to download until Jan 26! If you are looking for a nice introduction to experimental #philmedicine, with an overview of debates & challenges, this book is for you! www.cambridge.org/core/element... #philsky #HPS

The 5 stages of the ‘enshittification’ of academic publishing Academic publishing now shows the same decline that has hit social media and online marketplaces.

++ Reclaiming academic publishing as a public good

theconversation.com/the-5-stages...

Let’s be clear: if the Palestine Action hunger strikers die, the government will bear moral responsibility | George Monbiot The three remaining hunger strikers have been convicted of nothing. Yet with astonishing cruelty, ministers refuse to listen to their reasonable demands, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

If the Palestine Action hunger strikers die - which they could do at any moment, as they are now very close to the end - it will be the government that killed them. Today’s column explains why. Please share, and write urgently to your MP.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

How does your favorite gene respond to stress? Check out our updated “Stressome-app”!

In a new @natcomms.nature.com paper we vastly extend our interactive app with loads of bulk and single-cell transcriptomics after acute and chronic stress. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'll walk you through👇

The feeling of dread upon reading the news is overwhelming. As a child of the 1980s I could never have imagined I'd live to see the collapse of our civilization

ESR : la France accentue son décrochage en 2025 - Universités 2024 Au-delà des péripéties politiques (changements de gouvernement, budgets en attente), que retenir de cette année 2025 ? S’il ne fallait retenir qu’une chose, c’est l’absence quasi totale dans les débat...

#ESR bilan 2025 : l'enseignement supérieur et la recherche en France décrochent sévèrement du peloton de tête, y compris en Europe. Dans de nombreux domaines nous sommes désormais derrière l'Espagne, l'Italie et surtout les Pays-Bas. A lire universites2024.fr/esr-la-franc...

2025: A Review of the Year in Neuroscience Enlightening the brain

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike.

The 10th of these, would you believe?

This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more

Enjoy!

medium.com/the-spike/20...

The Entangled Brain Popular neuroscience accounts often focus on specific mind-brain aspects like addiction, cognition, or memory, but The Entangled Brain tackles a much bigger ...

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻
Annual reminder that the book is open access.
How do we think of the brain as a deeply interconnected system with highly distributed, non hierarchical processing.
Want to learn about the brain from a fresh perspective?
#neuroskyence
mitpress.mit.edu/978026254460...

This paper completely nails an age old theory, leading to a clear law describing the strength of conditioned associations.

elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

title line

screenshots from the nine tasks

Very excited to share the first empirical paper from LEVANTE: we describe the LEVANTE core tasks, a set of nine open source tasks for measuring learning and development in kids ages 5-12 years.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵

Are you an international Master’s student interested in pursuing a PhD in Neuroscience in Paris?

DIM C-BRAINS has opened a call for applications (deadline Feb 1, 2026!).

👉 dim-cbrains.fr/en/phd-progr...

We propose the project “Body-brain mechanisms regulating positive & negative valence”.

American Science, Shattered An eight-decade partnership between universities and the federal government made U.S. science preeminent. It took Trump less than a year to shred that

Explore the first seven parts of American Science, Shattered
A multipart series on how the Trump administration has disrupted labs, upended lives, and delayed discoveries.
www.statnews.com/american-sci...

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :)

The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used

> neal.fun/size-of-life/

The neuronal circuits and cellular encoding of thermosensation - Nature Reviews Neuroscience The thermosensory system across insects and mammals has shared principles of neuronal wiring and encoding. In this Review, Carta, Vestergaard and Poulet discuss how the nervous systems of insects and ...

New review out! 🔥🧊
We break down how rodents, primates & insects encode temperature in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

View-only: rdcu.be/eThU1

All reviewers should read this 👇

🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉
We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience.
It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic.
Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif

Cartoon by @deadder.bsky.social.