Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Julie Charlton

Ali Mohebi @mohebial.bsky.social · 3d

Excited to hear the latest science updates from @czimmerman.bsky.social on Monday, 1-2 pm CST. You can join us too—either on Zoom or in person! bit.ly/3VOJrcy

Neuroscience lecture by Dr. Chris Zimmerman on Body-Brain interactions in learning

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Julie Charlton @juliecharlton.bsky.social · 3d

fortune.com/2025/09/24/s...

Sam Altman’s AI empire will devour as much power as New York City and San Diego combined. Experts say it’s ‘scary’ | Fortune

Andrew Chien told Fortune he’s been a computer scientist for 40 years but we’re close to “some seminal moments for how we think about AI and its impact on society.”

fortune.com

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Julie Charlton @juliecharlton.bsky.social · 3d

www.democracynow.org/2025/10/3/ga...

Italian Unions Strike to Protest Israel’s Attack on Gaza Flotilla

The Global Sumud Flotilla was intercepted by Israeli forces Thursday as its dozens of vessels approached the shores of Gaza. In response to the detention of the flotilla’s activists, Italian labor uni...

www.democracynow.org

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eartha mae @endoeartha.bsky.social · 12d

Very excited and proud to share my postdoctoral research with @neurrriot.bsky.social looking at the context-specific encoding of social behavior 💃🕺 in hormone-sensitive, large-scale brain networks in mice!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#neuroskyence #compneurosky 🧪
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Fanny Cazettes @fannycazettes.bsky.social · 8d

Did you know that facial expressions reveal more than meets the eye? 🤯

Our new study shows that even a mouse's face 🐭 can reflect hidden neural computations🧠. Turns out, facial expressions are more than just emotions!

We're so excited to see this paper out @natneuro.nature.com 🎉
🔗: rdcu.be/eIQzO

Facial expressions in mice reveal latent cognitive variables and their neural correlates

Nature Neuroscience - The face reveals more than just emotion. Cazettes, Reato and colleagues show that subtle facial movements reveal hidden cognitive states, reflecting the brain’s ongoing...

rdcu.be

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Julie Charlton @juliecharlton.bsky.social · 16d

🛑 Attention researchers who train freely-moving rodents!

Jess Breda and I developed a protocol for training center-port nose fixation 61% faster than a previous curriculum while keeping violation rates low.

Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

FixGrower: An efficient and robust curriculum for shaping fixation behavior in rodents

Center-port fixation is a common prerequisite for many freely-moving rodent tasks in neuroscience and psychology. However, typical protocols for shaping this behavior are non-standardized and ineffici...

www.biorxiv.org

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Julie Charlton @juliecharlton.bsky.social · 18d

It's been amazing to watch this beautiful work come together over the last couple of years. Congrats @thomas-zhihao-luo.bsky.social and @timkimd.bsky.social !

Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 19d

What happens in your brain when you make up your mind?

Postdoc (soon faculty at U. of Utah) @thomas-zhihao-luo.bsky.social and ex-grad student (now Shanahan Fellow at Allen Institute) @timkimd.bsky.social have some answers in this new paper out in Nature!

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

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Thomas Luo @thomas-zhihao-luo.bsky.social · 20d

How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature

Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

www.nature.com

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Serge Ahmed @sergeahmed.bsky.social · 20d

This article is truly impressive, both for the significance of its findings and the enormous amount of work it represents!

Briefly, it demonstrates that the gut-brain vagal axis exerts a considerable influence on dopamine-dependent reward-related processes...

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www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Julie Charlton @juliecharlton.bsky.social · 27d

I can't think of a single activity that brings out more neuroticism (in myself) than figure formatting

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Steve Fleming @smfleming.bsky.social · Feb 21

Excited to see this now out in the world!

We identify a computational basis for how persistent underconfidence is maintained in the face of intact performance, finding that it is grounded in impaired updating of global self-beliefs from local metacognition

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

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Distorted learning from local metacognition supports transdiagnostic underconfidence - Nature Communications

Individuals with symptoms of anxiety and depression exhibit persistent underconfidence. Here, the authors show that distortions in learning from local metacognition can explain how underconfidence is ...

www.nature.com

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Julie Charlton @juliecharlton.bsky.social · 28d

Congrats!

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International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social · Sep 3

Two flagship papers from the International Brain Laboratory, now out in ‪@Nature.com‬:
🧠 Brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09235-0
🧠 Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09226-1 +

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Julie Charlton @juliecharlton.bsky.social · Aug 29

Congrats!!

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Julie Charlton @juliecharlton.bsky.social · Aug 21

It happened again while we were at a coffee shop? It doesn't make any sense! At least we have cat suits coming in the mail today (for them not us)

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Julie Charlton @juliecharlton.bsky.social · Aug 21

Can anyone explain how we went to bed with two cats each in cones and woke up to one cat in two cones??

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Simon Kelly @spk3lly.bsky.social · Aug 21

Check out our new multisensory decision study!
We tackle a decades-old Q: does faster detection of bimodal targets come from a race or co-activation between modalities? And also a vital, orthogonal Q: is it one decision process or two?
A1: co-activation
A2: two!
Read here: rdcu.be/eASYd

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Denis Wirtz @deniswirtz.bsky.social · Aug 8

The updated version of the database of PhD fellowships produced and maintained by my team can be downloaded by anyone here:

research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

For each of the 187 fellowships, you will find a short description, deadline, $ amount, link, etc.

Good luck!

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Damien Fair @drdamienfair.bsky.social · Aug 10

I still get chills

Meet Mike
*30+ years severe depression
*first hospitalized @ 13y
*20 meds
*3 rounds of ECT
*2 near-fatal suicide attempts

Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE

see videos, read paper, follow thread
doi.org/10.31234/osf...

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Erin Rich @erinlrich.bsky.social · Aug 7

Happy to have some good science news - our new study with @aqperkins.bsky.social is out in @plosbiology.org!

dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Orbitofrontal cortex computes gaze-dependent comparisons between attributes rather than integrated values

When choosing between options with multiple attributes, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is thought to integrate across those attributes, aiding in value comparisons. This study shows in monkeys that OF...

dx.plos.org

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Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · Aug 5

We are expected just to sit back and watch two million people be starved to death—half of them children—while real estate investors eagerly plan to build oceanside condos.

What’s happening is the most evil thing I’ve witnessed in my lifetime.

PLEASE call your elected representatives and speak out:

US Capitol Switchboard 202-224-3121
CALL

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Julie Charlton @juliecharlton.bsky.social · Aug 1

Congrats!

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Vivian Paulun @vivianpaulun.bsky.social · Aug 1

Super excited to share our new article: “Dissociable cortical regions represent things and stuff in the human brain” with @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, @rtpramod.bsky.social and @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social

Video abstract: www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0XR...

Paper: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lWxv3QW8S...

Things and Stuff: How the brain distinguishes oozing fluids from solid objects

YouTube video by McGovern Institute

www.youtube.com

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Liz Essley Whyte @lizessleywhyte.bsky.social · Jul 29

NEW
The White House is blocking the NIH from awarding new research grants for the rest of the fiscal year

Chokes off billions in research funding

Gift link www.wsj.com/politics/pol... with @nidhisubs.bsky.social

Trump Administration Puts New Chokehold on Billions in Health-Research Funding

The National Institutes of Health can’t award grants to outside researchers under a new White House restriction.

www.wsj.com

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Anna Beyeler 🐝 @anna-beyeler.bsky.social · Jul 10

👨‍💻 Open PI position in our institute 👨‍💻 !! If you are an expert in Computational Neuroscience and want to start your lab in Bordeaux, contact us !
www.fens.org/careers/job-...
@neuromagendie.bsky.social
@neurobordeaux.bsky.social

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