Twitter-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests).
Tim Behrens
6,186 posts
- I had the privilege to be on a zoom call with Francis Collins (Outgoing NIH director) today. I asked him why NIH didn’t give full backing to open non-profit publishing. He replied this would likely lead to NIH funding cuts due to commercial journals’ lobbying power in US govt.
- My 7yo son imagines fancifully ambitious Lego projects, pathetically absent in any detail. He then demands that I execute them, and regularly checks on my progress without offering any constructive input. I think he is destined to be a PI.
- Come on brain scientists. 2022 is the year we’re going to solve it. For sure.
- New service available to all. Will retweet for $9500. If you pay $2600 (non-refundable), I will advise you on whether your tweet is good enough to be retweeted, and may or may not divert you to a colleague with a lower follower count.
- Some notes about starting a lab. users.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/~behrens/Start…
- 1700 people currently at #neuromatch2020, a conference which did not exist 3 weeks ago and all of them in the comfort of their own homes. Totally unbelievable. An amazing achievement by @KordingLab @neuralreckoning @titipat_a et al.
- The recent open reviewing debate is a reminder to treat people like humans first and scientists second. Being kind has always been, and remains, more important than being right.
- First reviewed preprint published under eLife's new model. Posted to biorXiv Nov 21st. Reviewed preprint posted 2 months later. Looks like a paper. Authors can choose to answer the reviewers and have it updated. Or leave it. Here it is. A Revolution: elifesciences.org/reviewed-prepr…
- This is one of the most striking optogenetic effects I have ever seen. Stimulate the Gabaergic cells in the mrn and the animal can't stop what it is currently doing, even if aversive. Stimulate the Glutamatergic cells and it switches to something else.
- A long time ago I was sitting in Demis’ office in Russell Square. Demis said he was going to use AI to solve everything. It just seemed so ridiculous that I laughed. Who’s laughing now?Research published in Nature reports a deep reinforcement learning architecture to design controllers for the magnetic confinement of plasmas in tokamaks go.nature.com/3uRq1Yj
- However far you progress in science you always think that there is a set of people who know more than you. Who are looking down at you. Then later you always discover they didn’t, and they weren’t. They were just as baffled as you were.
