hkl @hkl@qoto.org

The strain on scientific publishing

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15884

#academia #AcademicChatter #PublishOrPerish

Oooooooooooh! How perfect for #TongueOutTuesday This is the leucistic raven that has been spotted by about a thousand people in the Anchorage area. Photo by Michelle Hanson.
#Alaska #AlaskaWildlife #BirdsOfAlaska #WhiteRaven

When the conference doors close, these scientists rock out.

A Pavlov’s Dogz show has become tradition at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting.
https://www.thetransmitter.org/community/when-the-conference-doors-close-these-scientists-rock-out/
#neuroscience

YES!
This is precisely what every university (and scholarly society!!) should be doing: have their own instance and drop X like a hot potato:

"an instance has been created [... ] on university servers, which is open to the university's organizational units. The active use of X will be significantly reduced."

https://www.uibk.ac.at/en/newsroom/2023/university-of-innsbruck-focuses-on-mastodon/

We detail all the arguments about precisely why that must happen here:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230207

"In fact, research indicates that, in labs where postdocs are more engaged, PhD students can be 4 times as likely to have positive skill development; mentoring by principal investigators had no discernible statistical effect on the same variable"

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002349

“Insulin belongs to the world, not to me.” — Dr. Frederick Banting wanted insulin to be within reach of everyone who needed it.

But every single House Republican voted against capping the price of insulin at $35/month for the 8.4 million Americans who need it.

Humans are not rodents: Activity in primate visual cortex is minimally driven by spontaneous movements https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01459-5 Now what are good scientific questions to ask when probing adaptation to visual-to-auditory sensory substitution? #neuroscience

Long-term availability of The vOICe is guaranteed https://web.archive.org/web/20211225143619/https://www.seeingwithsound.com/webvoice/webvoice.htm Internet Archive; #bionic #ethics

Neural correlates of theory of mind reasoning in congenitally blind children https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929323000907 "data suggest that vision facilitates, but is not necessary for, ToM development"

Cool story: xenografting of human #neurons into mouse #Alzheimers model resulted in their death by #necroptosis. This process involves #lncRNA MEG3, possibly via TNF inflammatory signaling. This study revealed human-specific vulnerability in AD.
#neuroscience
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp9556

Pretty interesting new data on GluA1 homomers from Ingo Greger’s lab. Distinct structural dynamics of this special subclass, compared to other AMPAR, are examined at multiple levels, from CryoEM to synaptic responses. #glutsmate #ionchannels #synapses https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06528-0

Neural tuning instantiates prior expectations in the human visual system https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41027-w Now my prior is that I expect to see a rising bright line when hearing a rising tone - so brain, get on to it! #neuroscience

A galaxy view edge-on by the Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 5866, also known as the Spindle Galaxy or Messier 102, is a bright lenticular galaxy in constellation Draco.

Source and more details: https://science.nasa.gov/edge-galaxy-ngc-5866

For all the folks starting their #PhD (or their master thesis) today - a reminder why your PhD advisor can solve a problem so "easily" ...

#astrodon #academia #AcademiChatter #research

Now open for submissions: The 4th annual #CellPress, Cell Signaling Technology, & Elsevier Foundation Rising Black Scientists Awards are now open!

These awards are open to all sciences. Deadline to submit your essay is October 31st. https://www.cell.com/diversity/awards?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

A ring of fire rises over Western Australia as the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth during an annular eclipse in 2013.

Video credit: Colin Legg & Geoff Sims
Full video and more details: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200615.html
#AltText4Me

Neural specialization for 'visual' concepts emerges in the absence of vision https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.23.552701v1 "preserved neural signatures of 'visual' light events in the left middle temporal gyrus (LMTG)"; #congenitally #blind

More information on Twitter/X at https://twitter.com/miriam_hauptman/status/1695002791180152971

If you have ever wondered where the decibel came from and why it's dB and not db, Jerger (2013) has you covered.

> Prior to 1923 the unit for expressing telephone transmission efficiency was the “mile of standard cable”, but in that year the Bell system adopted a new concept, the “Transmission Unit” or TU, defined as 1/10 log P/Po, where P and Po are pressure levels in the ratio of 10:1. A year later Bell scientists decided that a more workable unit should be defined as 10 transmission units or, simply log P/Po. They proposed to name this new unit the bel, after Alexander Graham Bell, founder of Bell Laboratories, and to introduce the concept of 1/10th of a bel, the decibel. In effect they traded “transmission unit” for “decibel”. This decibel notation was readily adopted by Harvey Fletcher to supplant the sensation unit on the intensity scale of the audiogram. Years later the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics evolved the rule that the first letters of physical units named after persons should be capitalized. Since the bel was named after an actual person, Alexander Graham Bell, it became the Bel, and decibel became dB.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/14992027.2012.752112