Alex Weber @weberam2@qoto.org

It's not just the brain waves, it is how they travel.

Planar, Spiral, and Concentric Traveling Waves Distinguish Cognitive States in Human Memory
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.26.577456v1
#neuroscience

With the increasing popularity of #preprints comes the growth of preprint review initiatives. In the latest blog from Europe PMC, find out how @sciety and EMBO Early Evidence Base are using the community-endorsed framework DocMaps to help readers navigate the preprint review landscape: https://blog.europepmc.org/2024/01/discovering-reviewed-preprints.html

why* would the us government sell its helium reserves. Thats some shit you literally cant get back because it literally goes into space, and we need it for uh lots of things.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/us-just-sold-helium-stockpile-s-medical-world-worried-rcna134785

*of course it was some shady backroom deal

Announcing a new preprint (bioRxiv)!

G. W. Diehl, A. D. Redish (2024) Measuring excitation-inhibition
balance through spectral components of local field potentials.
bioRxiv unreviewed preprint.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.24.577086v1

We directly test the relationship between local field potentials and synaptic efficacy in vivo from awake behaving rats.

"The story of the Moderna vaccine isn't one of a company taking huge gambles with shareholder dollars. It's the story of the US government giving billions and billions of dollars to a private firm, which will now *charge* the US government – and the American people – a 4,460% markup on the resulting medicine." https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/25/nationalize-moderna/#herd-immunity #covid

No keyboard is complete without a #DOOM key. #retrocomputing #retrogames #mechanicalkeyboard

Simultaneous, cortex-wide and cellular-resolution neuronal population dynamics reveal an *unbounded* scaling of dimensionality with neuron number
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.15.575721v1

#neuroscience #dimensionality

#Neurodivergent scientists are sharing the highs and lows of navigating academia in a new series of articles for #SparksOfChange ✨

Catch up in the thread with what’s been published so far 👇 🧵 1/n #AcademicChatter
https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/44d04224/being-neurodivergent-in-academia-why-sparks-of-change-is-publishing-stories-from-neurodivergent-researchers?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

How massive were last summer's Canadian wildfires?

So massive that the area of forest destroyed--18.5 million hectares--is triple the previous record.

So massive that the carbon emissions from the destroyed tree bodies dwarfed Canada's annual GHG emissions from all other sources.

In fact, the emissions from Canadian wildfires in 2023 were roughly equivalent to 6% of global emissions for 2021.

In normal conditions, the lost carbon from wildfires is recuperated by forest regrowth within a few years. But with temperatures continuing to increase, there's less time between fires for such regrowth to occur. So, we're balanced on the edge of a major tipping point, where wildfires in Canada, Siberia, and Australia could turn forests from net carbon sinks into net carbon sources.

This article does a pretty good job discussing how scientists are integrating wildfire emissions into global carbon budget thinking, and carbon budgets generally.

#Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #wildfires #CarbonBudget #Forests #Environment #GlobalWarming

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-22/are-megafires-contributing-to-climate-change/103219876

Goodhart's law strikes again!

“Is the article already accepted?” he asked Sarath. “This says 100% acceptance.”

“Means we have network with Journal editors,” Sarath replied. “So we can guarantee Acceptance.”

“Students are really desperate to get research papers in whichever way possible,” Zadey says. “No one really cares about the outcomes,” he adds. “It’s all about outputs.”

https://www.science.org/content/article/paper-mills-bribing-editors-scholarly-journals-science-investigation-finds

“Google’s new phones now use AI to let you edit photos to a degree never seen before, exchanging sad faces for happy ones and overcast afternoons for perfect sunsets.”

Ok so do we want photos to remind us of that day, or makeup how the day actually went?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/08/1085096/artificial-intelligence-generative-ai-chatgpt-open-ai-breakthrough-technologies/

Terrific investigation of the secretive multi-year rightwing campaign, pro-patriarchy, pro-bigotry, anti-“woke,” successfully attacking public education. Damning emails mined by Nicholas Confessore. #GiftLink https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/20/us/dei-woke-claremont-institute.html?unlocked_article_code=1.PU0.wEhm.C2_iYDdN6QvJ&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

@weberam2 @petersuber @OpenAlex You *can* get your data from the API and build a quick author page from it (I wrote an R howto here: https://leonardblaschek.github.io/replace_google_scholar.html) and do any manual filtering of the works that you need.

It's not as straightforward as setting up a GS page, but it'll give you a lot more control.

"---and by splitting up my personality across at least three social networks, that means I'm making it harder for the AGI to reinstantiate my consciousness," he yelled at her, over the club's music.

I'm sure the documentary about the fall of American democracy will be fascinating but living through it is bullshit.