Redpenblackpen metaphor of a scientific paper: illustration of a neat house (=paper as published), basement with some junk, bigger than the house (=supplemental data), huge area with monsters and snakes underneath (=actual work performed).
Youre not alone thinking this. @redpenblackpen.bsky.social from a while ago, my favorite 🤩
🚨 We're hiring! 🚨
I'm looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join my ERC-funded project on fetal brain development in multilingual contexts. 🧠 🤰🗣️
📍Aix-en-Provence/Marseille, France
📅 Start: September 2026
Full ad: olgakepinska.com/wp-content/u...
Please reach out with any questions!
Some first-rate science writing: For this story, @jdrakephd.bsky.social carefully read our recent paper and then we spent a very fun 90 minutes or so talking on zoom. His article that gets right to the heart of our model, explains it clearly, and then explores why it will matter in the future.
Left: Intracortical intensity profiles were extracted at each vertex of infant structural MRI scans. Intensities were sampled at 12 equivolumetric intracortical surfaces, spanning from the pial boundary (blue) to the white matter boundary (yellow), capturing signal variations across cortical depths, defined as microstructure profiles. Top right: Systematic changes in profile shape with respect to (i) center of gravity and (ii) variance. To illustrate this relationship, all profiles (across participants and regions) were sorted according to the respective moment, then averaged within 100 bins. Bottom right: Parcel-wise central moment distributions mapped on the dHCP 40-week surface template (see S1 Data). Excluded regions (i.e., von Economo areas LA1, LA2, LC1, LC2, LC3, LD, and LE and the cortical wall) are shown in gray.
How do #prenatal & #postnatal periods shape the developing human #cortex? This study uses #neonatal MRI to show that time in the womb drives widespread, uniform maturation, whereas time after birth produces more region- & depth-specific changes across the cortex @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/47o6rpk
Heritability is a statistical description of sources of trait variation in a specific set of people under a specific set of environmental conditions. It doesn’t show how malleable the trait is, doesn't index an underlying feature of human biology, & can’t say anything about you as an individual.
Stentor coeruleus is a single-celled organism with unexpected abilities PHOTO AGENCY MELBA / Alamy
Single-celled organism with no brain is capable of Pavlovian learning
Associative learning in the protozoan Stentor coeruleus 🧪
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Suggests an ancient evolutionary origin that preceded the emergence of multicellular nervous systems.
A 3-year study published in Pediatrics examined newborns in Norway. It found a clear benefit for the baby when mom gets a COVID vaccination during pregnancy. n.pr/4uXOx6X
Thanks for these insights! We're actually working hard on answering this question directly in more than 4.500 brains: osf.io/zyjbc/overview Hope to have a better answer soon!
Here's a great publication hoax perpetrated by Pascal Diago, possibly comparable to the Sokal hoax (look it up if you're not familiar with it), about pregnancy cravings for prime numbers!
retractionwatch.com/2026/01/30/g...
‼️ Nous recherchons toujours des personnes bilingues français-allemand pour une importante étude sur le multilinguisme ! N'hésitez pas à partager et à participer si vous le pouvez ! Merci ! @nocelab.bsky.social @nccrlanguage.bsky.social
Nine subcortical/cerebellar atlases included in the subcortex_visualization Python package (and subcortexVisualizationR package in R). The atlases are depicted in two-dimensional vector graphic format.
The extended version of my thesis procrastination project/subcortex visualization package is out now in both Python and R, now that I’ve graduated 🤠 This figure shows the 9 atlases included (and counting)!
Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Website: anniegbryant.github.io/subcortex_vi...
Awake infant fMRI offers a rare window into early brain and cognitive development. In a new paper out now in Infancy, we leverage data from hundreds of infant scans from the Saxe and Turk-Browne Labs to reveal what factors drive scanning success — and how future studies can maximize data retention!
An abbreviation (ABB) in a journal article (JA) or Grant Application (GA) is rarely worth the words it saves. Every ABB requires cognitive resources (CR) and at my age by the time I'm halfway through a JA or GA I no longer have the CR to remember what your ABB stood for.
This is 🤯
All publicly available. Looks like an amazing new histology-based human probabilistic atlas and parcellation tool.
#neuroskyence #mri #brainmapping
A probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation | Nature share.google/5AD0iW7pxgb4...
Cover of this week's Nature showing a brain rendering Cover caption from the journal: Brain development: Our ability to process information into complex emotions, behaviours and decisions relies on the rich diversity of cell types that make up the human brain. Uncovering the molecular and cellular events that take place during brain development could reveal not only the mechanisms that give rise to this diversity but also shed light on how this process might go awry in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. In this week’s issue, the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) builds on its previous work creating atlases of cell types in the adult mouse, non-human primate (NHP) and human brains to present cell-type atlases of the developing human, mouse and NHP brains. Across a suite of papers, nine of which are published in Nature, the researchers uncover the complex programs through which cell types emerge during brain development in humans and animals, revealing both the shared and unique features of the human brain. The latest work, along with future research directions, is summed up in a Perspective article by Tomasz Nowakowski and colleagues
New issue of Nature - with NINE studies on #brain #development from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) 🧠🧪🔬
An amazing set of resources for all scientists working on the brain!
🧠 Immersive feature:
www.nature.com/immersive/d4...
🧠 Perspective:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📰 new paper! lnkd.in/dYdrvZAz, by @irenebalboni.bsky.social , Alessandra Rampinini, @olgakepinska.bsky.social, @berthele.bsky.social, @nargolestani.bsky.social, @nccrlanguage.bsky.social showing the importance of multimodal approaches for uncovering brain-behaviour relationships
thank you!!! 😃
Rozdane wczoraj przez @erc.europa.eu granty #ERCStG trafiły także do 6️⃣ polskich naukowców, którzy swoje badania będą prowadzić w Niemczech, Austrii, Francji i Szwajcarii. Czego dotyczą ich projekty? ⬇️
@aniaczark.bsky.social @magda-sznurkowska.bsky.social @olgakepinska.bsky.social
I'm more than happy to share that I have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant @erc.europa.eu for my project on fetal language acquisition. In DiverseSounds, we'll focus on prenatal language environment and its effects on neural plasticity and language development post-birth. Exciting times ahead!
fMRI functional connectivity: compares correlations of BOLD signal from different brain regions
“Relying on PRIME young adults limits cognitive science” www.cell.com/trends/cogni... new @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social piece with @connectedmindslab.bsky.social we highlight how a focus on young adults as a benchmark of ‘human’ behaviour has shaped cognitive science in several ways 👇
You can hear the sounds, but can you distinguish the words? 🤔
Here's the postprint version of our new, soon-to-be SSLA paper!
osf.io/6zbgt
Celia Gorba, Pilar Prieto and I revisit the tricky link between L2 sound & word recognition—with a fresh look at methods
Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.
Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.
Out now at Nat. Neuro.
"Addressing artifactual bias in large, automated MRI analyses of brain development"
Huge congrats to Josh Roffman team on this herculean effort.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We recently published this paper in PNAS exploring how London cab drivers plan routes.
We found that entropy of streets & successor representations explain planning speed.
It was fantastic working on this with Eva Griesbauer, Dan McNamee, and Hugo Spiers.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Alert! ... for the child development world!
@fluxsociety.bsky.social @fitngin.bsky.social
The Healthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study has released its first data wave - it’s massive.
Check here:
docs.hbcdstudy.org
and here:
nbdc-datahub.org
Here’s why it matters 🧠🍼
Yes, my favourite blog post!
In all our studies (3 twin, 2 longitudinal), we consistently found: how well children read → how much they enjoy reading.
In 2/5, we also saw some evidence for the reverse.
Different samples, countries, ages, and measures—but same key finding: skills shape motivation.
Children are incredible language learning machines. But how do they do it? Our latest paper, just published in TICS, synthesizes decades of evidence to propose four components that must be built into any theory of how children learn language. 1/
www.cell.com/trends/cogni... @mpi-nl.bsky.social
😭