Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

Tragic development in the search for missing Belgian trekker Hugo Huyghebeart, thought to be trying to hike up Haba Shan near Tiger Leaping Gorge. A 38-year old search and rescue team leader, Chen Yanshou, died on 22 April while conducting a search in brutal blizzard conditions at 4300m

Very cool work!

This was an interesting and frustrating saga. One moral is that we need better data sharing and reproducible protocols. Otherwise crazy people like us will have to spend 2 years finding out that things don't work.

New preprint!

Prefrontal brain-to-brain synchrony during human group hunting: Evidence from fNIRS hyperscanning

Heroic work from @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social and team

fNIRS & minecraft combined to reveal PFC synchrony during human group hunting

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial Scientists caution that more research is needed, but nearly all of the patients who responded to the personalized vaccine are still alive six years later.

"Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial: Scientists caution that more research is needed, but nearly all of the patients who responded to the personalized vaccine are still alive six years later."

"A pioneer of sustainable open access, where research is always in progress." 🤭

A “fun” experience with BMC Neurology @bmc.springernature.com who sat on our submission for over 10 months without ever sending for review, despite repeated reminders… we have now retracted to submit elsewhere…

I am a big fan of reading classics. For a manuscript that I am working on I am revisiting this gem form 1978, which has such a clear/accessible writing-style. *sigh* They just don't make them like this anymore.

📣 RUB wants YOU: Global Talents, welcome to Bochum! 🌍✨
Whether you are looking for a research stay, a future workplace, or a chance to mentor - @ruhr-uni-bochum.de is the place to be. Check our funding lines. ⏳ Deadline for all calls: 1 May! 👉 www.research-school.rub.de/internationa...

📣 First paper from the lab! 🎉🧠 Led by brilliant MRes students Aysha and Zhiyun, we found exploring a novel, unpredictable VR environment retroactively enhanced memory in humans: rdcu.be/fc496

Wonderful footage. I can't wait to go back into the water in May. 🤿

Take-home: closer emulation of rodent paradigms (spatial memory + multi-dimensional novelty) can elicit retroactive tagging in humans, but reference points matter.

The catch: enhancement was observed when novelty was experienced on Day 2, after participants had a familiarity baseline. Novelty seems to need a reference point to work, which may help explain why human findings have been mixed.

Glad to have been part of it and really happy to see that retroactive novelty benefits ARE possible under certain conditions.

Sea snakes can be very curious about people, and sometimes you pick up an unscheduled dive buddy for half the dive

His brain was clearly uploaded to the matrix.

France is switching from Microsoft to Linux

"We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny. We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure, our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing, evolution, and risks we do not control."

fully agree with Stefano. I spent years of my training learning to translate scientific thinking into models and code. if that’s no longer a bottleneck, what was the point — and what should replace it?

Why is there no way to download the "open" peer review of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, for which I had to log in by the way, as a .pdf?

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I also have this feeling that the last author was female but so far that didn't prove helpful.

Hive mind: I have this vaguely memory of reading a paper that argued we need to study to inter-individual differences (e.g. correlations between tasks) in order to understand cognition but I just don't remember where.

This might have been in the context of navigation/ memory. Any ideas?

An interesting case of reverse translation (from humans to animals) and I think an important step:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Done

A new paper in Science measured the prevalence of social sycophancy across 11 leading large language models. The model’s responses were nearly 50% more sycophantic than humans’, even when users engaged in unethical, illegal, or harmful behaviors.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New work from our lab spearheaded by the amazing @kaixiangzhuang.bsky.social offering a fresh look at the big five personality traits.

***Please forward to interested colleagues***

The call for symposia (deadline 15 April) and abstracts (deadline 1 May) for Biomag 2026 in Beijing (23-25 Aug) is now open:

biomag2026.scimeeting.cn

[Security]: CRITICAL: Malicious litellm_init.pth in litellm 1.82.8 — credential stealer · Issue #24512 · BerriAI/litellm [Security]: CRITICAL: Malicious litellm_init.pth in litellm 1.82.8 PyPI package — credential stealer Summary The litellm==1.82.8 wheel package on PyPI contains a malicious .pth file (litellm_init.p...

Why you should be very careful installing packages from Github: github.com/BerriAI/lite...

Toward embodied, ecological cognition with ambulatory virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a powerful tool for bridging ecological validity and experimental control in cognitive science. VR techniques enable more naturalistic behavior and offer value for assessment and rehabilitation in aging and clinical populations. In this review, we describe how emerging ambulatory VR approaches that support more naturalistic movements, actions, and interactions within immersive environments offer important advances for studying cognition and neural systems in ecologically valid contexts. We highlight the ways in which ambulatory VR paradigms enrich memory, navigation, and cognitive control through embodied sensorimotor engagement, and explore the mechanistic basis for these enhancements, including potential compensatory components in aging and disease. We also discuss methodological challenges and opportunities for combining ambulatory VR with mobile neuroimaging.

Online Now: Toward embodied, ecological cognition with ambulatory virtual reality

Experimental path integration task. Top: While the Pure PI subtask consisted only of a grassy plain, the Landmark PI subtask additionally contained a central lighthouse serving as spatial cue. Middle: Each trial began with the “start phase”, where participants navigated to a basket (goal location), the location of which they should encode. In the following “outgoing phase,” they navigated to a variable number of trees (1–5) until reaching a tree containing an apple (retrieval location). Then, during the “incoming phase,” participants had to find the way back to the goal location before receiving feedback via zero to three stars according to performance based on the drop error. Basket and trees disappeared as soon as they were reached. Bottom left: Outgoing phase (dashed black line) and incoming phase (dotted black line) were quantified according to their spatial distances: outgoing distance corresponded to the cumulated distance from goal to retrieval location (dashed red line), and incoming distance to the Euclidean distance between retrieval and goal location (dotted red line). Bottom right: General PI performance was assessed via the drop error, which corresponded to the distance between response location (marked with an X) and goal location (solid red line). The drop error can further be differentiated into distance error, referring to the difference between retrieval-to-goal distance and retrieval-to-response distance (blue line), and rotation error, depicting the angle between the retrieval-to-goal path and the retrieval-to-response path (purple arc).

How does stress impact #navigational performance? This study shows that #cortisol administration impairs path integration, a specific navigational process, and reduces grid-like brain activity patterns in the #entorhinal #cortex @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3NmX3eG