I would like to announce that I will also be blocking the Straight of #Hormuz in addition to the #UnitedStates and #Iran. Our dog Lily will be joining me. So now it’s like really, really quadruple blocked. Especially if you are a squirrel. 🐿️
The big issue they had when they tried to implant me is apparently I just have a hamster on a spinning wheel inside my skull where my brain should be. It’s a failure mode the BCI community doesn’t want the public to know about!
Slaughtering our golden goose: massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration www.nature.com/articles/d41...
🚨 Congress held NIH and NSF budgets roughly flat. Scientists celebrated.
Here is what actually happened.
NIH awarded 4,641 fewer grants in FY2025 than the 4-year avg. New awards dropped 14%. Over $1.3B never reached investigators.
NSF awards fell 22%.
The money was there.
Our new paper. This one is important for anyone doing rodent #vagus nerve stimulation studies.
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
roon @tszzl the private sector has been remaking its own versions of NIH, ARPA etc as these public science institutions have seen structural decline and defunding and it will be supercharged by the funding NPV of machine intelligence and its firepower at allocation decisions
This is only true for people who understand neither science nor economics.
The NIH budget for this year is FIFTY times larger than OpenAI’s $1B pledge.
The foundation of US science & innovation is public funding. The private sector cannot replace it.
US science is being killed
Maple syrup under a microscope.
That is why Canadians are so happy, we literally eat glitter. 😊
#Canada
This cannot be good.
Isn't this the opposite of draining the swamp?
Extremely cool.
We haven’t known very much about how localized neuromodulator signaling is.
This data — made possible by new molecular sensor tools — is revealing that it’s quite local, just a few cell-widths in extent.
#neuroscience 🧪
The form is short. You can submit anonymously. Even one sentence counts.
"I want NIH to fund the best science based on merit, not politics" is a valid comment.
Deadline: May 16, 2026
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
NIH is accepting public comments on its next Strategic Plan (2027-2031). You don't need to be a scientist. If you're a taxpayer, this is your money funding your health.
2x NIH POs told me: comments will be ignored by this admin, but not by the historical record. Silence will be inferred as support.
We’re hiring — come build the future of brain-computer interfaces! If you’re excited about building technology that can truly change lives, working at the intersection of neuroscience and AI — we'd love to hear from you!
Learn more and apply: precisionneuro.io/careers
NIH has long engaged the scientific community in a democratic way. That's a good thing, and it's under attack.
Watch out.
New post by me, about why NIH's peer review process and advisory panels are pretty unique across gov't, and why they're so important.
Writing out a conversation I’ve been having a lot at this conference:
Things in US science are far, far worse than people know.
Far worse than even other scientists know.
1/
Dr. Dalton Millgate:That's because great achievement has no road map. The X-Ray is pretty good, and so is penicillin, and neither were discovered with a practical objective in mind. I mean, when the electron was discovered in 1897, it was useless. And now we have an entire world run by electronics.
Relative normalcy in non-compete NoAs is good to see.
The most impt change at #NIH and to US science this year is bigger than grant cancellations— it’s how the agency is governed.
For 75 years NIH has been largely independent of presidential control. That’s changed this year. New piece from me and @nataliebaviles.bsky.social in @nature.com
🧪
NINDS has rescinded a policy that required extra Council level review/scrutiny for awards to any PI who had $1.5Million in total- a halving of the payline, possibility of denial, etc
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
$300 Million in jet planes lost to a fuckup.
That’s 83 five year NIH R01 grants burned in minutes due to error, aka poor execution of this unnecessary war which serves only to make the world more dangerous.
Not a great email to get leaving on a Friday. “Really sorry I’ll be out of town so I’ll miss your talk on Monday.”
Me to myself: I have a talk on Monday???
The transition from Assistant to Full Prof may be from being nervous about talks for weeks before to completely forgetting you had one.
Newest paper! mSDF-DFT: An ultra-low energy discrete Fourier transform architecture for closed-loop neural sensing in the Journal of Systems Architecture. Everyone uses Fourier transforms in online neural signal processing. We made it more efficient! doi.org/10.1016/j.sy...
Today's anti-science pairing
Department Grand Rounds on documentation for reimbursement today. As a non-MD myself, my MD colleagues kept joking "this must be fascinating for you".
It was fascinating as someone who designs tech to help MDs. But as a non-MD, I'd like to say on behalf of the rest of us:
"I am so, so sorry..."
This is about LLMs and comparing activations to large-scale recording in brains
Five minutes listening to Congress?
Note I give LLMs zero credit for any intelligence; it's all just pretty simple linear algebra at a base level. But I suspected the 'connection' is so obvious it would show up in any weighted search algorithm.
I asked #GoogleAI "What do #Bannon, #Lutnick, #Musk and #Dershowitz have in common?" with zero context.
It immediately made the connection between both #Trump and #Epstein.
Yet the media has missed Trump preferentially works with MANY people with clear ties to Epstein. #kompromat
Let’s see, #Dershowitz, #Musk, #Bannon, and #Lutnick all tried to go to the #epstein island. Remind me, who else do they all have in common? #trump
At this point, there is zero way that is a coincidence. It seems like Trump only hired people with the mutual connection to Epstein in common.
