also, controversial opinion but voting on an app you haven't read is irresponsible. it's too high-stakes. I'd like to see more, SEP-like, smaller groups of experts having real discussions and less of grants getting the score that reflects R1's gut reaction + presentation style.

I think there are things NIH can do better. when there is too much to discuss in the given time, no one is going to go to the mats to defend a grant against a lazy or hostile reviewer. and there has to be a better, program-level mechanism for discarding low quality reviews (eg factually wrong).

1. research institutions that want to remain research institutions are going to need to pay for research

2. research institutions that want to remain research institutions are going to need to become friendlier to industry partners

can we do brain regions too? "visual cortex" like it only has one job!

"Taking this literature as a whole, there may be a sense that where there’s smoke, there must be fire,' but experience from other fields ... has shown that actually there can sometimes just be lots of smoke."

"The figure also shows US research funding associated with these keywords extracted from NIH Reporter, settling at around 20 to 25 billion dollars per annum since 2018." this is millions, not billions, no?

grant proposals are fighting an uphill battle against reviewers' visceral concept of an acceptable sample size. at least twice I've had reviewers ignore the power analysis and say it just seemed too small.

seems like this should be a bigger deal than it currently is:

"Currently, industry-led experiments are publishable without [IRB] approval [39]. There is little reason to exempt
industry from standard journal policies..."

sure, but if you rely on that grant to keep a roof over your head, I think you're entitled to some concern when reviews are delayed

I don't, but it's also not hard to game pre-registration

46% of preadolescent girls had "misaligned" biological sex and gender?

Hormonal milieu influences whole-brain structural dynamics across the menstrual cycle using dense sampling in multiple individuals - Nature Neuroscience Heller et al. showed dense longitudinal imaging in four females, including one with endometriosis and one using oral contraceptives, and the finding that different hormonal milieus influence widespread brain volume changes linked to progesterone or estradiol.

Hormonal milieu influences whole-brain structural dynamics across the menstrual cycle using dense sampling in multiple individuals

@carinaheller.bsky.social, @uni-jena.de,
@umn-midb.bsky.social, @icsantabarbara.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"no garbage"

I guess this is a different conversation but we are assuming here that score is tightly related to quality. I am less confident of this each time I sit on study section

kind of a bold claim

Factor 3: Expertise and Resources

I just got an "Additional expertise needed" because one consultant is off-site. in the year of our lord 2025. no other comments. :)

the link takes me to the wrong place! do you have another?

Why menstrual cycle irregularities belong in brain research - Nature Medicine The menstrual cycle requires tight orchestration between the brain and body, and irregularities can be both the cause and the consequence of wide-ranging health issues. Embracing this complexity, inst...

We wrote a piece for @naturemedicine.bsky.social 🧠

Menstrual cycle irregularities can be both cause and consequence of wide-ranging health issues.
Embracing this complexity could reveal novel brain–body interactions and advance neuroscience.

Check out our commentary www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Benchmarking methods for mapping functional connectivity in the brain - Nature Methods In this Analysis, Liu et al. benchmark more than 200 pairwise statistics for functional brain connectivity in tasks such as hub mapping, distance relationships, structure–function coupling and behavio...

An Analysis of 200 pairwise statistics for functional brain connectivity in tasks such as hub mapping, distance relationships, structure-function coupling and behavior prediction highlights their effectiveness for neurophysiological applications.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

we are entering a whole new era of brain imaging analytics 🤩🧠

really cool!!! love to see the convergence across PET / genes / fMRI. please please consider making the .niis / statistical maps from figs 3-5 downloadable!! curious to see how closely the activation pattern you report overlaps with other CUD studies 😁

high-dose stimulants lead to psychosis -- basically, if you keep turning up the "salience" volume eventually everything seems salient and the brain scrambles to explain it?

this paper was such a joy to read. in addition to the very thorough treatment of the data I love how densely-referenced the intro is; I think I learned something from every sentence! one passing thought about the salience boost -- I wonder if that's the mechanism by which (cont)

My med school textbook says stimulants like Ritalin treat hyperactivity by “stimulating” the brain’s attention and cognitive control systems. We studied children taking stimulants in the ABCD Study, and the largest differences were actually in arousal and reward networks! Check out our preprint!

I'm curious if some journals are already implementing this. I have 1 paper under re-review and got 3 reviews. R3 was clearly written by AI, but I assumed someone got invited to review and used AI. I checked the researchsquare timeline and only 2 reviewers ever agreed.

thank you, I just dipped my toe in (louvain) and will be taking it back out. sbm = stochastic block model?

A network correspondence toolbox for quantitative evaluation of novel neuroimaging results - Nature Communications Here, the authors present the Network Correspondence Toolbox, which enables researchers to examine and report spatial correspondence between their neuroimaging results and widely used brain atlases.

It's finally here! Use the Network Correspondence Toolbox to help contextualize your neuroimaging findings 🧠

Mapping dopaminergic projections in the human brain with resting-state fMRI A functional connectivity gradient in striatum is obtained that maps onto DaT SPECT-derived dopaminergic projections and thereby likely provides a new biomarker for investigating dopaminergic (dys)fun...

super cool -- thought this might be of interest if you hadn't seen it already: elifesciences.org/articles/71846

thank you!! reassuring that this is business as usual!