In August, Jay Bhattacharya said “Training future biomedical scientists” was the 1st priority for his version of NIH.

But talk is cheap. Let’s see how JB’s doing. 🤔

NIH supports trainees mostly via fellowship (F), training (T), and career development (K) awards.

Here are funding curves for each.🧵

Neurobiologists Hack Brain Circuits Tied to Placebo Pain Relief Scientists have identified the brain circuits tied to placebo pain relief. Researchers have known that placebo effects can be a powerful treatment, yet the underlying neurological mechanisms have not ...

Excited to share our new study on how the brain generates placebo pain relief!

We developed a mouse model that recapitulates key features of human placebo analgesia, then used it to identify causal circuitry.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

today.ucsd.edu/story/neurob...

1/n

Nice work! Does the same relationship hold for unconditioned licks (ie consumption)?

transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotion...
This got press hate because of the word "emotions" but it is cool work. "Internal motivational states" serve as a form of working memory that helps animals organize their behavior, so why not ask if similar computational primitives help LLMs to do the same?

Hey @ditzkoff.bsky.social I knew I recognized you! Sorry for the identity mishap, trying to work on my journalist vs. neuroscientist decoder.

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

@jhennig.bsky.social has shown that dopamine exerts a real-time effect on conditioned responding, beyond its role in learning:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Another indication that dopamine is more than a learning signal!

A joint effort with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social and @mhburrell.bsky.social.

Research Fellow at NIMH. Yeah, that’s my sense, thanks mostly to reading your candid takes.

Remember this example whenever anyone tells you that you’re generally safe living in a blue city within a red state (something I was told frequently while on the faculty job market)

On the whole, who do you think is worse off atm: extramural or intramural researchers? Asking as someone who is moving from a university to NIH 😐

Cosyne 2026 - Cosyne Tutorial: Comparative Analysis of Neural Population Codes YouTube video by Cosyne Talks

Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc.

The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...

Today in @nature.com, the @christophthaiss.bsky.social & @maayanlevy.bsky.social labs trace age-related memory loss to the gastrointestinal tract & map the complete gut-to-brain pathway driving it. Targeting this pathway can reverse cognitive aging in mice.

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

Check out our latest research drop! We show BLA dopamine signaling encodes the emotional weight of sensory transitions, but not the associative strength or value of stimuli. These signals dynamically rescale when the learning context changes: "this matters most!" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

NIH Director Bhattacharya signals an end to the affirmative action program for ESI Well, this is fascinating. Director Jayanta Bhattacharya went on the Why Should I Trust You podcast in an episode dated Feb 26, 2026 [h/t]. Around 59:00 he is answering the podcast host after she p…

NIH Director Bhattacharya signals an end to the affirmative action program for ESI drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/02/26/n...

Double congrats on the cool work and for making this the first APA paper I’ve ever been able to access without throwing something across the room.

Here's a quick analysis I did on data I've been collecting on psych/neuro faculty applicants. I don't have data on unsuccessful applicants, but my inference is that women mentored by women have to rely more on bringing in $ to get a faculty job than men mentored by men.

Duration between rewards controls the rate of behavioral and dopaminergic learning - Nature Neuroscience Cue–reward learning rate scales proportionally with the time between rewards. Consequently, learning over a fixed duration is independent of the number of trials. This challenges trial-based dopamine ...

Very excited to post our paper led by @daburke.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... where we uncover a simple mathematical rule underlying how brains learn that a cue predicts a reward. 1/26

Sheep be damned, congrats Ben!

Now published in Neuropharmacology! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies

Science: U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office

By Jeffrey Mervis, Monica Hersher @science.org @policyhound.bsky.social @mghersher.bsky.social

bit.ly/3M8yf9B

Thanks!

No I meant your cocaine paper

The link seems to be broken. Can you provide the title of the paper?

Since the Namboodiri lab isn’t on Bluesky (I think?), I’d like to amplify this cool paper which I and others in the Janak lab made a small contribution to.

Committee Releases Conferenced Defense, Homeland Security, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, and Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Bi... United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

The conference (agreement between House and Senate) appropriations bill that includes HHS and NIH was released this morning.

www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majorit...

1/5

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

A long, absolutely must-read article from Cory Doctorow: www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Tolman's Sunburst Maze 80 Years on: A Meta‐Analysis Reveals Poor Replicability and Little Evidence for Shortcutting In 1946, Tolman et al. reported that rats could take a novel shortcut to a goal after training on an indirect route, supporting the Cognitive Map theory. However, a review of subsequent Sunburst maze...

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts?

Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze.

Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think.
🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn....

@uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

I don't think you non-science people realize what it takes to get a grant funded by NIH. Started experiments in Sept 2021 to generate 3 new mouse mutants to model human disease. Prelim dara shows they have relevant disease phenotypes worthy of study. Need a small grant first to characterize /1

Dual cholinergic mechanisms for sculpting striatal dopamine in vivo Striatal dopamine (DA) and acetylcholine constitute a computationally powerful neuromodulatory dyad that orchestrates action selection, motivational vigor, and reward learning. Striatal cholinergic in...

Excited to share latest study from the lab by an amazing RA, Dylan Flink.

We solved a small (important) puzzle while in the trenches of a larger (wavy 🌊) puzzle.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵...

This is my first time hearing of Sacks’ fabrications. Say it ain’t so.