This Friday: designing & building software to analyse #TMS & EMG data, with Gleb Perevoznyuk.

14:00 GMT+1, ZOOM

See you there!

Hope so! We had a few cases in our garden, but none for a few years. Such a good bird :-)

Same! We had 6 or 7 this year, more than any of the last 6 years.

🇫🇮🍆💪✈️

It's the TechnoCrat 4.6 model: Perplexity

David Lammy (left) looks over at Rachel Reeves (right), both doing a remarkable gong-worthy job of suppressing all human emotion while Keir Starmer (centre) bores the country with talk of "process"

Lammy & Reeves putting in Oscar-winning performances here:

youtu.be/h0elB6_pvrY?...

Always the fingers. Every time. "AI" still can't do hands; has no idea where they're supposed to be. @thehandlab.bsky.social is still in business 😎

Feels like the exact opposite in science - very hard to find disagreement! (despite much disagreement existing.)

David Attenborough's natural successor #Wildlife #FreeBunny

After 20 years studying & working in 6 UK universities, I can't recall a single time that i felt free speech was at risk.

Is this just pre-election culture war-mongery?

🤷‍♂️

"Greens who were long dismissed as “idealistic” and “unrealistic” now look like hard-headed pragmatists and true patriots. They are years ahead of their rivals in demanding a transition that makes sense on every level: environmental, economic and political."

💚

A beauty!

Ecosia says: "Ask the world's greenedt AI, backed by renewable energy. Respects your privacy." Fair enough. But can it calculate?

Q: "What is 493920 times 392930?" A: "The product of 493,320 and 392,930 is: 493, 920 x 392, 930 = 194, 106, 305, 600 So, 493,920 times 392,930 equals 194,107,305,600." It does not.

Confirmed with @ecosiasearch.bsky.social 'World's greenest AI' (so hopefully my 4th-ever AI search was not too wasteful.

"Ask anything" it solicits. (But not maths)

What a f*cking disgrace 😔.

Appalling. People are using LLMs to get the wrong answer in tasks we've solved decades/centuries ago. Ketan has calculated the costs 👇

😔

Did not know someone would say this when i woke up today 👇

Just discovered at 7:15 tonight 😃

@countbinface.bsky.social this you?

Angine de Poitrine - Full Performance (Live on KEXP) YouTube video by KEXP

Rock 2.0

youtu.be/0Ssi-9wS1so?...

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Indeed! They are very good indicators of something - perhaps the network of ideas, peers, or the social structure of a discipline - but beyond that they signal little more than soundbite-y-ness. Groan!

😂

Well, I try my best!

Aha, nice: I've seen what you report - that first authors mis-remember what was in their own papers - but never on a field-wide scale, that's awesome!

Is it too much to ask that scientists read the *whole abstract* before citing a paper?

If not, we now need to put the conclusions of our papers in the first line of the abstract to ensure that our peers will actually read it 😐

#RtFP. And if not, at least #RtFA

🧪

--- CITATION RANT ENDS ---

The latest citation says they set their study's parameter as:

"radius=5 mm; chosen to approximate the effective spatial resolution of TMS (Holmes et al 2024)"

It seems that our citers read *the first sentence* of our abstract, got what they wanted, & stopped

They *did not read the whole abstract*

Our paper reviewed ~50 others, & presented 7 new experiments: 2 years' solid work!

We concluded that the "effective spatial resolution of TMS" was "much larger... than generally assumed", & we put an approximate number on this: 55mm

Traditionally, the number was 5mm - an order of magnitude smaller

Transcranial magnetic stimulation over supramarginal gyrus stimulates primary motor cortex directly and impairs manual dexterity: implications for TMS focality | Journal of Neurophysiology | American Physiological Society Based on human motor cortex, the effective spatial resolution of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is often described as 5–20 mm, because small changes in TMS coil position can have large effects on motor-evoked potentials (MEPs). MEPs are often studied at rest, with muscles relaxed. During muscle contraction and movement, corticospinal excitability is higher, thresholds for effective stimulation are lower, and MEPs can be evoked from larger regions of scalp, so the effective spatial resolution of TMS is larger. We found that TMS over the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) impaired manual dexterity in the grooved pegboard task. It also resulted in short-latency MEPs in hand muscles, despite the coil being 55 mm away from the motor cortex hand area (M1). MEPs might be evoked by either a specific corticospinal connection from SMG or a remote but direct electromagnetic stimulation of M1. To distinguish these alternatives, we mapped MEPs across the scalp during rest, isotonic contraction, and manual dexterity tasks and ran electric field simulations to model the expected M1 activation from 27 scalp locations and four coil orientations. We also systematically reviewed studies using TMS during movement. Across five experiments, TMS over SMG reliably evoked MEPs during hand movement. These MEPs were consistent with direct M1 stimulation and substantially decreased corticospinal thresholds during natural movement. Systematic review suggested that 54 published experiments may have suffered from similar motor activation confounds. Our results have implications for the assumed spatial resolution of TMS, and especially when TMS is presented within 55 mm of the motor cortex. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is often described as having an effective spatial resolution of ∼10 mm, because of the limited area of the scalp on which TMS produces motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) in resting muscles. We find that during natural hand movement TMS evokes MEPs from a much larger scalp area, in particular when stimulating over the supramarginal gyrus 55 mm away. Our results show that TMS can be effective at much larger distances than generally assumed.

Citations as an index of scientific quality are very poor

I'm obsessed with my #citations, "H-" & "I10-" indices, so regularly check GoogleScholar

I just found that the latest citation to my best #TMS ⚡🧠 work (doi.org/10.1152/jn.0...) claimed the exact *opposite* of what our paper concluded 🙃

🧵👇

In a First for the U.S., Renewables Generate More Power Than Natural Gas In March, for the first time, renewables supplied more power to the U.S. than natural gas, a milestone in the transition to clean power. However, rising power demand is complicating the shift away from fossil fuels by extending the lives of many aging coal power plants.

In a first last month, renewables supplied more power to the U.S. than natural gas, a milestone in the shift to clean energy.

Although aliens certainly exist (the alternative is less plausible), tjey have not invaded, Obama is not a hippopotamus & Canada is not preparing a Raccoon army for invasion.

Or are they..?

👇

(also: people are not always honest in surveys...)

I don't know why this is so hard for some people to grasp. If we extend our use of fossil gas, rather than going all-out for grid batteries, heat pumps and induction hobs, we extend our dependence on *foreign* sources of gas, regardless of whether we also use the UK's last remaining reserves. 🧵

The complete morphology of a single LC-NE neuron.

First off, these cells are gigantic. This one, for example, has >72 cm of axon! To our knowledge, it’s the longest neuron ever fully reconstructed. I leave it to the reader as an exercise to estimate the length of a human LC neuron. 5