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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Touch evoked by cortical stimulation dies within minutes. Tired neurons get the blame. However, inhibitory cells in mouse cortex keep firing while the excitatory ones fall silent. BRIDGE-STIM 2027 puts the human, monkey, and mouse teams in one room. Pittsburgh, May 17–19.

BRIDGE-STIM 2027 flyer. Headline: A human can tell you what stimulation feels like, a mouse can tell you why. May 17 to 19, 2027, University of Pittsburgh. Abstracts due March 1, 2027. $75 trainees, $250 faculty, meals included. NSF travel awards. 15 speakers listed. stim.bioniclab.org

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

🧵 Every entry in this series featured science that outsiders called ridiculous. This one is different. Here, the scientific establishment itself said it would fail. 🔬

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

One current pulse drives a single cortical column in a mouse. The same waveform in a paralyzed human BCI user yields a different percept, or none. That cross-species gap is the problem BRIDGE-STIM 2027 is built to close. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

🧬In 2001, a member of the National Academy of Sciences told my 400-person lecture to watch Jennifer Doudna, because she'd probably win a Nobel. What he didn't say: taxpayers were already paying for the work that would get her there. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

⚡ Same ICMS waveform, three species, three different outcomes. Mouse cortex responds in ways NHP cortex does not, and what NHPs report does not always predict what a paralyzed human BCI user perceives. Mechanism does not travel across model systems by default.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

🧠 NSF just funded BRIDGE-STIM 2027 (Award #2624028, CBET). May 17-19, Pittsburgh. The workshop assembles experimentalists running intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) in mice, NHPs, and humans, addressing the cross-species translation gap stalling sensorimotor BCI restoration.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

⚡ A brain implant delivers a microsecond pulse to cortex, and the textbook answer is that the neuron fires. The biology turns out to be far richer, which matters for every patient feeling through a prosthetic hand, suppressing a seizure, or treating depression by stimulation.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

🔬 Your tax dollars once paid a physicist whose own colleagues told him he was wasting the university's money. In 1951, Charles Townes sat on a D.C. park bench and worked out, on the back of an envelope, how to force molecules to release coherent radiation. 🧵 1/5

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

🌊 High school biology. Teacher plays a clip. Frame one, ATP synthase, the protein that makes ATP from a proton gradient in every cell. Frame two, a water turbine. Nearly identical structures, 14 orders of magnitude apart, identical mechanism. Biology was an engineering system. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

🧮 We built a computational model that predicted which electrode channels would fail in human BCI participants before they failed. The mouse data isn't misleading. The biology of failure is the same in humans, and now we can map it.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Your tax dollars once paid a doctor at a VA hospital in the Bronx to study the venom of a poisonous lizard. It produced Ozempic, Wegovy, and a $38.6 billion therapeutic class. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

🔄 A NIH reviewer recently told me NIH shouldn't fund basic science. As paylines collapse, PIs chase translational hooks and positive results to stay publishable, defunding the deep characterization, failure analysis, and replication that future translation depends on.

NIH slide from reviewer training stating that Research does not need a direct link to human health to be important to NIH

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

10 years ago, after 10 months of facilities renovation delays, I was finally able to start building my lab.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

🔊 Every intervention we've tried to extend BCI lifespan modifies the electrode or delivers a drug. Both work, both carry tradeoffs, new materials bring new failure modes, drugs go systemic with off-target effects. So we asked: what if we redirect the brain's immune response with sound?

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Define "Gold Standard Science" without publication, peer review, conferences, journal access, or international collaboration. You can't. Neither can OMB. The proposed 2 CFR rewrite (OMB-2026-0034) requires compliance with it anyway. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

🖖 Star Trek imagined the most capable AI possible. The ship's computer knew everything, computed anything in seconds. It still never had an idea. A human always asked "what if we reroute through the deflector." The computer only ran the consequences. The seed was always human.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

In 2017, NIH proposed capping how much funding any single lab could hold. Senior PIs killed it in a month. The trainees who would have benefited said nothing. OMB-2026-0034 is the same fight. This time you're the target.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

🕵️ Your brain's immune system isn't fighting the implant. It's listening to it. The textbook story: immune system sees foreign object, attacks, builds scar. Incomplete. We found microglia monitor what the device does to nearby neurons in real time, then adjust behavior to match. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

In 1981, Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers who walked off the job. The logic held: professional judgment required job protection, and they abandoned the job. Schedule Policy/Career inverts that logic entirely. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

⚛️ In 1925, a 23-year-old on a state-funded university post retreated to a rocky island with hay fever and wrote a paper so strange he wasn't sure it was worth publishing. Schrodinger called it "nonsense." Einstein rejected it. It became the basis of modern technology.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

OMB just published 412 pages in the Federal Register (Docket OMB-2026-0034) giving political appointees authority to terminate any NIH grant, override peer review scores, and block you from publishing with federal funds. Comment period closes ~July 13. Thread 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

⚡ The brain has a thermostat that matches blood flow to neural activity in real time. Chronic electrical stimulation breaks it. The therapeutic stimulation BCIs deliver may be undermining the metabolic environment those devices depend on. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Vought's daughter takes Trikafta for cystic fibrosis. The CFTR gene was isolated in 1989 with NIH dollars. Every step of the 30-year pipeline was federally funded academic research. His OMB is now strangling the exact work that produced the drug keeping her alive.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

🪼 Your tax dollars paid a scientist to squeeze jellyfish through cheesecloth. Osamu Shimomura processed tens of thousands on an NSF grant to understand why they glow. He found a protein that glowed green under UV light. Called it "green protein." Nobody cared. For decades.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

🧠 A logic failure that costs the BCI field decades. PI: "mechanism A is sufficient to drive outcome B, here's the intervention experiment." Critic: "you haven't shown A is the only cause, B also depends on C, D, E." PI: "yes, those matter too." Critic: "then your experiment proves nothing."🧵👇

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

🇺🇸 March 1863. 110k Union battle deaths still ahead. Lee's army positioned to invade the North within weeks. Lincoln signed the charter establishing the National Academy of Sciences anyway.163 years & 31 administrations of both parties later, that charter still works.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

🧱 Your brain implant isn't failing at the electrode. It's failing in the blood vessels. The BCI field spent decades on scar tissue and coating chemistry. Our data point 50-100 microns away, inside vessels nobody was monitoring. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

On April 24, the administration dismissed all 22 members of the National Science Board by email. NSB has approved every major NSF expenditure since 1950. Six weeks later, NSF Tech Labs awards of $10-50M/year obligate without that oversight layer in place.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

🛰️ In 1973, the DoD launched a satellite navigation system. Civilians couldn't use it. Then in 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 drifted into Soviet airspace due to a navigation error. 269 dead. Two weeks later, Reagan ordered GPS opened to civilians.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

🧠 Neurons near a BCI electrode are aging decades in weeks. Not metaphorically. Cellularly. We found a waste pigment that normally takes 60+ years to accumulate showing up in young mouse neurons within weeks of implantation.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

🧬 When a brain implant loses signal, the field assumes the neurons died. That assumption has driven decades of strategy: softer materials, anti-inflammatory coatings, smaller electrodes, all to protect neurons. We tested whether neurons were the problem. They weren't.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

⚠️ Late Friday afternoon, May 15, while reporters were leaving for the weekend, HHS quietly cut more NIH staff and began moving senior career employees into "at-will" status under the renamed Schedule F. No press release. No published list. A "first tranche," with more to come. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

🕸️ In 1966, a Pentagon official redirected $1M from a missile defense program to fund a computer networking project nobody in the military had requested. That 20-minute meeting built the internet. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

🔬 Jonathan Vande Geest asked his colleague how many hours of fixing, freezing, sectioning, and staining the 3D collagen image took. The answer was none. The tissue was alive, unfixed, sitting under a two-photon microscope.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Brilliant talks this morning at the annual CNBC (Center for the Neural Basis on Cognition) Retreat with a fitting theme on communication at the Pittsburgh Zoo www.cnbc.cmu.edu

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

💊 A few years ago we asked: if oligodendrocyte dysfunction contributes to BCI failure, can we fix it with a drug? We tried clemastine, an FDA-approved antihistamine that crosses the BBB and promotes oligodendrocyte differentiation. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

📡 In 1887, Heinrich Hertz became the first person to generate and detect electromagnetic waves. When a student asked what they were good for, he shrugged: "Nothing, I guess." He died at 36. He never saw what his "useless" waves became.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

🧠 Half of animals receiving the most commonly used clinical brain stimulation frequency developed seizure-like activity. But only after six weeks. Long past the point where most safety studies stop looking. New paper, final version out in Biomaterials. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

🚌 Every neuroscience textbook says myelin speeds up nerve conduction. That is correct. It is also incomplete in a way that has misled the BCI field for years. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

🧠 Visual cortex prostheses use 25-Hz ICMS to evoke phosphenes in blind patients. New UP NExT paper in Biomaterials: in awake mice, 25-Hz ICMS preferentially induces chronic epileptiform events that emerge wks after implantation and acute testing cannot detect.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

📊 Every computer, smartphone, TV, medical device, car, satellite, and AI system on Earth runs on the electron. Thomson wasn't inventing any of it. He wanted to know what cathode rays were. Basic research answers questions before anyone knows they matter. #YourTaxDollarsAtWork

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

⚡ In 1897, J.J. Thomson shot electricity through a glass tube and found particles 1,000x lighter than a hydrogen atom. He called them "corpuscles." His colleagues thought he was joking. He had discovered the electron, the first subatomic particle in history. Nobel Prize, 1906.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

🗑️ Every neuron in your brain has a waste management system. When it fails near a chronically implanted electrode, the cell does not die immediately. It accumulates damage quietly, for weeks, before it shows up in your recordings. 🧵

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

🐝 In 1988, three Georgia Tech engineers heard an NPR segment on how bees allocate foragers with no central authority. One joked: "Would bees be better if they hired us as consultants?" NSF and the Navy funded them to find out. They tracked 4,000 labeled bees for three years.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

We can stimulate the brain with microscale precision. We still don't know what we're writing.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

🔬 In 1966, a microbiologist and an undergrad scooped bacteria from a Yellowstone hot spring. No medical goal. No product plan. Just curiosity. NSF funded it. Critics said it didn't sound important. It became the foundation of a $15 billion industry.

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TK (Takashi DY) Kozai @bioniclab.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

🎥 A few people asked for slides after my CMU seminar. I re-recorded the full talk instead. Thanks to Bin He for organizing.

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