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J. Brendan Ritchie

@jbrendanritchie.bsky.social
658 followers 704 following 202 posts

Cognitive neuroscientist studying vision and cognition. Recovering philosopher. Former NIH postdoc. Asst Prof in Neuro at U Lethbridge/Iniskim 🇨🇦. Views are my own. He/him

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Reposted by J. Brendan Ritchie
Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 14h
Earlier this week, I agreed to interviews with two USA Today journalists. They wrote fantastic articles about the Cornell case that I'm proud to have been a part of. What I did not know is that their employer considers interviews to proprietary and opens up recordings to be used by any journalist.
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Apurva Ratan Murty @apurvaratan.bsky.social · 21h
Excited to first share @alishdipani.bsky.social 's study. Alish asked a (deceptively) simple Q: Are category-selective units in ANNs actually like category-selective regions in the brain? (why is this imp? read until the end). #neuroskyence #neuroscience #brain #neuroai
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Walker Bragman @walkerbragman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The bullying and harassment that this will enable is the point. This administration wants to make life unbearable for “undesirable” populations. It’s fascist scapegoating 101. thehill.com/homenews/edu...
thehill.com
Education Department formally rescinds Title IX protections for LGBTQ students
The Education Department announced Monday it has formally rescinded the Biden-era Title IX interpretation that gave sex-based discrimination protections to students on the basis of sexual orientati…
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hellabores92.bsky.social @hellabores92.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Courage is Contagious. Excellent article by Sylvia Chou. It takes a lot to stand up for the truth when there is a culture of fear but what we lose is so much more if we do not. www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...
psychologicalscience.org
NIH Employees Lived in A Culture of Fear, So They Started Keeping Receipts
Sylvia Chou, former NIH program director, says “nobody’s OK” after massive disruptions to funding policies and infrastructure.
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J. Brendan Ritchie @jbrendanritchie.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
And in the case of the US, it'll also take substantial reform of its political institutions, and the media, during that time.
Black and white image of American writer Gore Vidal as a young man. Intensely gazing at the camera, wearing a sweater vest. Accompanying is the quote: once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to get the truth  back.
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Reposted by J. Brendan Ritchie
Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 24/09/2026
over the past few weeks several AI evaluation/cybersecurity experts have explained how what's happening is a result of human incompetence rather than "AI going rogue". I'm begging the media to show a shred of journalistic integrity and stop parroting what altman or amodei say
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Michelle Greene @mgreenephd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
🚨New paper alert! 🚨 The visual system tunes itself to the statistics of its input. How do individual experiences differently tune vision? In this work, @bjbalas.bsky.social and I examined how one individual difference—height—changes the visual diet and how this affects perception. 1/
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Here's today's column on the astonishing, ongoing mistreatment of people with #ME/CFS. Please spread it far and wide: the only thing which can break the media's wall of indifference is seeing an article about the issue go viral. Thank you. 1/2 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
Abandoned, dismissed and gaslighted: there is no excuse for the way ME sufferers have been betrayed | George Monbiot
Changes in guidance and science seem to have little impact on millions of devastated lives. It’s a social crisis playing out behind closed doors, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot
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Zhiqing Deng @zhiqingdeng.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
🧠Excited to share that our paper has been accepted at PNAS! We found hierarchical plasticity in people born without hands. ❤️Thanks to @striemamit.bsky.social @yuqiliu1179.bsky.social @Florencia Martinez-Addiego www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
Experience-driven plasticity in the secondary somatosensory cortex in people born without hands | PNAS
In congenital handlessness, where individuals rely on their feet for compensatory manual functions, reorganization in the primary somatosensory cor...
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Colette Delawalla, PhD @cdelawalla.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Alright, let’s all get on the same page about Vought/NIH/Trump. THEY👏WILL👏STOP👏AT👏NOTHING👏 The goal is to destroy the STEM ecosystem, universities, and democracy as we have known it. PERIOD. The only way to win is to impeach them all…which means we need Congress. HERE’S HOW WE WIN 🧵
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Conor Browne @brownecfm.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Articles like these are emblematic of the institutional amnesia surrounding Covid-19. A pathogen that emerged less than seven years ago, which can cause fatigue during the acute infection and as a common long-term effect, not even mentioned. Conspicuously absent. www.nbcnews.com/health/menta...
nbcnews.com
Why are Americans so tired? CDC report highlights who’s feeling it most
Fatigue is one of the most common concerns reported in primary care visits, yet not much attention is given to how often adults in the U.S. are coping with it.
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 20/09/2026
“The arrangement would give Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, a direct role in determining how NIH distributes its $48 billion in congressionally-appropriated money.” Bypassing the many checks and balances at NIH on grant funding decisions.
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Mark Ungrin @mark-ungrin.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
CTV news coverage of the errors in health policy and guidance that leave the public unprotected from aerosol disease transmission and long COVID (with @drdavidkeegan.bsky.social and Kerri Bowser) is up. Great to see so much interest! Below is the UK inquiry cited: #medsky #scisky #cdnpoli #polisky
youtu.be
COVID health policy still outdated: researchers
YouTube video by CTV News
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Rolling Stone @rollingstone.com · 18/09/2026
The Military’s Bogus AI ‘Almost Started a War’ With China Troops were about to board a Chinese ship before the Pentagon realized they had false intel, according to CNN. Read: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 17/09/2026
“From a human standpoint, it’s tragic. From a constitutional perspective, it’s absurd: The people elect their representatives to enact legislation, and five unelected judges veto that legislation. Is this really the democratic system our founders envisioned?”
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🇨🇦Joe Vipond🇨🇦 @jvipondmd.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
"We had concerns whether the process was being completed in a fair, equitable and consistent manner with the many daily, and sometimes hourly, changes to the processes,” former Elections Alberta staff (resigned in protest)
calgaryherald.com
Corb Lund requests moratorium on coal, former Elections Alberta staff speak out
Corb Lund is seeking a moratorium on coal development until a judicial review of how his group's petition was handled has been completed.
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Jenna Norton @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The cuts in staff across federal health agencies are staggering. Great analysis from @ourpublicservice.bsky.social. 1 in 5 people gone from NIH. More than 1 in 4 gone from CDC. Nearly 7 in 10 gone from AHRQ. ourpublicservice.org/resource/the...
ourpublicservice.org
The Cost of Cutting American Science: How Federal Cuts Diminish Public Health Capacity
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Jody Culham's Lab @culhamari-lab.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Our Annual Review of Vision Science paper on "Bringing Vision Science Closer to the Real World" with @evadeligiannis.bsky.social is officially out and available through open access. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
annualreviews.org
Bringing Vision Science Closer to the Real World
Vision science has demonstrated considerable success in characterizing early- and mid-level visual processes through reductionism and tightly controlled experiments. However, an understanding of high-...
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The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
300 early-career neuroscientists commented on the future of the field in a new survey led by @neuromatch.bsky.social and @thetransmitter.bsky.social. #neuroskyence By Paige Miranda www.thetransmitter.org/science-and-...
thetransmitter.org
‘High risk, high reward’: How early-career neuroscientists view their future
The Transmitter and Neuromatch surveyed more than 300 early-career neuroscientists to better understand their unique challenges, career aspirations and support needs.
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Elliot Murphy @elliot-murphy.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
New work out today! The result of a 15 year project to offer genuine linking hypotheses between linguistics and neuroscience: a revised research program, and its first result - a novel neural binding operation ('Meld') capturing core properties of natural language syntax 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2609.14384
arxiv.org
Formal Properties of Language as Constraints on Neural Dynamics
What must a neural system be capable of to implement language? Current research annotates stimuli with linguistic variables and tests which electrodes, voxels, or language-model layers predict neural ...
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
This thread is good to read. In my experience, what @michaelhendricks.bsky.social is describing here is not the situation faced by all labs in Canada, but it does describe the situation faced by far too many. And, it's all down to one simple thing: the feds don't find the tri-councils enough!
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 14/09/2026
Cis people do not understand how much trans people's rights have regressed in just 5 years. 5 years ago, there were none of these restrictions. 19 states banned legal recognition 21 states have bathroom bans 8 states ban gender marker changes on DLs 25 ban gender affirming care for trans youth
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 12/09/2026
A trans man in the UK has been banned in the workplace restrooms after he was forced to use the women's restrooms to comply with the new EHRC guidance. The women complained because he is visibly male and so they told him he can't use any bathroom.
A screenshot of a Reddit post from the r/LegalAdviceUK subreddit by user Dijstraanon, titled "FtM transgender facing two different issues at work? England."
The post text reads:
"Brother in law is trans FtM and presents fully as a man. He's now facing an impossible situation at work with his employer telling him that due to recent legislation he must use the toilet of his birth gender. BUT several female colleagues have raised a grievance about him using their gendered toilet.
His employer has told him that he cannot use the toilet while he is at work until they sort it out and cannot give him a timeframe to do so. They do [cut off] have disabled separate toilets.
In the mean time one of his female colleagues has accused him of sexual harassment because he was used their gendered toilet. His menstrual cycle meant he needed to use the toilet.
He's been with the employer for just over 5 years but only in this location for 18 months. The location is mainly male with just a handful of females, and his workshop only has male toilets.
I do not know how to support him and as he's not in a union there is no one to turn too right now."
The post has an orange "Comments Moderated" tag, 169 upvotes, and 134 comments.
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Jenna Norton @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
An excellent piece from a group including fellow Bethesda Declaration signers. Appreciate the call for an increasingly democratic model of shared governance in public research funding. As well as the call for scientists to engage. www.aaup.org/toward-recon...
aaup.org
Toward the Reconstruction of US Research Infrastructure
Academia must organize now to secure the future of the US academic research enterprise.
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
What, an Anthropic researcher states (without evidence) that there is a 10% chance that AI will cause human extinction? Incredible, we have never before heard such a claim!
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Gregg Gonsalves @gregggonsalves.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
No one. No one. No one can ever say to me again that Jay Bhattacharya was a reasonable pick for NIH Director. He was and is an ideological zealot. This is his doing. Shame on him. Shame on Matthew Memoli, Jon Lorsch, John Powers and the rest of them at NIH.
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Canada's National Observer @nationalobserver.com · 04/09/2026
INVESTIGATION: Canada’s National Observer has discovered a network of deceptive, AI-generated websites promoting Albertan separatism. The websites, rather than targeting human readers, are targeting chatbots — trying to influence the answers they provide.
nationalobserver.com
A US-linked network of fake websites is promoting Alberta separatism to AI chatbots
The websites present crude, AI-generated slop disguised as the voice of real Albertans. But they're made in Florida — and they're not even targeting Albertans directly.
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J. Offir, PhD @joffirphd.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
🧵My family stopped through NYC (less than 3 miles from ground zero) 2 months after 9/11, & we wore N95s. Strangers were derisive, but it really seemed like common sense. Come to find out: Rep. Jerrold Nadler said he tried to convince Giuliani & Bloomberg "to release www.nytimes.com/2026/09/07/n...
nytimes.com
After 9/11, Documents Suggest New Yorkers Were Misled About Air Quality (Gift Article)
New York City officials are making public more than 170,000 pages of documents related to the air quality around the World Trade Center site in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.
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Amanda Hu @amandalhu.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Parents of girls over 12 all over Alberta are now receiving “permission forms” requiring their birth sex as female in order to participate in sports as a result of the Government of Alberta’s “Fairness and Safety in Sport Act”. The more parents who file a challenge in response, the better.
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The Breakdown AB @thebreakdownab.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
From a confirmed source within the Calgary Board of Education... Over 1000 kids across Calgary are being denied an education. Because of UCP changes to the Education Act, over 1000 kids are being denied an education because of delays in immigration processing. Over 1000.
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 04/09/2026
Right. Vought and Bhattacharya tried to gut NIH in 2025 via stopping spending (Fed Reg bans) and rescission. That failed. Now in 2026, they’re still using bureaucracy inside the agency to try to slow spending. But they need a new way to get the leftover money (meant for science!) out of NIH. 1/
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Jenna Norton @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Unlawfully stealing from our future health to fund a war that never should have happened. democrats-appropriations.house.gov/news/press-r...
democrats-appropriations.house.gov
Defense Officials Attempt to Raid NIH Funds to Cover Department of Defense Activities
House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03) has learned that officials at the Department of Defense (DoD) are working to divert billions of dollars from the National Institute...
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Abbey @abbeyarletto.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
This is what living next door to a 30 megawatt data center sounds like.
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Paul Taylor @afni-pt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Have you ever felt like something was missing from your #fmri results? Have you been worried about potential reproducibility issues? Well, this new @natmethods.nature.com article with 40+ coauthors shows how the simple change to transparent thresholding helps both. Go Figure! rdcu.be/B4tikBETdQZa
A comparison of old and new thresholding approaches for fMRI data. The newer, transparent thresholding allows for interpreting context, more complete modeling, a reduction of biases and an increase in meaningful content. This all leads to more accurate interpretations and improved reproducibility evaluations.
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It's ME(Jaime) @exceedhergrasp1.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Excellent; well worth a read. 🧪 www.insidehighered.com/opinion/care...
insidehighered.com
Grad Students Wonder if Academia Is Worth Saving (opinion)
It’s not just the federal government that’s telling grad students their work doesn’t matter.
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McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 29/08/2026
"This is a paradigm shift. It’s like Plato’s cave. You sit in a dark room, watch images projected on a screen, and then stay there and enjoy more images. That’s what Plato’s cave is all about. At least, that’s what I’ve gathered from the modules." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/our...
mcsweeneys.net
Our University Does Not Require Books, Paper, or Human Knowledge
“Such a radical shakeup in learning has never happened before, as far as I know. Is there even a way to learn about whether or not something has happened bef...
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Grace Lindsay @neurograce.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
This paper shows how measures and constructs in psychology get introduced but rarely reused. Would love to see a similar analysis done on methods of analyzing neural data. A Fragmented Field: Construct and Measure Proliferation in Psychology" Anvari et al., 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Treemap plots for (top) personality and social psychology and (bottom) clinical and health psychology. Each tile shows one measure, labeled with its acronym if it fits on the tile. Larger tiles indicate that the measure has been used a higher number of times; the many smaller tiles show fragmentation.
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Rob Mok @robmok.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
📢 Announcing the 11th CiNet Conference: "From Biological to General Artificial Intelligence: Computational and Experimental Approaches to Understanding and Modeling the Brain" 5–7 October 2026, CiNet, Osaka, Japan Organized by yours truly & Shinji Nishimoto #neuroskyence #psychscisky #mlsky 🧠🤖 1/
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Victoria Bosch @initself.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Are brains and artificial neural networks converging onto universal representations? There is a seductive idea making the rounds in NeuroAI / machine learning: train systems well enough, and they all converge on the same representation of reality (i.e. a unique world model). We have thoughts™ 1/n
cell.com
The Umwelt Representation Hypothesis: rethinking Universality
Recent studies reveal striking representational alignment between artificial neural networks (ANNs) and biological brains, leading to proposals that all sufficiently capable systems converge on univer...
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PressProgress @pressprogress.ca · 25/08/2026
Sold a Lie: Emails Reveal Government and College Assured International Students they Would be Eligible for a Post-Graduation Work Permit Despite Rule Changes. Now, students are facing removal orders from Canada after an ICE-like CBSA raid at their protest in Calgary pressprogress.ca/sold-a-lie-e...
pressprogress.ca
Sold a Lie: Emails Reveal Government and College Assured International Students they Would be Eligible for a Post-Graduation Work Permit Despite Rule Changes.
Now, students are facing removal orders from Canada after an ICE-like CBSA raid at their protest in Calgary
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NIH Vigils @nihvigils.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
“It’s an elegant arrangement. It converts coercive state action into private editorial decisions, distributes moral injury across thousands of individual scientists each making a defensible compromise, and leaves executive power free to deny with curious vigor that censorship is occurring at all.”
sciencedirect.com
Inside the meat locker: anticipatory self-censorship and pressure on the vocabulary of American science
The U.S. federal grant terminations of 2025 have had a chilling effect on American science. Grantees whose awards have been renegotiated under threat …
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Pieter T. L. Beck @ptrbck.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
We have written a statement in support of Ghent Uni's decision to suspend Nathan Cofnas. We resist attempts to frame this as a punishment for "whistleblowing" or censorship of "controversial research". We invite all academics who share our views to sign our letter. forms.gle/qwN8xzEM5C7Q...
forms.gle
Open letter on the suspension of Nathan Cofnas at Ghent University
We, colleagues of Nathan Cofnas - supported by many colleagues internationally - want to respond to the negative and incorrect framing of Ghent University’s decision to suspend Nathan Cofnas. With th...
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 25/08/2026
The Pentagon has never received a passing grade on a comprehensive financial audit. One thing is clear: Vast sums are funneled into costly weapon systems that chronically come in over budget.
propublica.org
The $1 Trillion Black Box
The U.S. military budget is vast and opaque. Projects touted as engineering marvels end up facing years of delays and ballooning costs. ProPublica has launched a series to report on the Pentagon’s spe...
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 24/08/2026
If you just happened to pick this week to start yelling about the importance of academic freedom, I sure hope you did more than watch silently for the past 18 months as the Trump administration assaulted everything from mRNA vaccine research to gender studies to the very idea of having universities.
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Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Belgian university regulations prohibit the dissemination of views that promote racial inequality, which makes them the first uni system to incorporate Popperian intolerance of intolerance. I understand why people have reservations about this kind of rule, but...
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 20/08/2026
I've never seen such an effort to censor a document as I have the Amnesty International report on gender critical groups because of JK Rowling. They removed the report from the Wayback Machine and now I got a DMCA strike on my Google Drive for having it. It was deleted and removed from my account.
A screenshot of an email viewed in dark mode with the subject line "Google DMCA Violation." The email from Google informs the recipient that they have received a notification under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that some of their materials allegedly infringe on copyrights. It explains the removal process, mentions that notice details will be posted on Lumen, warns against repeated violations, and lists one affected Google Drive URL at the bottomA nearly identical mobile browser screenshot of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. It shows a search for the same Amnesty International UK resources URL, resulting in the same message: "This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."A mobile browser screenshot of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. A URL for an Amnesty International UK resources page is entered in the search bar, but the page displays the message: "This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."
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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
🚨 Job alert 🚨 Our department @vuamsterdam.bsky.social is hiring an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience! Join our lovely community here in beautiful Amsterdam! 🧠🔥 Deadline: October 15 Apply: workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/as...
workingat.vu.nl
Vacancy — Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience
Join the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) as Assistant Professor in cognitive neuroscience.
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 19/08/2026
“I am bracing for something bad to happen… It’s hard to pile up all this risk, then for all of it to come to nothing: landmines avoided until a Democratic administration takes over and clears all of them. The odds of that strike me as dim.” I share @brianbeutler.bsky.social ‘s feeling
offmessage.net
Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen
People should know.
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Michael E. Mann @michaelemann.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
You don't say... www.ms.now/news/frame-u...
ms.now
Whistleblower says probes into antisemitism at colleges were ploys to harass and strip millions
A former Justice Department lawyer says the Trump investigations squeezed Ivy League universities for millions before they were even concluded. A top Democrat is demanding answers.
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Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 17/08/2026
US child vaccination rates have plunged since before the pandemic, with kindergarten classrooms in more than 70% of counties now lacking herd immunity against measles.
US choropleth map showing percentage change in MMR or overall vaccination rates since before the pandemic, by county. Decreases are shown in pink, increases in green.
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