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Mary Elizabeth Sutherland

@meharpist.bsky.social

3.3K followers 310 following 162 posts

I'm Nature's Deputy Editor for ecology, evolution and social science and handle papers in cog neuro, psych, and a variety of behavioral and social sciences. When I'm not working, I'm a mom (and sometimes even try to find time to play my harp or ski).

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Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

If you care about inequality and fairness, check out some of the pieces published in NHB's recent Focus issue on the topic

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

How can children keep learning when schools close because of climate events or disease? A recent @nature.com paper shows that weekly 20-minute phone tutoring sessions for children learning from home in India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines, and Uganda improved learning www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Mobile education builds resilience during shocks in five countries - Nature

Remote phone-based targeted tutoring in five countries produced large, cost-effective learning gains during school closures, outperforming text messaging and working effectively when delivered by gove...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

What if psychedelics don't make the brain more disordered, but more attuned to the world around it? A study in @nature.com suggests psilocybin aligns brain activity with context, linking feelings of connectedness and self-transcendence to lasting mindset shifts www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Psychedelics align brain activity with context - Nature

The psychedelic psilocybin reorganizes brain activity into structured, context-aligned patterns that integrate internal and external processing, providing a neural basis for the felt continuity betwee...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Most decision-making research focuses on discrete choices, but real life is continuous. @nature.com recently published a study showing that the brain manages such behavior by dynamically mixing goal-based control policies (with distinct roles for hippocampus ACC & OFC) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Neural basis of compositional control - Nature

Behaviour of human participants in a prey-pursuit task reflects dynamic blending of goal-specific control policies, with hippocampus estimating latent states, anterior cingulate cortex orchestrating p...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Large language models can be used to estimate the results of social science experiments about as accurately as human forecasters—even for experiments published after the models were trained—although they tended to overestimate effect sizes shows a @nature.com paper www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Large language models can predict the results of social science experiments - Nature

Large language models can be used to estimate the results of social science experiments about as accurately as a group of human forecasters—even for experiments published after the...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

What happens in your brain when you are under general anesthetic? A recent @nature.com paper reports that the human hippocampus is still responding to, predicting, and learning auditory stimuli and speech www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus - Nature

In the hippocampus, complex processing of sensory stimuli occurs even in the unconscious state.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

While I'm on the topic of @nature.com comments, I want to highlight one echoing a sentiment I've held for a while now, namely that science and the humanities are complementary and enable progress by helping each other: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Why science needs the humanities more than ever

From AI to biotechnology, today’s scientific breakthroughs raise ethical and social challenges that technical expertise alone cannot solve.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

How can results in the behavioral sciences be more generalizable and more likely to yield meaningful results? Writing in @nature.com, John List argues that one solution is for academics to use more natural field experiments www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Make science more reliable: study people as they go about their lives

Researchers have long discussed the replication crisis. Now it’s time to tackle another problem in the behavioural sciences: generalizability.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

How does the brain build sentences? A recent @nature.com paper combined wide-scale recordings of single neurons with natural language processing models and found that there are specific neurons that only care if a word is a noun, or if a phrase is ending 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Mapping the neuronal building blocks of human language with language models - Nature

Wide-scale recordings reveal neurons in the human brain that encode fundamental components of language such as the grammatical relationships between words, their parts of speech and the...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

I’m so happy to be representing @nature.com at OHBM in Bordeaux! If you see ma and want to chat, please say hi! @ohbmofficial.bsky.social

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

I'm a bit late on this, but wanted to highlight the comprehensive, cross-sectional reference benchmark for white matter pathways across the lifespan that was recently published in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

White matter micro- and macrostructure brain charts for the human lifespan - Nature

Integration of data representing 35,120 brain scans from diverse global studies enables construction of reference charts that define normative microstructural and macrostructural properties across the...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

@nature.com's first Stage 2 Registered Report has been published! The researchers manipulated #bluesky algorithms to illustrate how social media algorithms impacts intergroup, moralized, and emotional information during the 2024 US election: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Redesigning algorithms to intervene on social norm misperceptions during a national election - Nature

Engagement-based feeds amplify intergroup, moralized, emotional (IME) and toxic content relative to reverse-chronological feeds, and a diversified extremity algorithm reduces exposure to IME and toxic...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

@nature.com is expanding Registered Reports - an article type where the research plan is reviewed prior to conducting the study, and, if it passes peer review, we promise to publish it regardless of the results - to all fields we publish + a broader range of research: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Nature is expanding Registered Reports to all the fields in which we publish

Registered Reports improve the credibility of scientific claims by rewarding big questions, sound methods and solid analyses. They need to become a standard tool in research.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

AI can now scan papers, generate hypotheses, and even help discover drugs—but still relies on something human: judgment, curiosity, and making sense of messy results. The future isn’t AI replacing scientists—it’s amplifying them. Read more in @nature.com's editorial: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Why AI cannot do good science without humans

With the arrival of ‘AI scientists’, it’s as well to remember that human wisdom, empathy and sheer messiness are as much part of progress as are process and efficiency.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

I'm not sure how accurate this study is, but found the results interesting "An AI-led analysis of publicly available peer-review reports of Nature Communications papers links requests for major revisions with papers that end up having high impact". www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Tough peer-review process? Your paper might end up being more highly cited

An AI-led analysis of publicly available peer-review reports links requests for major revisions with papers that end up having high impact.

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Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

How much sleep should you get to age in a healthy way?! @nature.com paper links sleep duration to 23 biological ageing clocks and finds a U‑shaped pattern: short or long sleep is associated with higher bio-age gaps; the lowest is around ~6.4–7.8h (varies by organ/sex). www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sleep chart of biological ageing clocks in middle and late life - Nature

A cross-organ, multi-omics U-shaped relationship between sleep duration and biological ageing clocks highlights the potential of sleep optimization to promote healthy ageing, lower disease risk and ex...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Millions of people(including me) turn to LLMs for information and advice. But who shapes their output? A @nature.com paper shows the influence of state controlled media on LLM output. Read all the details in the article here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

State media control influences large language models - Nature

Government-controlled media influences the output of large language models via their training data, and models queried in the languages of countries with lower media freedom show a stronger ...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

A recent @nature.com paper uses evidence from thousands of MBA and law cohorts to show that more diverse student groups are associated with higher median salaries at graduation. This is a timely, data‑driven contribution to debates on higher‑ed policy www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Racial diversity in higher education is associated with higher student salaries - Nature

A longitudinal study shows that racial diversity in higher education is associated with higher student salaries at graduation, indicating that policies to increase or leverage racial diversity enhance...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Why does cooperation fade—even when incentives are strong? A recent @nature.com paper analyzes real-world group lending data and finds that motivation erodes over time, rebounds when norms are reset, then declines faster each cycle. Read more here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Punctuated decline of human cooperation - Nature

Cooperation in group lending declines over time due to shifting behavioural motivations, briefly rebounds after loan restarts, then declines faster again, revealing systematic deviations from rational...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

I was honored to be featured on @stimulatingbrains.org's podcast, hosted by @andreashorn.org, so please listen if you're interested in scientific publishing or being an editor at @nature.com stimulatingbrains.org/77-mary-eliz...

stimulatingbrains.org

#77: Mary Elizabeth Sutherland — Nature, editorial judgment, and the future of scientific publishing – Stimulating Brains

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Large language models (LLMs) trained on outputs from other LLMs/AI can inherit undesirable behaviors, even if they are not directly referenced in the training data shows a recent @nature.com paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Language models transmit behavioural traits through hidden signals in data - Nature

During model distillation, large language models can subtly transmit traits unrelated to the training data.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

@nature.com is hiring an editor to join the Clinical, Translational, Genetics and Biotechnology team and handle genomic technology areas, including genome engineering, cancer genomics, synthetic biology, omics-based diagnosis and technologies springernature.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/SpringerNatu...

springernature.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com

Associate or Senior Editor, Nature

Title: Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Locations: Shanghai or Madrid – hybrid working model Closing Date: 21st April 2026 About Springer Nature Springer Nature is one of the leading publishers of r...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

A week ago, @nature.com published a very special issue on reliable research in the social and behavioral sciences. It features four papers that look at reproducibility, robustness and replicability and represents an amazing amount of work. Check it out here: www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Reliable research in the social and behavioural and sciences

Sweeping new investigations probe the replication, robustness and reproducibility of results across the behavioural and social sciences.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Check out this @nature.com paper on how the brain’s functional hierarchy evolves from birth to 100. Infants' gradient architecture is anchored by sensory systems, differentiates along association and control axes during childhood/adolescence & dedifferentiates in aging www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Functional hierarchy of the human neocortex across the lifespan - Nature

fMRI data from individuals of a wide range of ages (from a few days to 100 years old) are used to map the key organizational axes of functional connectivity in the human cortex throughout the lifespan...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

@nature.com published a very important study last week: it should that an intervention to educate unmarried adolescent girls in 18 communities in northern Nigeria reduced rates of child (ie under 18) marriage from 86% to 21%. Read more here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A big-push community intervention reduced rates of child marriage by 80% - Nature

A community-wide intervention in northern Nigeria reduced rates of child marriage from 79% to 14%, showing that bundled, big-push approaches can dramatically shift entrenched behaviours.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

I know that I've posted about this paper before, but I was just reading the research briefing in @nature.com and got impressed all over again so thought I'd share: Parkinson's disease affects a network of brain regions that control whole-body action 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Parkinson’s disease affects network of brain regions that controls whole-body action

A network called SCAN shows abnormally high connectivity with deep brain structures in people with Parkinson’s disease.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Excited to share @nathumbehav.nature.com's new “How to” collection—a practical set of researcher‑to‑researcher insights on everything from building supportive lab cultures to ethical online data use, designing surveys and megastudies, evaluating LLMs, and more. 🧪 www.nature.com/collections/...

‘How to’ Comments

This ongoing Series of ‘How to’ Comments offers expert guidance and recommendations on a wide range of topics relevant to the broad readership of Nature Human ...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

Check out this recent @nature.com paper reporting a field experiment on X. It shows X's algorithm boosts conservative content and downranks traditional media—shifting users’ views on key issues. Switching to chronological doesn’t reverse the effect. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm - Nature

Among users initially on a chronological feed, 7 weeks of exposure to X’s algorithmic feed in 2023 shifted political attitudes and account-following behaviour in a more conservative direction compared...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

A recent @nature.com paper asks a big question: Do LLMs actually have moral competence or are they just good at sounding right? This question is answered by distinguishing between moral performance and competence and a roadmap to assess what LLMs are really doing www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A roadmap for evaluating moral competence in large language models - Nature

This Perspective offers a roadmap for tackling the challenges of the facsimile problem, moral multidimensionality and moral pluralism in large language models.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

I'm excited to see what people think of @openscholar.bsky.social, an open-source language model that can answer scientific queries with accuracy similar to human experts. Read more in the @nature.com paper here: 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Synthesizing scientific literature with retrieval-augmented language models - Nature

A specialized, open-source, retrieval-augmented language model is introduced for answering scientific queries and synthesizing literature, the responses of which are shown to be preferred by human eva...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

The highlight of my week was the publication of "Parkinson’s disease as a somato-cognitive action network disorder" in @nature.com. It's a great paper that shows how conceptual changes in fundamental neuroscience - the discovery of SCAN - can improve treatment 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Parkinson’s disease as a somato-cognitive action network disorder - Nature

The substantia nigra and all Parkinson’s disease deep-brain stimulation targets are selectively connected to the somato-cognitive action network rather than to effector-specific motor regions.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Happy Friday! For those of you who didn't see the excellent @nature.com paper showing that scientists who use AI tools produce more research but on a narrower range of topics, consider listening to the podcast: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

AI can turbocharge scientists’ careers — but limit their scope

Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 14 January 2026

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Recently published in @nature.com :the human brain stores what happened and the context in mostly separate neurons—binding them only when needed, which enables flexible memory (and hopefully avoids confusion) 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Distinct neuronal populations in the human brain combine content and context - Nature

Single-neuron recordings in humans reveal largely separate content and context neurons whose coordinated activity flexibly places memory items in context.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

One of the best parts of my week was seeing this paper -showing that the use of AI/ML tools leads to more publications, citations, and faster career progression but a narrowing of topics studied - come out in @nature.com 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Artificial intelligence tools expand scientists’ impact but contract science’s focus - Nature

Artificial intelligence boosts individual scientists’ output, citations and career progression, but collectively narrows research diversity and reduces collaboration, concentrating work in data-rich a...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

A recent @nature.com shows that it's possible to reduce the suffering of chronic pain without numbing sensation or using opioids... at least in mice 🧪. Read more here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Client Challenge

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

As 2025 draws to a close, consider listening to @nature.com's end of year podcast - it's a great way to end 2025 and this holiday season 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The Nature Podcast festive spectacular 2025

Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 17 December 2025

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Did you know that chatting with LLMs can shift people's attitudes towards political candidates & policy issues? A recent @nature.com paper show that AI chatbots can persuade voters to change their minds; a related paper in @science.org describes when they work best www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Persuading voters using human–artificial intelligence dialogues - Nature

Human–artificial intelligence (AI) dialogues can meaningfully impact voters’ attitudes towards presidential candidates and policy, demonstrating the potential of conversational AI to influence politic...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

A recent meta-analysis published in @nature.com finds that there is no general effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health (though there are some effects for specific groups, e.g. low-income samples). Read more details in the full paper here: 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

No meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health - Nature

A meta-analysis of 168 studies reveals that economic inequality is not significantly associated with subjective well-being or mental health.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

All AI models are constrained by the quality of their data. A recent @nature.com paper introduces the Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark (FHIBE), a diverse dataset implementing best practices for consent, privacy, compensation, safety and utility. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fair human-centric image dataset for ethical AI benchmarking - Nature

The Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark (FHIBE, pronounced ‘Feebee’)—an image dataset that implements best practices for consent, privacy, compensation, safety, diversity and utility—can be used respon...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Do glitches on video calls annoy you? A new study in @nature.com shows that they reduce trust in telehealth, lowered job-interview ratings, weakened social connection, and decreased likelihood for parole, likely due, in part, to the sense of uncanniness they trigger 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Video-call glitches trigger uncanniness and harm consequential life outcomes - Nature

Glitches in video calls can have a negative effect on the judgement of the people involved and correspond to worse outcomes in major areas of life such as job interviews and parole hearings.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

How does the brain integrate visual and somatosensory representations? A recent @nature.com paper presents a model that, when applied to ongoing co-activations during rest, results in detailed maps of body-part tuning that aligns with visual tuning 🧪 Read more here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain - Nature

A mode of brain organization that connects visual and bodily reference frames may translate raw sensory impressions into more abstract formats that are useful for action, social cognition and semantic...

Reposted by Mary Elizabeth Sutherland

Owen Maresh @graveolens.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

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

Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain - Nature

A mode of brain organization that connects visual and bodily reference frames may translate raw sensory impressions into more abstract formats that are useful for action, social cognition and semantic...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

What aspects of language are universal, and which are due to familiarity? A @nature.com paper finds that while STG shows shared responses to basic speech sounds, only native language boosts encoding of word boundaries + sound-sequence stats 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Shared and language-specific phonological processing in the human temporal lobe - Nature

The human superior temporal gyrus processes acoustic–phonetic properties of speech regardless of whether the language is familiar to the listener, but only encodes word boundaries and language-sp...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

Do you have a background in applied #AI and an interest in joining @nature.com's editorial team? If so, consider applying! www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Biological, Clinical, and Social Sciences - New York City, New York (US) job with Springer Nature Ltd | 12848260

Title: Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Biological, Clinical, and Social Sciences Organization: Nature Portfolio Locations: New York, Jersey City...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

How did rumors related to the peasant insurrections in revolutionary France (1789) spread? Researchers used epidemiological models to provide a quantitative answer, marking - to my knowledge - the first quantitative history paper that @nature.com has published www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Epidemiology models explain rumour spreading during France’s Great Fear of 1789 - Nature

Epidemiological methods are used to show that the Great Fear of 1789, a series of peasant insurrections in rural revolutionary France, was driven by deliberate political action rather than spontaneous...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

This is exciting: We just opened a position for a multimedia editor to broaden @nature.com 's presence on social media, including TikTok. If you're interested, consider applying springernature.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/de-DE/Spring...

springernature.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com

Associate Multimedia Editor or Senior Multimedia Editor

Job Title: Associate Multimedia Editor or Senior Multimedia Editor (12 Month Fixed Term Role) Organisation: Nature Portfolio Location: London – Hybrid Working Model Application Deadline: Sunday 9th No...

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

Did you know that AI can figure out its own way to learn, and that its way is better than one designed by humans? Read more in a @nature.com N&V (and the original paper is in the comment) 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

AI discovers learning algorithm that outperforms those designed by humans

An artificial-intelligence algorithm that discovers its own way to learn achieves state-of-the-art performance, including on some tasks it had never encountered before.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

How do stereotypes shape AI, and what does that mean for the future of hiring? Hear more in @nature.com 's podcast here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How stereotypes shape AI – and what that means for the future of hiring

Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 08 October 2025

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

I really like my job because it allows me to contribute to important @nature.com papers like this one, which shows that online media and large language models (LLMs) distort age and gender in stereotypical ways. Learn more in this video 🧪 www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vdw...

Age and Gender Distortion in Online Media and Large Language Models

YouTube video by Douglas Guilbeault

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

I play the harp and have always loved music and being creative, so was very excited to see this paper in Nature Communications showing that creative hobbies may slow brain aging! 🧪 Read more in @nature.com's news coverage: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Creative hobbies could slow brain ageing at the molecular level

To keep the mind young, dance the tango.