iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Sofie Valk

Simon Fisher @profsimonfisher.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

“We analyzed 7000 records of learning bouts across wild orangutans’ 8-year dependency period. Social learning was 5x more frequent than individual learning. Immature orangutans with heightened learning propensities developed most expansive diet profiles at independence.” @revathe.bsky.social et al🧪👇

science.org

How 8 years of social and individual learning interact to shape ecological competence in orangutans

Cultural learning permeates human skill and knowledge acquisition. To understand its importance for nonhuman apes, we analyzed just under 7000 records of behavioral bouts of social and individual lear...

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Reposted by Sofie Valk

Romy Lorenz @romy-lorenz.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Please share widely! 🚀 I am recruiting a PhD student for an exciting cross-species collaborative project using layer fMRI to investigate how interoception shapes cognitive control - Application deadline is: 1.10.2026 - Start: Jan 2027 www.mpg.de/26934670/phd...

mpg.de

PhD Position (m/f/d) | Ultra-High-Field Layer fMRI of Cognitive Control and Interoception

PhD Position in Ultra-High-Field Layer fMRI of Cognitive Control and Interoception

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Reposted by Sofie Valk

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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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Super proud of the work led by @meikehettwer.bsky.social activating a tour du force of six enigma working groups (depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and autism) plus enigma gradients to a 20.000+ lifespan sample from 172 sites and 6 continents

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

This shared organization provides a map for reconciling individual variability with transdiagnostic similarities and motivates an integrative, systems-level understanding of mental health

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

We found: Brain deviations in all diagnoses largely align with the brain’s intrinsic organization.Extreme deviations are rare (<10% overlap), but converge on a shared network of highly connected regions. Overlap > differences: Brain structure is more similar across diagnoses than unique to each.

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Reposted by Sofie Valk

Alex Fornito @alexfornito.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Not sure how to visualise your connectome data? Check our latest led by @m-gajwani.bsky.social & C Adamson on NeuroMarvl: an open source web-based platform for visualising and sharing connectomes! Paper: tinyurl.com/2t7ftu9d Software: tinyurl.com/yrv3xja3 @nsb-lab.bsky.social

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Reposted by Sofie Valk

Ashley Tyrer @ashleytyrer.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

1/ I’m delighted to share our new paper, out now in @cpsyjournal.bsky.social with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social and @micahgallen.com, correlating variations in cortical microstructures with individual differences in gamified exploration-exploitation behaviours! 🧵 doi.org/10.5334/cpsy...

doi.org

Cortical Microstructural Variations Correlate With Individual Differences in Gamified Exploration–Exploitation Behaviours | Computational Psychiatry

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Ann Kennedy @antihebbiann.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Happy Monday! Come learn how jellyfish swim. In a review led by fluid dynamics maestro Alex Hoover, we outline how neuromechanical modeling will help us understand how modulation of neural activity allows jellyfish to jet and pirouette through fluids www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Figure 1. The fluid dynamics of jellyfish swimming. a) Minimum intensity projection of a video clip of swimming Clytia hemisphaerica recorded at 30 fps; dark spots capture trajectories of tentacle bulbs, mouth, and gonads over time. Blue outlines approximate the margin of jellyfish on the frame of maximum extent on two successive swim pulses; green arrow shows direction of swimming. b) Minimum intensity projection of the same animal during a period of turning, showing asymmetry in the movement of bulbs on the inside vs outside of the turn. c) 3D diagram of the bell of a swimming jellyfish, showing starting and stopping vortex rings and fluid flow into (blue) vs away from (purple) the bell during the passive energy recapture phase of swimming. d) Cross section of a swimming jellyfish showing fluid vorticity toward the end of a swim pulse relaxation phase, showing locations of the starting and stopping vortex rings and the boundary layer. e) Swim pulse dynamics of an oblate jellyfish under symmetric bell contraction, producing straight swimming. The starting vortex ring is generated by active muscle contraction of the bell (ii, purple arrows), while the stopping vortex ring is generated by passive elastic relaxation (iii-iv, green arrows) from the mesoglea. Forward motion during the relaxation phase arises from the interaction of the starting and stopping vortex rings, with the starting vortex ring pulling fluid away from the bell and the stopping vortex ring directing fluid into the subumbrellar cavity. f) Swim pulse dynamics under asymmetric bell contraction, producing turning. Initially at rest (i), the neuronal signal initiates a muscular contraction in the bell margin on the inside of the turn before a stronger contraction of the bell margin is observed on the outside of the turn (ii-iii, purple arrows). The corresponding passive restoration yields a stronger expansion of the bell margin on the outside of the turn (iv, green arrows).

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Thanks 🙏 Mylla Marsiglia Alexandra John Şeyma Bayrak Bin Wan Anton Jakovčić Jordan DeKraker Jessica Royer Boris Bernhardt

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Overall our work illustrates that these aren’t two separate systems mapped onto isocortex side by side, but structures that are finely interdigitated with each other across the cortical sheet.

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Even at the subfield/nucleus level the pattern held, and interestingly the paralaminar nucleus came out as the most “hippocampus-like” part of the amygdala.

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Both structures shared coupling with paralimbic and (more weakly) default mode cortex. But they diverged in character: hippocampus tracked more with default-mode and visual networks, amygdala with ventral attention and limbic networks.

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Using resting-state fMRI in 722 HCP Young Adult participants, we mapped both structures’ subregions onto cortex using two connectivity metrics: Pearson correlation for broad co-fluctuation, and GLASSO partial correlation for more direct associations.

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Yigit Eriguec studied how hippocampal subfields and amygdalar nuclei are jointly wired into the cortex, two neighboring structures usually studied separately.

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Thanks 🙏 you are an inspiration!!

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Thanks to Alfred Anwander, Amin Saberi, Katerina Manoli, Jessica Royer, Doruk Yigit Eriguc, Valerie Jill Sydnor, Bin Wan, Simon Eickhoff and Boris Bernhardt for the thoughtful support and feedback along the way!

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

For anyone who's worked with thalamic nuclei, diffusion imaging, or multimodal developmental data, you'll know this was no small effort to pull together.

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Finally, these structural and functional shifts tracked with reductions in nucleus volume, pointing to pruning and intra-nucleus remodeling as a shared mechanism behind both effects.

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

These findings are a key step towards precision models of thalamocortical connectivity, which is relevant to better understand the role of this system in cognition and brain/mental health.

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

At the same time, functional thalamocortical connectivity decreased with age, and this decrease was coupled with FA changes specifically in the nuclei showing prolonged structural maturation.

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

What we found: FA increases with age across the board, but the timing and magnitude differ by nucleus. Sensory-projecting nuclei rich in "core" cells plateau early, while association-projecting, "matrix"-rich nuclei keep maturing well into adolescence.

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Using the Human Connectome Project in Development dataset (N=604, ages 8 to 21), we segmented 10 thalamic nuclei and reconstructed their nucleus-specific connections to cortex using probabilistic tractography. We then tracked how these connections mature using fractional anisotropy.

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Reposted by Sofie Valk

The Atlantic @theatlantic.com · 21/06/2026

“Some of the best time we spend with other people happens not when we’ve planned something special, but when we simply make room for them in the middle of an ordinary day,” Rafaela Jinich writes in The Wonder Reader:

bit.ly

The Beauty of Doing Nothing Together

There’s something reassuring about being with people when nobody is trying especially hard.

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Reposted by Sofie Valk

Roxana Zeraati @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

If these research directions resonate with you and you're interested in joining our team, we now have 2 open PhD positions! More information about the positions: nextcloud.tuebingen.mpg.de/index.php/s/... More information about our research: www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/906930/natur... #NeuroJobs

An illustration of different animals engaging in natural decision-making.

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The Atlantic @theatlantic.com · 21/04/2026

As the weather gets nicer, many of us feel the allure of hanging out. But modern life can make it hard to find places to just be, or to make new friends, Isabel Fattal writes in the Wonder Reader: theatln.tc/KhWkbk52

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Rick Betzel @richardfbetzel.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Awesome new work from Nick Weaver and Chris Lynn. How complicated is the human brain, really? This paper introduces a way to measure the compressibility of brain activity -- i.e. how many correlations do you actually need to predict large-scale neural activity. 1/

pnas.org

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

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Sofie Valk @sofievalk.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Happy to have been able to contribute to this great work 👶🗻⛰️🏔️

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Reposted by Sofie Valk

ETH Zurich @ethz.ch · 15/12/2025

In a groundbreaking study, an international team led by ETH Zurich researchers has for the first time calculated how many glaciers worldwide are likely to remain until the end of the century and for how long. It looks bleak. ethz.ch/en/news-and-...

ethz.ch

The Alps to lose a record number of glaciers in the next decade

How much longer will glaciers survive? A new study from ETH Zurich researchers offers the first detailed projection of how many glaciers could vanish by 2100 due to global warming – and why regions su...

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Reposted by Sofie Valk

Amin Saberi @amnsbr.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

I’m now a bit obsessed with GPUs 🤓 They have great potential for scaling up neuroimaging and neuroscience analyses 📈 Coming up next: GPU-accelerated neuroimaging meta-analyses (work in progress 🚧: github.com/amnsbr/nimar...) 20/n

github.com

GitHub - amnsbr/nimare-gpu: GPU-accelerated activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis (a GPU wrapper for NiMARE)

GPU-accelerated activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis (a GPU wrapper for NiMARE) - amnsbr/nimare-gpu

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Reposted by Sofie Valk

Amin Saberi @amnsbr.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

✨ New preprint ✨ Introducing cuBNM, a toolbox we developed to run brain simulations *much* more efficiently on GPUs 🎉🚀 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Documentation: cubnm.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ GitHub: github.com/amnsbr/cubnm 1/n 🧵

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Reposted by Sofie Valk

Andrew Reid @reid-lab.org · 06/11/2025

This is 🤯 All publicly available. Looks like an amazing new histology-based human probabilistic atlas and parcellation tool. #neuroskyence #mri #brainmapping A probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation | Nature share.google/5AD0iW7pxgb4...

share.google

A probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation - Nature

NextBrain is an open source, probabilistic atlas of the entire human brain, assembled using artificial-intelligence-enabled registration and segmentation methods to reconstruct the multimodal serial h...

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Rebecca R Helm @rebeccarhelm.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

Many sea stars begin life as young fairy-like creature (called a brachiolaria) that float through the open ocean. Eventually, a small star forms within them (here in yellow). The fairy-like brachiolaria sinks under the star’s weight, and the star pops out! 🎥@the_story_of_a_biologist (on Insta)

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