Akanksha Gupta

The Academic Wheel of Privilege showing the 24 socio-cultural identities. The 24 socio-cultural identity types span six sectors: health and wellbeing, society, culture and communication, gender and sexuality, education and career, living arrangements and lastly childhood and development. These identity types are shown as circles connected to three concentric rings (outer, middle and inner) of “identity” circles with increasing privilege as you go towards the centre.

Out now!

The Academic Wheel of Privilege 🎡

We developed a framework & app to guide authorship teams in making equitable and thoughtful authorship decisions.

@saralilplants.bsky.social, @justinsulik.bsky.social, Bethan Iley, Mahmoud Elsherif, @flavioazevedo.bsky.social

🔗 osf.io/preprints/me...

Task learning increases information redundancy of neural responses in macaque visual cortex How does the brain optimize sensory information for decision-making in new tasks? One hypothesis suggests that learning reduces redundancy in neural representations to improve efficiency, whereas anot...

RIP redundancy reduction?

Beautiful work by Liu & colleagues showing that neural redundancy increases with learning, as predicted by a Bayesian model:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Believe in your work. Stop ending papers with “More research is needed” and start concluding with “No more research on this topic is needed.”

’Tis the time’s plague, when madmen lead the blind.

Headshots, names and countries of location for nine of the 2026 PREreview Champions

Headshots, names and countries of location for eight of the 2026 PREreview Champions

🎉 These are the 17 wonderful people who are becoming PREreview Champions this year!

🙌 Get to know them and join us in celebrating them:
content.prereview.org/announcing-2...

@prasakthi.bsky.social @iakankshagupta.bsky.social @sayab.bsky.social

Peer review is not there for you to tell experts in the field how you'd prefer the style of the paper to be, or what method or analysis you have a clear bias for.

Your job is to check for correctness, spot errors or gaps, protect the integrity of the scientific method, not piss on others.

ANXIETY Same symptoms as a heart attack, but no need to worry!!!

don't worry

one of the hardest things about homesickness is wanting to go home but then realising you’d need a time machine, not a plane ticket

Looking for Australian (UTC+10) individuals who would be willing to serve as mentors for the #DisabledInSTEM program as we have two individuals currently without mentors!

I want everyone who has spent years in therapy wondering what is wrong with them, wondering why they had so many bad relationships, why they felt so much dread, to know that it was in part because you were living in a world run by evil, evil people and you could tell that somewhere deep down

I am really angry about all of the scientists who cozied up to Epstein even after it was known who he was.

I am nearly as angry at how many people are justifying this as "they had to, it's how academia works"

NO IT FUCKING WELL ISN'T

❤️

An Introduction to Science Communication eLife Social Media Manager, Daisy Veysey, provides an introduction to science communication. Originally delivered as part of eLife's Community Ambassador training programme, the webinar discusses the…

‘An introduction to science communication’

Last month, we delivered a webinar introducing our eLife Community Ambassadors to science communication, from the philosophy of science to practical tips.

Watch it on our YouTube!

Part 1: How do LLMs work? YouTube video by Andrew Perfors

I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊

Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.

Funny, but also one of the two best career pieces of advice I got -- get exercise, especially when you are too stressed or don't have time for it.

"clear and consistently-implemented codes of conduct...make female scientists & engineers safer, & allow them to focus more effectively on their research."
.."changing the Royal Society's CoC so that the likelihood of serious sanctions for sexual harassment is reduced, would directly endanger women"

Image shows the panels of the final Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, published on December 31st 1995, drawn by comic artist Bill Watterson. It depicts Calvin (a young boy) and Hobbes (a stuffed tiger and his close companion) trekking outside in their winter clothes, across a fresh blanket of snow. Calvin: Wow, it really snowed last night! Isn't it wonderful! Hobbes: Everything familiar has disappeared! The world looks brand-new! Calvin: A new year. ... A fresh clean start! Hobbes: It's like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on! Calvin: A day full of possibilities! The two of them board their sled in anticipation. Calvin: It's a magical world, Hobbes ol' buddy... They set off on the sled out into the snow. Calvin: ... Let's go exploring!

30 years ago today, December 31st 1995, the last ever Calvin & Hobbes comic strip was published. Even now, I still find it so poignant & moving.

Birth Lottery If you were reborn today, where would you land? And how would that change your life?

Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth.

www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

Size of Life From an amoeba to a blue whale

and the winner of the "2025 best thing on Internet" has just arrived
neal.fun/size-of-life/

@carlbergstrom.com

Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization Nature Neuroscience - Parcellation of the cortex into functionally modular brain areas is foundational to neuroscience. Here, Hayden, Heilbronner and Yoo question the central status of brain areas...

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵

rdcu.be/eVZ1A

The CNRS is breaking free from the Web of Science From January 1st 2026, the CNRS will cut access to one of the largest commercial bibliometric databases, Clarivate Analytics'

From January 1st 2026, the CNRS will cut access to one of the largest commercial bibliometric databases, Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science, along with the Core Collection and Journal Citation Reports.

Photo taken at the Neues Museum in Berlin (which luckily has elevators!). It shows lots of stairs both left and right and several floors with people walking up. Some windows at the top.

Can we please discuss accessibility at conferences?

When organizers and schedules assume that everyone can walk fast and climb stairs, people with mobility issues (visible or invisible) might feel excluded.

/

the good news is if you sacrifice your integrity and all your personal relationships throughout your entire young adulthood you might, if you're lucky, get to hang out with guys like this for the rest of your life

Things that will get you kicked out of academia forever:
- taking maternity leave at the wrong time
- spending too much time with your kids
- reporting harassment
- not moving every 2-3 years
- taking a partner's job/preferences into account
- mouthing off before tenure

former kids who read too many books and didnt know how to pronounce the words you learned gang say hey

Steve Furber powerpoint slide showing picture of Ada Lovelace and a quote: "I have my hopes, and very distinct ones too, of one day getting cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into mathematical equations--in short, a law or laws for the mutual actions of the molecules of brain. .... I hope to bequeath to the generations a calculus of the nervous system."

incredible Ada Lovelace quote highlighted in a talk by Steve Furber. She spells out the dream of computational neuroscience, 2 centuries ago. The sheer ambition 🤩

NWB just turned 10 years old! Researchers worldwide have downloaded 1.9 PB of NWB data from @dandiarchive.org. This animation shows the reach of NWB, facilitating collaboration across the globe. What impact has open neurophysiology data had on your science? Share your stories! 🧠

@openscience

Large-scale multi-site study shows no association between musical training and early auditory neural sound encoding - Nature Communications Widely cited studies have claimed that musical training is associated with enhanced neural encoding for sound at early stages of the auditory system. Results from this large-scale multisite study do n...

It has been "known" that musical experience improves auditory coding in the brainstem. But...a new multilab study concludes

"Our findings provide no evidence for associations between early auditory neural responses and either musical training or musical ability."

👀

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

Reflections on the ‘Science for Social Good’ Satellite Event at CCN 2025 by Georgia Turner The day before the CCN 2025 conference kicked off in Amsterdam, attendees from career stages ranging from pre-PhD students to keynote speakers gathered together for an event focus…

@anne-urai.bsky.social , @weijima.bsky.social , Ili Ma and @tsonj.bsky.social organised an amazing workshop on 'Science for Social Good' at #CCN2025 @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

We wrote a blog reflecting on it:

anneurai.net/2025/08/14/r...