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✨​Exciting news! Our research on parallel decision computations is out today in @NatureNeuro !

nature.com/articles/s41593-023

There are often multiple strategies to solve a problem but we can only use one strategy at a time. Does this mean that the brain focuses on the executed strategy? How does it choose which strategy to compute?

In our new paper, we provide a surprising answer to these questions.

We found that rather than committing to a single strategy, the brain can compute multiple alternative decision strategies simultaneously!

Why would it be useful to represent both used and unused strategies simultaneously in the same brain region?

This property could facilitate cognitive flexibility and learning since changing strategies may only require selecting a precomputed decision variable rather than having to construct it from scratch.

Big thanks to my co-authors, especially Zach Mainen and Alfonso Renart for this great collaboration, and to the reviewers who definitely helped us improve this work!

Here is a must-read post from children's author Maggie Tokuda-Hall on how Scholastic offered to publish her book — all she had to do was remove all mention of racism.

Sure, they're banning books in Tennessee and Texas. But it's not just the books that get published and then banned from the library. It's all the books that don't get published in the first place.

Those banning books know publishers like Scholastic pull this cowardly bullshit. It's their game plan.

prettyokmaggie.com/blog/2023/4

I'm hoping this is just the beginning.

"The Public Broadcasting Service has followed National Public Radio in quitting Twitter after the social media network labeled both organizations as government-backed media."

bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

#twitter #pbs #npr #news

The term 'microaggressions' has been around since 1970. Many have heard the term, but do we know what it means? And if we know what it means, do we understand the impact these slights and biases have on the affected communities?

Microaggressions are pebbles in the pond of society. The initial impact may be minor, but it does have a ripple effect. How can we identify microaggressions and counteract them? Read more at #TheBigPicture: thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p

For Throwback Thursday, an episode with Akiko Iwasaki at the start of Covid year 2 (2021). We talked about the pandemic of course, but a lot more. Including her Immunology course at Yale.

"Ruslan (Medzhitov) and I have worked together to construct a course of introductory for medical students over the last several years. We wanted to approach immunology from first principles, not throwing some CD numbers and IL-whatever at the students, but really starting form how the system is established, how it works, what detection systems there are, and the arsenal of immune effector functions that are used to fight infection."

embo.org/podcasts/the-right-pl

Our extensively revised preprint now goes beyond clarifying Haldane’s arguments about the #CostOfSelection / #SubstitutionalLoad / #SelectiveDeaths, it also significantly extends them, and applies the resulting model to data biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20
@jdmatheson @moi #EvolgenPaper #PopulationGenetics #NaturalSelection #FitnessComponents #GeneticLoad 1/10

Combining mRNA vaccines designed to boost T (including non-spike targets on nucleocapsid, membrane & ORF1ab proteins) and B cell responses (targeting the spike).

cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8

Merck’s has posted the full trial results for its first-in-class activin inhibitor for the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension, sotatercept. The final report supports last fall’s positive interim analysis, which I covered in the Clinical Pipeline.
The final analysis was just published in NEJM 👇

nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM

You can read my piece on it here

nature.com/articles/d41591-022

"Transcriptomic analysis of skate developing fins revealed a major reorganization of signalling gradients relative to other vertebrates1. The redeployment of developmental transcription factors, such as 3′ hox genes, initiates an anterior signalling centre analogous to the posterior apical ectodermal ridge (AER). These changes arose ~286–221 million years ago (Fig. 1b) after the divergence between sharks and skates. Nevertheless, the genomic and regulatory changes underlying these novel expression domains have remained elusive."

nature.com/articles/s41586-023

Excited to share MBE's first Highlight! Learn how Antarctic icefishes have adapted to both the extreme cold and the unique lighting conditions under Antarctic sea ice -- Looking through the Ice: Cold-Adapted Vision in Antarctic Icefish doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msad058 #science #evolution #biology #genome #SciComm #evolgen_paper

“The goal of these campaigns was not to convince foreign audiences that Russia’s military invasion was somehow justified, but to make it harder for people to discern fact from fiction,” writes Sander van der Linden in his new book, “Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity.”

blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocial

RT @Lo_Zanzi
#TheMoreTheMerrier! Smart approach with the #mRNAvaccine platform to extend the protection of classical anti-Spike vaccines! ⁦@CellCellPress⁩ a new RNA vaccine that encodes multiple conserved peptides of #SARSCoV2 non-spike antigens to target #Tcells cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8

On this day in 1941: Michael S Brown born, won 1985 #NobelPrize for working out metabolism of cholesterol #ThisDayInBiotech

How do cancer-specific chromosome gains/losses contribute to #oncogenesis?
Susanne Lens and collaborators at UMC Utrecht describe a #kinesin-based strategy for inducing #mitotic #missegregation of selected #chromosomes, as tool for modeling specific #aneuploidies

embopress.org/doi/10.15252/emb

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