1/ Why do late-stage cancer patients lose motivation & sink into apathy? 🔥Our new Science paper shows cancer activates a cytokine-sensing brain circuit to lower motivation.Great work by Aelita Zhu @sarahstarosta @Pignatelli_Lab @JanowitzTobias &team!🧵 🔗 doi.org/10.1126/science.adm8…

Fascinating @nature piece on cancer cachexia. Grateful to speak with Amber Dance & see our research highlighted: the brain is a key orchestrator that actively drains a patient's motivation. "It’s not that they don’t care. It is part of the disease." nature.com/articles/d41586-0…

Fable is definitely living up to its name, it’s a complete myth! 🤫 Got team access and every single query I tried is getting routed to 4.8 anyway... didnt try coding but many topics

American science is shrinking. 
A Post analysis found that, halfway through this fiscal year, the number of competitive grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health is down by more than half compared with the same period last year. wapo.st/3OgoHKV

The proposed FY2027 budget includes a $5.8B (−12.3%) cut to the NIH. United for Medical Research calculated this could cost ~50,000 jobs and $11.6B in economic activity, with 26 states losing >$100M each. A tragedy for science, patients, and the economy. #NIH

Hungary's next health minister: orthopedic surgeon by day, dance floor legend by night

If you are wondering about the new Hungarian PM, Péter Magyar, this thread explains clearly what he just pulled off

A backup lipolysis circuit to burn normally protected bone marrow fat without the normal adrenaline/noradrenaline stress pathway. Congrats to our collaborators on an elegant study.

The science funding system is BROKEN. PhDs and professors are spending their days writing grant proposals rather than conducting research that could transform millions of lives. And the worst part? The system REWARDS predictable, safe, incremental science. It PUNISHES radical ideas and moonshots.

I am recruiting graduate students for the experimental side of my lab @mcgillu for admission in Fall 2026! Get in touch if you're interested in how brain circuits implement distributed computation, including dopamine-based distributed RL and probabilistic representations.

Scientific family reunion, the funnest part of SfN!!! @ArminLak @OttTorben & Katharina Schmack

We prefer the term background neural activity to "photobomb" @GordFishell

Just reconnecting with @bjmarlin and… lo and behold… who can spot the two neuroscience glitterati enthusiastically photobombing?

#ChatGPT5 is a letdown, not because it's not AGI, but because it's slow and then shy about discussing molecular biology "for safety reasons" Just canceled; Gemini's looking better

Wow, this is truly exciting! Congrats to @KevinJTraceyMD and the whole team...

Grateful to @megtirrell and @CNN for covering this story. My NIH grant to study hearing loss was abruptly canceled, then restored by a court, but @NIH hopes to terminate the grant AGAIN(statnews.com/2025/07/06/hhs-…), creating massive uncertainty for my trainees. We're in a golden age where gene therapy and AI are making science fiction real. But this instability hobbles our progress, spooks the next generation of scientific talent, and risks outsourcing our scientific leadership. As Congress decides the NIH budget, stable funding is essential to keep the best minds and intellectual property here in the US. I hope they recognize the value we bring to the table and choose to support us. As a reminder: One of the most famous GOP leaders, Newt Gingrich, actually advocated for DOUBLING the NIH budget (see here: nytimes.com/2015/04/22/opini…). Instead, the NIH budget has failed to keep up with inflation, leading to ever diminishing capabilities... cnn.com/2025/07/29/health/ni…

We worked so well as a team for the #GRCPsychedelics @VVyazovskiy @MelissaHerman4 @ViditaVaidya and congrats to @TheBorisLab and @MikaelPalner, who will be the future vice-chairs!

Reducing animal use is a worthy goal but mechanistic discovery, the engine of biomedical progress, still requires animal models. Translation is vital and challenging and could be improved with these initiatives. Just don’t conflate the two.