Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Lucas C Parra @lcparra.bsky.social · 19h

iai.tv/articles/eme...

Is "Emergence" really good for nothing? Or is this just a debate about semantics?

philpapers.org/archive/HEIT...

Emergence explains nothing and is bad science | John Heil

iai.tv

Reposted by Lucas C Parra

JJ @jjodx.bsky.social · 3d

One of my two last (ever) papers on tDCS:
Does anodal tDCS over M1 really enhance motor sequence learning? A non-replication of earlier findings in a double-blind, pre-registered large-sample study in humans
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Does anodal tDCS over M1 really enhance motor sequence learning? A non-replication of earlier findings in a double-blind, pre-registered large-sample study in humans

Background Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is one of the most widely used noninvasive neuromodulation methods. Despite its popularity, some recent studies highlighted issues about the r...

www.medrxiv.org

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Lucas C Parra @lcparra.bsky.social · 3d

youtu.be/_zfN9wnPvU0?...

AI Slop Is Destroying The Internet

YouTube video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

youtu.be

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Lucas C Parra @lcparra.bsky.social · 5d

Faculty position in Biomedical Engineering in New York City at our lovely campus. Please re-post!

cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...

Jobs | City University of New York

cuny.jobs

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Lucas C Parra @lcparra.bsky.social · 24d

... unnamed White House official says ... "It will first apply in the upcoming lottery cycle for new applicants.".

This sounds like it won't apply to cap-exempt H1B for academia, or will it?

Chaos and arbitrary rules, again.

www.axios.com/2025/09/20/t...

Trump's new H-1B fee won't apply to existing visa holders, official says

The $100,000 fee for the highly prized visa is intended to boost jobs for U.S. workers.

www.axios.com

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Lucas C Parra @lcparra.bsky.social · 24d

Does anyone know if this affects cap-exempt H1-B at academic institutions?

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Reposted by Lucas C Parra

Samuel Eckmann @samueleckmann.bsky.social · Sep 8

M1, not so low-d after all:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Lucas C Parra @lcparra.bsky.social · Sep 7

And 93 of mine ...

The Viking (Gunnar Blohm) @gunnarblohm.bsky.social · Sep 7

They used 51 of my papers...

Ryan Estrada @ryanestrada.com · Sep 6

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

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Lucas C Parra @lcparra.bsky.social · Sep 7

This is a very impressive system. Ultrasound brain stimulation with 256 transduces and simultaneous fMRI. Results suggest focal stimulation of LGN, a visual nucleolus deep inside the brain.

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

Ultrasound system for precise neuromodulation of human deep brain circuits - Nature Communications

Modulating deep brain structure can lead to therapies for neurological conditions. Here, the authors show a transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) system featuring a 256-element helmet-shaped trans...

www.nature.com

Reposted by Lucas C Parra

PHD Comics @phdcomics.com · Sep 2

The Path

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Reposted by Lucas C Parra

David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · Aug 31

The time between fucking around and finding out for messing with the climate and environment is long, and attribution is sometimes difficult. So conservative politicians have gotten away with appointing imbeciles to positions of power in these areas. However, no such luck for them in public health.

Opinion | Bernie Sanders: Kennedy Must Resign

www.nytimes.com

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Reposted by Lucas C Parra

Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · Aug 29

This rule would have meant I couldn't do my Ph.D. in America.

I did do it in America. Became a professor. 12 thriving U.S. labs are now headed by trainees from my research lab. Like me, they are all working hard to enrich American knowledge and society.

With this self-harming rule, none of that.

Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · Aug 29

Trump admin planning to change student visas from lasting for duration of academic program to fixed 4-yr term, and then much harder to renew
Could destroy US ability to attract global talent, particularly those seeking advanced degrees in STEM. The median time to complete a PhD is 5.7 yrs per NSF.

Trump Deals A New Immigration Blow To International Students

Trump officials have proposed a new rule limiting international students to fixed periods of entry, making a U.S. education more precarious.

www.forbes.com

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Reposted by Lucas C Parra

Ian Holmes @ianholmes.org · Aug 30

Bernie Sanders: Kennedy Must Resign www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/o...

Opinion | Bernie Sanders: Kennedy Must Resign

www.nytimes.com

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Reposted by Lucas C Parra

Nico Schuck @nicoschuck.bsky.social · Aug 22

Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social

#compneuro #neuroskyence

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Replay in the human visual cortex during brief task pauses is linked to implicit learning of successor representations | PNAS

Humans can implicitly learn about multistep sequential relationships between events in the environment from their statistical co-occurrence. Theore...

www.pnas.org

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Reposted by Lucas C Parra

Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · Aug 25

Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory!

We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414...
🧵1/9

Neural and behavioral reinstatement jointly reflect retrieval of narrative events - Nature Communications

When people recall a movie, their eye movements and brain activity resemble those observed during the viewing. These behavioral and neural reactivations are linked through a common process, likely ref...

doi.org

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Reposted by Lucas C Parra

Antonino Greco @agreco.bsky.social · Aug 18

Are top-down feedback connections enough for robust vision?

We found ConvRNN with top-down feedback exhibiting OOD robustness only when trained with dropout, revealing a dual mechanism for robust sensory coding

with @marco-d.bsky.social, Karl Friston, Giovanni Pezzulo & @siegellab.bsky.social

🧵👇

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Lucas C Parra @lcparra.bsky.social · Aug 19

I had totally missed this development of "fast weight programming" (FWP). This review makes a fascinating connection between recurrent networks and transformers with FWP right between the two. Supper interesting.

Harrison Ritz @hritz.bsky.social · Aug 17

Fast weight programming and linear transformers: from machine learning to neurobiology arxiv.org/abs/2508.084...

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Reposted by Lucas C Parra

Nora Newcombe @noranewcombe.bsky.social · Aug 17

Please sign! Science funding got strong support from the Senate but is now in the House! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

CE-Letter to Congress Requesting Protection of Science Funding in the FY26 Budget

To: The Honorable Members of the United States Congress Dear Honorable Senators and Representatives, We write in our individual capacities as U.S. citizens to urge you to prevent the far-reaching cons...

docs.google.com

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Reposted by Lucas C Parra

Angelo Forli @aforli89.bsky.social · Jul 9

Our study is out in Nature!
Using wireless Neuropixels we recorded hippocampal activity in freely flying bats and uncovered replay and theta(less) sweeps, revealing striking differences from classic rodent models.

👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Replay and representation dynamics in the hippocampus of freely flying bats - Nature

Nature - Replay and representation dynamics in the hippocampus of freely flying bats

www.nature.com

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Lucas C Parra @lcparra.bsky.social · Aug 13

This new paper on memory of stories makes perfect sense to me: we remember those topics better that get more time in the narrative.

Nice work.

Alexander Huth @alexanderhuth.bsky.social · Aug 1

New paper with @mujianing.bsky.social & @prestonlab.bsky.social! We propose a simple model for human memory of narratives: we uniformly sample incoming information at a constant rate. This explains behavioral data much better than variable-rate sampling triggered by event segmentation or surprisal.

bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · Aug 1

Efficient uniform sampling explains non-uniform memory of narrative stories https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.31.667952v1

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Reposted by Lucas C Parra

Raimo Kangasniemi @rk70534.bsky.social · Aug 4

"The BBC World Service has compiled material on over 160 cases where children have been shot in Gaza, and found that in 95 cases the child was shot in the head or chest.

In most of these cases the victim was under 12 years old."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjP6...

Investigating the killings of children in Gaza | BBC News

YouTube video by BBC News

www.youtube.com

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Lucas C Parra @lcparra.bsky.social · Jul 28

Interestingly, they chose to keep the dynamic A constant. Friston et al. assume A to be modulated by the task. The assumption that the brain has (largely) constant dynamic is consistent with our findings in iEEG

elifesciences.org/articles/104...

We are finding the same in EEG. Preprint coming ...

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Lucas C Parra @lcparra.bsky.social · Jul 28

Nice work modeling behavior and EEG as dynamical systems. The State space model is similar to the "dynamical causal model" (without all the fantastical claims). Their code seems to work well in high dimensions, whereas DCM has only been used in small problems, despite both using the EM algorithm.

Harrison Ritz @hritz.bsky.social · Jul 27

We put out this preprint a couple months ago, but I really wanted to replicate our findings before we went to publication.

At first, what we found was very confusing!

But when we dug in, it revealed a fascinating neural strategy for how we switch between tasks

doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.29.615736

🧵

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Reposted by Lucas C Parra

Gregory A. Hargreaves @bordergroves.bsky.social · Jul 25

The word “Research” is doing way too much work. We need separate words for “creating new verifiable knowledge” and “looking shit up on the internet”

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Reposted by Lucas C Parra

Olivia Christiano @oliviachristiano.bsky.social · Jul 19

How reliable is OPM-MEG, and how does it compare to other neuroimaging modalities? 🤔

In a new preprint with ‪@s-michelmann.bsky.social‬, we evaluate the reliability of OPM-MEG within & between individuals, and compare it to fMRI & iEEG during repeated movie viewing. 🧠

📄 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Reliability and signal comparison of OPM-MEG, fMRI & iEEG in a repeated movie viewing paradigm

Optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) offer a promising advancement in noninvasive neuroimaging via magnetoencephalography (MEG), but establishing their reliability and comparability to existing metho...

doi.org

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