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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…
One of the coolest electrophysiology results ever...
rapidly flickering neural representations reflecting conscious perception
Huge congrats @doristsao & @HesseJanis!
1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)
Kepecs Lab retweeted
💔May their memories be a blessing. May those who were injured heal completely. May light and love overcome darkness and hate. Am Yisrael Chai.
Huge congratulations, Karl! @KarlDeisseroth
You and your colleagues fundamentally changed how we do neuroscience and we are still unlocking the power of these techniques. Incredibly well deserved!
Congratulations to our first #NobelPrize laureate of 2026 🎉
Early this morning Karl Deisseroth found out he was awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
He seems very happy with the news!
ALT Karl Deisseroth on the phone looking happy
Could not agree more with brilliant insights from @doristsao
What we do has to have consequences, whether for AI or medicine
If someone had simply published an academic paper on transformers, no one would have cared. The impact has come from scaling it to solve actual problems. In neuroscience we similarly tackle problems at such a small scale (describing the neural correlate of percept X or task Y) that it's hard to make people care. It's hard to even know if any proposed algorithm is right.
But I feel so inspired by what's happened in AI...if we also scale our efforts and aim for understanding the *full structure of the brain's model of world and self*, there actually is hope to solve the entire problem in our lifetime...and when we do, we will not only figure out intelligence (as LLMs have), but consciousness.
What is the brain's algorithm for tracking a persistent piece of matter? What is the brain's algorithm creating programs with variable arguments? What is the brain's data structure for representing "I"? I am dying to know.
Re the neural foundation model program: I think intelligently stitching data together across sessions and subjects is important, and foundation models are a good tool for that. But I absolutely disagree that they are an answer to understanding the brain.
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
Kepecs Lab retweeted
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
Kepecs Lab retweeted
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
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.
Very happy to start 2026 by sharing our new manuscript in Nature Metabolism.✨ By studying the constitutive adipocytes in the bone marrow, we identified a brain-mediated pathway that bypasses the SNS to evoke massive fat loss. 🧠🦴
Full article here: lnkd.in/gH7eHv4r
Kepecs Lab retweeted
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.
Kepecs Lab retweeted
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?
Kepecs Lab retweeted
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...
Congratulations to everyone at Setpoint Medical, present and past, who worked for 18 years to bring a brand new idea for the first time into a clinical reality. This begins a new era for millions of patients needing new options.
businesswire.com/news/home/2…
Kepecs Lab retweeted
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…
Kepecs Lab retweeted
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!
