Andrea Stocco

Early voting by 18-29 Democrats in North Carolina is 232.8% of what it was so far in 2022. You read that right, 232.8%.

The value of scientists writing for @thetransmitter.bsky.social, as I see it, is to help draw attention to “signal” in an era increasingly swamped with “noise”. As a researcher on the front lines, you have ideas about what’s valuable. Share them!

Exciting to spend the day catching up with @thetransmitter.bsky.social. it’s amazing to see what they’ve accomplished in just 3 years! 🎉 They are an outlet for basic neurosci. If you’d like to see more of your community/idea in TT, pitch a piece! www.thetransmitter.org/editorial-po...

Very rich people have always loved boarding school and other ways of spending the least time with their kids — AI companies now convinced them, and anybody able to be conned this way, that even the process of getting to know their childrens' personalities is a waste of time.

Glad more are realising this is a blunder! > By applying these tests outside their proper context [such as to LLM-based AI systems], the findings derived from such practice answer no real questions and fail to provide meaningful insights. doi.org/10.3384/nejl...

In one day, two politicians - Bolsonaro in Brazil and Vucic in Serbia - with ties to Trump have lost surprise elections thanks to high turnout. The rise of the international far-right is not inevitable.

I have been thinking about this for the past two weeks. The Brazilian election is something all of us had a stake in.

Tonight Students Saved Democracy in Serbia. 🇷🇸 They won the election. The Student List movement unites youth, academics, and civic voices across Serbia. Grounded in anti-corruption reforms, democratic integrity, transparent governance, this movement brings hope to many. Vučić conceded defeat!

Brazil rejected Bolsonaro. Serbia's students beat Vučić. Machado is home in Venezuela. What a day for democracy.

Just to be clear... Prop 40 is a ONE-TIME retroactive tax. It applies ONLY to billionaires and would tax just 5% of their wealth — which grew 30% in 2025. California's billionaires would still be worth $2T+ AFTER the tax. The revenue will fund healthcare for millions of Californians. Vote YES.

I keep asking myself: “How did we get so mind numbingly stupid enough to elect people who would be fascists?” And it all comes back to education. We started teaching to the test, stopped teaching civics, stopped valuing the arts and independent thought. We started teaching people to be profitable.

This is one of the most powerful depictions of health research-driven progress. No statistics required.

So in a huge surprise to absolutely no one, it turns out that NIH director Jay Bhattacharya's new journal based on the premise of letting his friends and only his friends publish essentially whatever they want is full of crackpot nonsense from retired cranks.

“There is no office that is worth stooping that low” — Obama portrays Vivek Ramaswamy’s vile attack ad as an affront to basic decency

“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory” — Obama

Trump’s DOJ sued California, threatened election officials with jail time, and staged arrests in the final days before the midterm elections. Legal experts say the lawsuit will go nowhere, but the goal was never to win in court. @readthebigpicture.bsky.social explains what the goal actually is.

Guillermo Del Toro dropping another one liner that’s exactly how I feel about AI slop, the “punishment” is built in

"Right now, we’re living in Trump’s world, in Vance’s world, in Hegseth’s world. This is what a world without empathy looks like. It’s a world of constant othering, of constant rage, of a constant belief that life is a zero-sum game. But nothing flourishes in that world." — @snipy.bsky.social

Americans are relearning the lesson we learned during the Gilded Age of the late 1890s, when robber barons ran the government and the economy for their own benefit: Oligarchy is incompatible with the common good. I'm hopeful we'll respond with a new progressive movement.

Every so often your post becomes news. This one is on Evelyn Rodarte, My Nguyen and my article on grammatical processing in bilinguals. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-emergence-of-skill/202610/how-bilinguals-move-between-two-grammars

while every generation thinks they're better than the previous one, parenting has advanced in leaps and bounds by numerous objective metrics for example, it is far less common today for parents to hit their kids than it was when I was a kid. this is unequivocally a good development

If you thought Ben Lamm was a shithead, you underestimated him. He's worse. Genetically engineering any creatures, but dogs especially, to be weapons of war — it's unspeakable. www.forbes.com/sites/amyfel...

This is one of the most holy sh*t stories I’ve ever read in my life. www.vanityfair.com/story/jared-...

Science is inherently political and when our government is actively hostile to science as a whole, publications should be able to write about it without being censored. Alas. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Saw this on the PubMed (what we use to look up scientific articles). It's so embarrassing.

This week, NIH advisors rebuked RFK for harming #NIH and US science. Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported it. Then RFK posted calling her sources anonymous or corrupt. I'll say this hoping it does good: I'm an NIH scientist, I'm not anonymous, and RFK Jr is destroying NIH. More in attachment:

With a couple other stories I have coming, this week is shaping up to be among the saddest ever on Seattle Bike Blog. Our status quo transportation system is so incredibly cruel and unforgiving, and we cannot continue accepting it as normal.

Will you be at the Memory Disorders meeting in Toronto? Or in Toronto? Come see Pavlov’s Dogz, the legendary brain punks you've heard so much about. Friday night at The Pilot. Get yr tix NOW! Pavlov's Dogz Date: Oct 23 • 19:00 www.eventbrite.ca/e/pavlovs-do...

Doing my best to try to amplify the value of our international colleagues in our labs as quoted in this piece (opinions my own) #science 🧪 US government probe into postdoc visas worries scientists www.nature.com/articles/d41...

‘Whalefall’ Writer Reveals Story Inspired By Time He Ate A Scuba Diver https://theonion.com/whalefall-writer-reveals-story-inspired-by-time-he-ate-a-scuba-diver/

@chantelpratphd.bsky.social and I recorded yet another episode of Brains for Dinner 🧠! This time, we talk about the neuroscience of language, communication, and the strange power of words (Oh, and we also went to an 80s-themed party!) chantelpratphd.substack.com/p/episode-12...

Barack Obama just delivered a blistering rebuke of Trump's actions against Ilhan Omar. This is worth reading in full.

I'm thrilled to share my first foray into nature writing. I describe my travels through Aotearoa New Zealand to see the country's rarest birds—and use this as a vehicle to tell the stories of the islands' evolutionary history and the bold conservation efforts that saved these creatures. Gift link

The Dark Knight Rises for Tax Purposes

Our paper is out in Nature, congrats to Qiyu, An et al! By stimulating ~20 motor cortex neurons carefully selected based on their activity, we could induce learned population activity and, sometimes, the movement itself, depending on the brain's state. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Washington has spent years trying to keep ICE from accessing residents’ driver information. According to a new report from the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, federal immigration agents are still finding ways around those protections.

Excerpts from Michael Lewis on DOGE (Guardian article). 1. Gavin Kliger, white nationalist, refused to shake hands with the Black IRS staffer who briefed him on privacy issues. Or pay attention. Kliger now has a defense start-up valued at 1.4B thanks to DOGE. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Elon Musk has spent at least $276 million since July to boost Republican candidates, a record-breaking sum. That’s just 0.028% of his total net worth. Oligarchs can rig the system at the expense of everyone else, and only spend pennies doing so. We must get Big Money out of politics.

For those uncertain about my underlying argument: There is an extremely well documented misinformation asymmetry in the U.S. such there is far more online falsehoods on the right than on the left. for a review see: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

What was once a gradual slide into autocracy has become something like free-fall. We should all be in the streets. www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

off the fucking rails. a rogue government.

I double-checked this on a couple of Xitter stat sites and it's true. Average views of the main AfD account dropped 90% and average engagement dropped by 60%. This is commercial social media for you: bots, damn bots and Russian bots.

I am angry tonight. Because tonight ICE shot a New Yorker. They shot a New Yorker while his five year old child was in the car. ICE makes this city less safe. We want them out. Now.

It needs to be loud and fucking clear that Pete Hegseth is so completely overwhelmed by the failed war he created, that he is resorting to a barbaric spectacle that has no place anywhere in the United States.

The latest “rigged election” strategy from the Trump administration involves producing a series of strategically timed arrests of non-citizens for alleged voter fraud & promoting those events to feed the false narrative that non-citizen voter fraud is widespread. uwcip.substack.com/p/federal-fr...