Marieke van Vugt

Cracked, but still there: the glass ceiling persists for senior women in science To mark International Women’s Day on 8 March, Mangala Srinivas reminds junior colleagues that career success won’t protect you from gender-based bias.

"Labels such as ‘poor fit’ or ‘not a real scientist’ are clearly opinions, which can be wrong. I also suggest that everyone take the responsibility to call out slights or unfair behaviour." Unfortunately also quite familiar to me... Still work to do! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

What a viral TikTok taught me about personal storytelling in science The success of a student’s educational video made me rethink the ways that teaching can create moments of wonder that technology can’t replace.

"maybe what we can offer as science educators is not information itself, but the excitement and meaning we derive from the topics we teach. And we can hope that our students will carry that wonder with them into the world" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Climate change is speeding up — the pace nearly doubled in ten years Earth is now warming at a rate of around 0.35 ºC per decade, fresh analysis finds.

"The rate of global warming has surged since 2015 and is now nearly double what it was in the 1970s, according to a study1 that tackles one of the hottest debates among climate scientists." www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The missing pieces of menopause science Hormone therapy is back after decades in the shadows. But evidence gaps remain for treating perimenopause — often the most disruptive part of the menopause transition.

What do we know about hormone therapy for menopause and peri-menopause symptoms? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A reinforcement learning and sequential sampling model constrained by gaze data Author summary When people are deciding between options they have encountered in the past, their preferences are largely based on their memory of past experiences with those options. However, simply l...

"The present study shows how constraining an RL-SSM with eye gaze data can further enhance its predictive ability." dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Celebrate women in research and the networks that sustain them On International Women’s Day, we celebrate technology pioneers and recognize the mentorship that is necessary to inspire the current generation and those of the future.

Celebrate women in research and the networks that sustain them--but why is mentoring always emphasized when talking about women, but not when talking about men? I also find mentoring important, but it so much reinforces the stereotypes... www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Why we should look beyond grades to spot potential in STEM “I have long believed that genius is evenly distributed across society,” this professor writes

"I wish the system did a better job of looking beyond traditional academic metrics when assessing potential." www.science.org/content/arti...

Now out: "Mindfulness in Relationships: Eight-Week Mindfulness Intervention Associated with Decreased Negative Emotion and Increased Nonreactivity in Non-meditating Romantic Partners" rdcu.be/e7ch6

How AI is shaping the war in Iran — and what's next for future conflicts The conflict in Iran is highlighting the use of artificial intelligence in warfare.

“There is no evidence that AI lowers civilian deaths or wrongful targeting decisions and it may be that the opposite is true,” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The first ‘AI societies’ are taking shape: how human-like are they? Scientists are studying forms of ‘social’ interactions between artificial-intelligence agents. Will they find a fresh form of sociology, or merely a sophisticated mime act?

On AI agents as means for simulating societies: "Their sycophantic nature might mean that AI agents can’t “reflect the contradiction and disagreement and negative emotion that real people experience”," www.nature.com/articles/d41...

These brain cells clear proteins that contribute to Alzheimer’s When specialized cells called tanycytes stop working, disease-causing tau proteins build up in the brain.

tanycytes "move tau proteins from the CSF surrounding the brain into the bloodstream.", and are possibly relevant for Alzheimer's disease www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The Epstein scandal is a wake-up call — new rules are needed on links with rich donors A systemic failure of oversight allowed the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to curry favour with academia. Stronger governance is urgently needed.

"academics are often naive when it comes to ensuring the appropriateness of donors, not least because the promotion system frequently rewards not caution, but the acquisition of major research funds." www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Do obesity drugs treat addiction? Huge study hints at their promise Study of 600,000 US military veterans shows that those who took anti-obesity medications were less likely to develop some complications of substance-use disorders.

"Among participants who had a history of substance-use disorders at the start of the study, those taking a GLP-1 drug generally had a reduced risk of the substance-use complications" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How a mathematician is cracking open Mexico’s powerful drug cartels Rafael Prieto-Curiel explains how his models of organized crime could improve public safety in his home country.

Cool application of computational modeling in the real world! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Do women academics need to work 2.4 times harder to succeed? - LSE Impact What reproducing Wennerås & Wold's classic 1997 study on peer review bias reveals about policymaking and the use of evidence in research policy.

💥New | Do women academics need to work 2.4 times harder to succeed?

✍️Ulf Sandström

#AcademicSky #GenderBias

🔔 DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MARCH 15TH 🔔

⏳ One extra week to submit your application!

🌎 The deadline was extended to ensure fairness by making sure that every motivated applicant gets a proper opportunity.

Now is the time.
Submit before March 15th.
Join us in Turkey ☀️

APPLY HERE: bit.ly/4rRP9sI

Understanding Maximum Likelihood Estimation A tool to understand maximum likelihood estimation

Do you know any other cool interactive applications that illustrate some statistical concept?
#rstats #stats
@rpsychologist.com

rpsychologist.com/likelihood/

Over the past decade, the robustness of the ego-depletion effect has been widely questioned. Possible reasons for variations in the ego-depletion effect may be participant expectations of the demand of the upcoming task and experimenter expectations or demand bias. In three experiments we tested the hypothesis that the ego-depletion effect is partly or exclusively attributable to (i) participants’ expectations of the task (Studies 1a and b) and (ii) experimental demand bias (Study 2). In all studies we did not observe a robust ego-depletion effect, and only participants informed that the task was tiring exhibited the effect. Taken together, our findings suggest that participant and experimenter expectations can influence performance in ego-depletion paradigms. However, more research is necessary to determine the extent to which these expectations—rather than other social-motivational factors—drive the effect.

New study finds demand and experimenter bias partly explain the ego-depletion effect

Journal:
doi.org/10.1007/s121...

Open access: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

By @oulmann.bsky.social, @martinhagger.bsky.social, et al.

Great post on the emergence of clinical trials!
This section makes me wonder about "professionalization" in science in general. I do feel like many parts of the research process in my field are...surprisingly dilettantish.>

Krijg je een hersenelektrode geïmplanteerd vanwege een dwangstoornis, word je opeens een liefhebber van Johnny Cash.

The observed smallest worthwhile difference in this study "means that the current 15% antidepressant benefit over no treatment was sufficient for 1 in 3 people to accept antidepressants given the burdens, but 2 in 3 expected greater treatment benefits."

Haven’t tried, but when teaching stats to Tibetan monks I found that Bayesian made significantly more sense to them than NHST

Has anyone tried teaching *only* Bayesian inferential #stats for undergrad psych (or other UG sosci programs)?
Like completely foregoing NHST, confidence whatevers, p values, CLT...

I'd be very interested in seeing a syllabus of such a course/ program!

The Per2Con group at CIMeC is actively seeking Post-Docs interested in investigating how newborns 👶 🧒 perceive 👁️👂and learn, using 🧠 HD EEG and eye-tracking.

✨You are motivated to work on neurodevelopment: we would love to hear from you to prepare a grant proposal together (Marie-Curie, Fyssen...)

The wonderful historic city of Marburg

🚨 University Marburg (Germany) is recruiting a W2 Professor of Mol. Pharmacology in the Faculty of Medicine.

Focus areas: Epithelial adaptation in #inflammation, #regeneration, and/or #cancer

stellenangebote.uni-marburg.de/jobposting/0...

#AcademicJobs #Pharmacology #FacultyPosition #cellbio

Johannes Fahrenfort: Subjective and Objective Approaches in the Study of Conscious Perception YouTube video by Mathematical Consciousness Science

I gave talk about subjective and objective approaches in the study of conscious perception last week in a BAMΞ workshop @uni-bamberg.de hosted by @johanneskleiner.bsky.social
@jolienfrancken.bsky.social and
@ronyhirsch.bsky.social. You can find the recording here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1zB...

They are always some kind of scam, but even if it seems to superficially work... Remember...

There's people inside it.

1/n

bsky.app/profile/oliv...

Audio long read: Many people have no mental imagery. What’s going on in their brains? Listen to an audio version of a recent Nature Feature.

Audio long read 🔊 Many people have no mental imagery. What’s going on in their brains?
go.nature.com/3ONrV8q

📣 Call for the 2026 Paul Bertelson Award

The European Society for Cognitive Psychology is proud to announce the official call for nominations for the 2026 Paul Bertelson Award.
The nomination deadline is 1 May 2026.

Data centre power emissions double over five years Ryan Cropp Ryan CroppEnergy and climate reporter Mar 3, 2026 – 7.32pm Save Share Gift this article Some of Australia’s biggest data centre operators have more than doubled their reported carbon emissions over the past five years, as the exponential growth of the sector leads to a major rise in demand on the power grid and puts pressure on the government’s climate agenda. Top data centre operators Amazon, AirTrunk and CDC all declared annual scope two emissions increases of more than 20 per cent in 2024-25 and more than 100 per cent since 2020-21, according to new figures published by the Clean Energy Regulator.

AirTrunk founder Robin Khuda told The Australian Financial Review Business Summit on Tuesday that the government’s AI plan was “pretty good”, but it needed to think more holistically about how the nation would build the infrastructure required to power it. Reported electricity emissions by data centre operator (tonnes CO2e) AmazonNextDCAirTrunkEquinixCDC FY21 FY22 FY23 FY24 FY25 200K 250K 300K 350K 400K 450K 500K 550K Source: Clean Energy Regulator The technology industry has argued that the energy demands of data centres will support the rollout of renewable power because they will sign the long-term power purchase agreements needed to make projects financially viable.

The emissions of Australia's top data centre operators have doubled over the past few years. You can see why Amazon Australia fought so hard to try and keep these numbers hidden.......

www.afr.com/policy/energ...