Imaging Neuroscience

Imaging Neuroscience

How pandemic publishing struck a blow to the visibility of women’s expertise

The biases in scientific publishing during the pandemic damaged women’s visibility, recognition, and career advancement, reports Jocalyn Clark Before covid-19, Reshma Jagsi had a thriving clinical and research career. As a full time physician and deputy department chair of radiation oncology at the University of Michigan, USA, she was ascending the leadership ladder before the world around her went into lockdown. “Everything was an emergency, and [all my colleagues were] working around the clock out of a sense of need, because the house was on fire,” she says. It felt as though “I was drowning.” On top of the acute emergency of helping sick patients, Jagsi was developing rapid treatment guidelines for covid-19 and reorganising research efforts for colleagues—while caring for her elderly mother and tutoring two schoolchildren. Other colleagues with younger children experienced high levels of anxiety, their careers completely sidelined by the pandemic. She says, “During an emergency, it didn’t matter how urgent the need was and how great your expertise was: if you’ve got a toddler who needs your attention and you can’t rely on your parents or your neighbours or day care, what else are you going to do?” When laboratories, operating rooms, and clinical trial sites worldwide closed because of national lockdowns, millions of people working in science found an opportunity to write, driven by a desire to help as well as the need to recover losses or to stay relevant and maintain publication records—the chief currency in research careers.1 Clinicians and academics were eager to secure authorships.2 But the covid-19 publishing game had by no means an equal playing field. Of the three million submissions to major health and medical journals in the first half of 2020, just 36% were from women. This gender gap applied to research and non-research articles, across …

Bicycle – Bartosz Ciechanowski

Interactive article explaining the physics of a bicycle.

Uncovering the organization of neural circuits with Generalized Phase Locking Analysis

Author summary Modern neural recording techniques give access to increasingly highly multivariate spike data, together with spatio-temporal activities of local field potentials reflecting integrative processes. We introduce GPLA as a generalized coupling measure between these point-process and continuous-time activities to help neuroscientists uncover the distributed organization of neural networks. We develop statistical analysis and modeling methodologies for this measure and demonstrate its interpretability in simulated and experimental multi-electrode recordings.

Theta oscillations in anterior cingulate cortex and orbitofrontal cortex differentially modulate accuracy and speed in flexible reward learning

Abstract. Flexible reward learning relies on frontal cortex, with substantial evidence indicating that anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and orbitofrontal cortex

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