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Jörn Alexander Quent

@jaquent

Currently working in #Shanghai | PhD from MRC-CBU/Cambridge Uni | Gates Cambridge | interested in neuroscience of memory | you can call me Alex

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Latest posts by Jörn Alexander Quent @jaquent

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Major Chinese funder to stop paying fees for 30 pricey open-access journals Move comes amid effort to grow the country’s own journals

Are #openaccess fees that some journals charge authors too high? The Chinese Academy of Sciences, the world’s largest research institution, reportedly thinks so and plans to stop funding some, a move that could shake up #scientificpublishing. @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...

24.02.2026 23:16 👍 47 🔁 33 💬 2 📌 5

I am glad there are some people that find this useful 🌈

25.02.2026 01:59 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Creating actually publication-ready figures for journals using `ggplot2` A practical guide to creating publication-ready figures in R using ggplot2, covering journal dimension requirements, custom themes, updated geom defaults, and SVG export—with minimal manual adjustment...

#rstats Here's a useful guide to creating publication-ready #ggplot figures to journal specifications, which is often quite fiddly.

jaquent.github.io/2026/02/crea...

24.02.2026 13:47 👍 76 🔁 23 💬 3 📌 3

Concluding this #TidyTuesday by sharing a guide on getting figures in #ggplot2 ready for publication!

Tomorrow I will share a bit more about how I use #Rstats in my own work in #StatisticalGenetics 🧬

24.02.2026 19:58 👍 12 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0

I've only ever used %in% to be honest.

24.02.2026 11:31 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Their seat is too low for me and I am not a giant.

24.02.2026 09:40 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

(Slightly adapted to fit into the character limited)

24.02.2026 05:58 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Tulving (1996): Neuroimaging is transforming the study of the brain/mind, promising to revolutionize research on neural bases of cognitive processes very much in the way in which the telescope changed the study of the heavens and the microscope the investigation of the infinitesimal world.

24.02.2026 05:57 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Chinese honesty can be brutal :D

24.02.2026 05:28 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
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We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another.
doi.org/10.64898/202...

23.02.2026 21:06 👍 55 🔁 20 💬 1 📌 2
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This is the most incredible footage of blue whales I’ve ever seen

22.02.2026 08:55 👍 6917 🔁 2268 💬 98 📌 417
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If you haven't yet changed how you teach and evaluate thanks to AI, you probably need to. This is not something that educators asked to happen, but it is worth noting what is out there - in this case an OpenClaw tool designed to cheat.

23.02.2026 02:50 👍 95 🔁 37 💬 6 📌 11
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Place cells in CA1 lack topographical organization of firing locations | PNAS Topography is a well-described and well-known concept for cortical organization in primary sensory and motor cortices of mammalian brains. Similar ...

A half-century old question may have its final answer. Using high-resolution #Mini2P microscopes, we find no evidence of local topography in #PlaceCells. Place fields of neighbouring cells are no more similar than those of randomly selected cells. 🧠🗺️ Out now in @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

19.02.2026 11:53 👍 149 🔁 43 💬 4 📌 8

Having spend time in multiple countries and institutions, it's very interesting to see what is and isn't a problem in certain places. E.g. getting reimbursed takes a few days here at Fudan University (Shanghai) but getting a University stamp on a document is feels like applying for a building permit

20.02.2026 23:57 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

This is so ridiculous.

20.02.2026 23:50 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Really good point.

20.02.2026 10:24 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

19.02.2026 15:14 👍 170 🔁 98 💬 6 📌 11

I usually think driving here is a bit an annoying but this time it was a treat :)

18.02.2026 13:02 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Driving from #Beijing to #Tianjin on the day of #CNY was a dream. Almost no cars, which I probably don't need to point out is very rare in these parts.

On that note: I wish everyone a happy year of the 🐴! May you find success in your endeavors. I for my part have planned a lot.

#SpringFestival

18.02.2026 12:58 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1

Oh, es war wohl 2006.

17.02.2026 05:29 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Frustrating...

17.02.2026 00:51 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

That's also my intuition. A single study is usually not that informative but even if there are multiple, small differences in design can have massive but unknown effects, which makes it difficult to integrate what we learn across studies.

16.02.2026 23:58 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Do you know about the German guy who in the 80ies or 90ies dressed up as one of the warriors, hid among the other warriors and got away with a slap on the wirst?

15.02.2026 23:17 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

08.02.2026 22:23 👍 17926 🔁 5442 💬 245 📌 258

To quote @nick-pettigrew.bsky.social: "I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste..."

15.02.2026 05:44 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Wow AI is so amazing we should use it for all our scientific diagrams

12.02.2026 23:44 👍 66 🔁 14 💬 9 📌 11

Periodic reminder: It’s Spring Festival in mainland China. Many researchers are on holiday while simultaneously working on major NSFC grant applications.

Responses to manuscript handling, reviews, or revisions may be delayed over the next two weeks.

14.02.2026 11:46 👍 3 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0
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NSD-synthetic, the out-of-distribution companion dataset of NSD consisting of 7T fMRI responses to 284 artificial images, is now published.

#NeuroAI #CompNeuro #neuroscience #AI

doi.org/10.1038/s414...

12.02.2026 14:46 👍 24 🔁 14 💬 0 📌 0
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02403-w

Excited to share a new paper spearheaded by the wonderful @baror-shira.bsky.social:
tinyurl.com/bd8xdcum
@erc.europa.eu @nathumbehav.nature.com

We test the link between serial dependence (as an index of continuity) and event boundaries (indexing segmentation). A few key findings in the thread:

11.02.2026 14:49 👍 49 🔁 26 💬 1 📌 2
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New paper alert! 🚨

We found that the brain's compass is remarkably stable at two scales

1️⃣ the system maintains its internal organization for weeks
2️⃣ It "remembers" its orientation for weeks, even after a single visit

This may be key to how the brain aligns its other maps.

Paper: rdcu.be/e3waP

11.02.2026 17:52 👍 199 🔁 69 💬 5 📌 7