Kepecs Lab

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/scienc…

@TheAnnaGat 🎯 pontosan!

@KepecsLab Akkor meg en se.... Es amugy meg ha az ember "tudja" is, az nem ugyanaz, mint tenyleg tudni. Szoval nehez.

My main rule for understanding social problems in one's life is: It is always the other way around. There's a layer of delusion, veil of Maya. You think cause -> effect. But turn the two around. It's the other way around. Suddenly it will all make sense. Same for character: It's always its own opposite. People who feel deeply lazy work insanely hard. People who feel they're bad run charities. Angry people are sad. Fast people think calmly and slowly. Shy people go on stage. Cold people write romances. Passionate people write level-headed papers. The lonely host parties. The sated are quiet. It is always the other way around in all things people.

@TheAnnaGat Igen, csak kár, hogy ezt nem tudtam húsz évvel ezelőtt.😂

@KepecsLab A szemelyes dramak mindig olyan misztikusak -- amig meg nem forditod. Akkor rajossz!

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/d4158…

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

@madras_bertha @EricJNestler @SinaiBrain @IcahnMountSinai Congratulations Eric, richly deserved, what an impact on the field!

@EricJNestler @SinaiBrain @IcahnMountSinai Well earned Eric. Always at the leading edge of research, tackling the toughest questions with elegant experiments to generate important insights.

I had the honor of a lifetime this evening by being inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. I want to thank the many PhD students and postdocs in my lab over the past almost 40 years whose hard, creative, and impactful work made this possible. @SinaiBrain @IcahnMountSinai

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

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

@silvirouskin Wow, nuts but also says you're doing something truly unique!! Worth reaching out to POs early... or apply for TR01 My closest experience: one Aim + money cut from a funded grant (3 percentile) because it didn't match institute priorities. PO said I should've checked first🤷‍♂️

Apparently my R01 is so interdisciplinary that no known branch of NIH is qualified to review it. I spend months writing it, and it was bounced off 3 different sections until it was WITHDRAWN. We are soon submitting this work to Science. Great support of innovative research. 💀

@TheAnnaGat A fagyi visszanyal!

I always tell my rw friends in the US who are eager to tweak how the system works for their own benefit: whatever you change, someday it will be used against you.

@SuryaGanguli And the Hungarian Algorithm to explain the strategic matching behind the scenes.😉

Just wanted to point out that recent geopolitical events provide a pedagogical example for teaching the max-flow min-cut theorem.

Hungary's next health minister: orthopedic surgeon by day, dance floor legend by night

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.

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.

@doristsao @AsteraInstitute Wow, that's a plot twist! Congratulations Doris, seems like an incredibly opportunity. Still thinking about what you showed at WashU a few months ago, some of the most exciting systems neuroscience results I’ve seen, can’t wait to see more!

I am deeply excited to share that I will be joining @AsteraInstitute to start a new effort to understand how the brain generates consciousness and intelligence.

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?