Open science

Recent articles

A new atlas of abstracts visualizes the field of human brain mapping—where does your work fit?

Satrajit Ghosh talks to Mac Shine about a community-built tool that places every abstract from the 2026 Organization for Human Brain Mapping meeting inside a semantic map of the broader neuroscience literature. Finding your neighbors in that space might matter more than you think.

By Mac Shine
9 June 2026 | 40 min watch
An opaque cube is repeated multiple times to create the appearance of overlapping cubes.

Sounding the alarm on pseudoreplication: Q&A with Constantinos Eleftheriou and Peter Kind

Most studies of neurological disorders in mice erroneously treat multiple samples from a single animal as independent replicates, according to a new analysis. But scientists and journals can take steps to curb this practice.

By Lauren Schenkman
12 June 2025 | 6 min read
Photograph of a neuroscience research training workshop in Africa.

Addressing the lack of infrastructure and training that stymies African neuroscience

A newly launched research center in Nigeria could offer a model for expanding neuroscience across the continent.

By Mahmoud Bukar Maina
29 July 2024 | 6 min read

Explore more from The Transmitter

Illustration of waterfall inside a woman's brain.

Revisiting the neural correlates of consciousness

Life happens in real time, but experience may be composed in ragtime—like the music genre, full of offbeat notes and uneven rhythms. The assumption that waking life consists of a “stream” of conscious representations has inadvertently led consciousness science to its current impasse.

By Francis T. Fallon, Michael Pitts
28 September 2026 | 7 min read
Illustration of rolling dice.

Grant review needs reform. How about we add an element of chance?

A process that uses a lottery system saves time, reduces strategic resubmission and accepts that, above a quality threshold, luck has always played a part in science funding.

By Adrien Peyrache
25 September 2026 | 6 min read
Research diagram of gene expression.

Fly neurons carry molecular signatures of their origins

The pattern of transcription factors a Drosophila neuron expresses offers clues to its lineage and birth order—and ultimately how neural circuits emerge.

By Alissa de Chassey
25 September 2026 | 5 min read