Belonging & Belongings: Who’s in the Room Depends on What’s in the Room

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Belonging & Belongings: Who’s in the Room Depends on What’s in the Room

Research has shown that ambient belonging, or the feeling of fitting into an environment can have a profound effect on peoples’ behavior. This feeling of belonging can arise from more than just one’s sense of fit with the people in the environment, and is often influenced by physical objects and materials. How we perceive and interpret our own group’s belonging in various communities can influence whether we approach or avoid certain spaces, which can completely alter the courses of our lives. For this reason, it is essential for us to understand how the environments we create influence others.

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Can we have it all? Balancing family with an academic career

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Can we have it all? Balancing family with an academic career

In 2000 Mary Ann Mason became the first female Dean of Graduate Studies at UC Berkeley and encountered an auspicious demographic shift—51% of the incoming graduate class was female. Unfortunately, the same trend did not hold true for faculty. While the total number of women faculty had also been increasing (though not at the same rate as students), the gap between tenured male and female faculty remained consistent, and large... Mason wondered whether one contributor to the leakiness could be the difficulty of balancing career and family, which could be particularly challenging for female academics.

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Women’s visibility in science and academia

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Women’s visibility in science and academia

The data dive into inequality in STEM continues.While the number of women in science has been increasing for the last twenty years, women are still leaving scientific fields at all stages of their careers. Research about the “leaky pipeline” suggests there is a disproportionate lack of female representation in crucial milestones for scientific career progression, such as receiving prestigious awards, publishing papers in important journals, and applying for patents. There are many ideas about why women continue to leave science as their careers progress, including differences in career goals and interests, parenting, differences in salary for equivalent positions, a lack of female role models and mentors, and explicit and implicit bias. Importantly, each of these factors contributes to a reduction in the visibility of women in science and academia.

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Gender differences in recommendation letters for postdoctoral fellowships in geoscience

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Gender differences in recommendation letters for postdoctoral fellowships in geoscience

The data dive into inequality in STEM continues. Letters of recommendation are absolutely key to securing admission to graduate programs and access to postdoctoral or tenure track positions. However, because letters tend to be personal in nature, they are also more susceptible to implicit biases. In the largest study on gender bias in recommendation letters to date, Dutt et al. quantitatively characterize gender differences in letters of recommendation across countries and institutions.

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A Novel Neural Circuit Saps Pleasure in Model of Depression

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A Novel Neural Circuit Saps Pleasure in Model of Depression

Grief is a normal response to some of life’s most powerful stressors – like the death of a loved one, a natural disaster, or a serious break-up. However, this grief may not go away for those suffering from depression. Feelings of helplessness, guilt, and lack of self-worth may stick around for extended periods of time, and a stressor isn’t required to trigger a depressive episode. This description may be familiar to many of us; everyone reading this probably knows someone who has gone through depression... In order to investigate the role of the globus pallidus in depression symptoms, Dr. Byungkook Lim’s lab at the University of California – San Diego utilized the best-known mouse model of depression for rigorous investigation.

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Complementary Learning Systems within the Hippocampus: Reconciling Episodic Memory with Statistical Learning

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Complementary Learning Systems within the Hippocampus: Reconciling Episodic Memory with Statistical Learning

As humans, we have a natural ability to remember the specifics of individual experiences (e.g. where I parked my car today) and rapidly learn rules across those experiences (e.g. where in the parking lot spaces tend to be open). The Complementary Learning Systems (CLS)  [1] theory offers a computational framework for how we are able to accomplish, both seemingly disparate tasks, by positing that the brain uses different brain circuits to solve these two different problems, specifically the cortex and the hippocampus.

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Cuttlefish camouflage reveals how they see the world

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Cuttlefish camouflage reveals how they see the world

Humans are r--lly g--d at filling in th- bl-nks... but can cuttlefish do the same? It’s very common for objects to be partially hidden from view, but we perceive them clearly even when only bits and pieces are actually visible. If a rock is partially covered in sand, it’s easy for us to see that the different bits poking out all belong to a single bigger rock. In perception research, this is called ‘filling-in’. Scientists have shown that other animals can do this too - including rodents, birds, fish and even bees! A study by Zylinski et al asked whether cuttlefish could.

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