The Technical University of Munich (TUM) has developed a soft, pneumatic glove that restores the ability of people with paralyzed hands to grasp objects. To achieve this, researchers at the TUM Chair of Cognitive Systems use electrical signals from the forearm muscles to reliably predict when a person intends to grasp an object. The invention could one day help people whose hands have been paralyzed as a result of accidents or neurological disorders.

Italian scientist Prof. Dr. Eleonora Russo has joined the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University Medical Center Mainz (UM) as a DFG Mercator Fellow, effective July 1, 2026. Hosted by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Kelsch, Professor of Systems Neuroscience and senior physician at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Russo brings her internationally recognized expertise in theoretical neuroscience from the prestigious BioRobotics Institute at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy.

Three University of Bonn researchers have been awarded a Proof of Concept Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). Neuroscientist Professor Dominik Bach, chemist Assistant Professor Ala Bunescu and radiologist Professor Philipp Vollmuth (from the University Hospital Bonn) are each receiving €150,000 over a period of 18 months. This program helps researchers to take findings from their work and turn them into commercial products or services.

In a virtual reality study involving zebrafish, researchers from the University of Konstanz and King’s College London have discovered that the development of the eye is influenced by what the fish see during the early stages of life – and this, in turn, alters their behaviour.

Xiao-Jing Wang receives this year’s Valentin Braitenberg Award for his “enormous contributions across many subfields, from biophysics to computational psychiatry” (the award committee). The award ceremony will take place during the Bernstein Conference on September 29, 2026, in Frankfurt am Main.

Two researchers at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) have once again been awarded prestigious ERC Advanced Grants by the European Research Council (ERC). The funded projects focus on brain research and will receive more than €2.4 million for UKE over the next five years. With these latest awards, UKE has now secured a total of 40 ERC Grants.

Researchers from the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Munich, LMU, and Cornell University reveal that zebrafish and fruit flies share the same internal compass mechanism, despite being separated by more than 550 million years of evolution.

An international research team led jointly by the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG), the University of Göttingen, and the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, has shown that nerve cells in the brain specialize in different tasks when processing visual information. The research focused on working memory — a complex network of different brain regions that stores and links information. A disruption in this information processing can lead to neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. The study results could help identify new treatment approaches for these disorders and have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Every time we move through a familiar environment, the hippocampus consults an internal map, a detailed spatial representation that is built up through repeated experience. But what happens when something unexpected occurs on a well-known route? Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn were able to demonstrate in a mouse model that the brain does not redraw its maps from scratch. Instead, it annotates them: preserving the underlying spatial layout while overlaying new information on top of the existing map. Their findings have now been published in the journal PNAS.

Our brain automatically compares new information with existing memories and links them together. Through this integration into our memory, we build knowledge. An international research team led by Prof. Dr. Lars Schwabe from the Department of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Hamburg has now demonstrated that acute stress negatively affects these processes in the brain. The study was published in Science Advances.