Like all complex organisms, every human originates from a single cell that multiplies through countless cell divisions. Thousands of cells coordinate, move and exert mechanical forces on each other as an embryo takes shape. Researchers at the Göttingen Campus Institute for Dynamics of Biological Networks (CIDBN), the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation, and the University of Marburg have now discovered a new way that embryonic cells coordinate their behaviour. This involves molecular mechanisms previously known only from the process of hearing. The researchers attribute the fact that such different cells use the same proteins for two such different functions to their evolutionary origin. The results were published in Current Biology.

Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID) provides a free webtool for ethics proposals in collaboration with Chemnitz University of Technology.

At the beginning of June, the BMFTR announced funding of around €120 million for the expansion phase of the future German Center for Mental Health. Several Bernstein members are involved at four of the six research sites.

The European Research Council (ERC) is funding Prof. Dr. Veronica Egger's COLUMNET project with an ERC Advanced Grant. The biophysicist heads the Neurophysiology working group in the Faculty of Biology and Preclinical Medicine at the University of Regensburg (UR). The project, which is endowed with 3.5 million euros, will run for five years and is dedicated to fundamental questions about the processing of odors in the brain.

The ability to precisely predict movements is essential not only for humans and animals, but also for many AI applications — from autonomous driving to robotics. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now discovered that artificial neural networks can perform this task better when trained with biological data from early visual system development.

How the brain largely maintains its function when neurons are lost – this is what researchers at the University Medical Center Mainz, the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) and Hebrew University (Jerusalem) have deciphered. They show that neuronal networks in the cerebral cortex reorganize within a short period of time, with other nerve cells taking over the tasks of the lost neurons. These findings could form the basis for future research into natural ageing processes and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. The study was published in the renowned journal Nature Neuroscience.

At its annual General Assembly, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities ALLEA (All European Academies) presented the Madame de Staël Prize to physicist Viola Priesemann. The award was announced in December 2024.

African elephants are the largest land animals on earth and significantly larger than their relatives in Asia, from which they are separated by millions of years of evolution. Nevertheless, Asian elephants have a 20 percent heavier brain, as scientists from Humboldt University Berlin and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) were able to demonstrate together with international colleagues. They also showed that elephant brains­ triple in weight after birth. These results, published in the scientific journal PNAS Nexus, provide potential explanations for behavioural differences between African and Asian elephants as well as for the pachyderms' long youth, during which they gain enormous experience and learn social skills.

If you quickly move a camera from object to object, the abrupt shift between the two points causes a motion smear that might give you nausea. Our eyes, however, do movements like these two or three times per second. These rapid movements are called saccades, and although the visual stimulus during a saccade shifts abruptly across the retina, our brain seems to keep it under the hood: we never perceive the shift. New research shows that the speed of our saccades predicts the speed limit in our vision when an object becomes too fast to see. According to a study published in Nature Communications by researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Science of Intelligence (TU Berlin), visual stimuli ––think a chipmunk darting around or a tennis ball hit with full force–– become invisible when they move at a speed, duration, and distance similar to those of one of our saccades. This suggests that the properties of the human visual system are best understood in the context of the movements of our eyes.

What is consciousness? For centuries, scientists and philosophers have tried to understand how the brain creates our inner world—how neural activity translates into the taste of coffee, for example, or the sting of pain. Now, an international, theory-neutral research consortium, led by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has put two of today’s most studied theories of consciousness to the test. The results, published in Nature, challenge core assumptions of both models and propose a new way to study complex scientific questions.