Just in time for the 2022 Society for Neuroscience Meeting in San Diego, Springer presents a new book in its Springer Series in Computational Neuroscience: Introducing Computation to Neuroscience – Selected Papers of George Gerstein.

An interdisciplinary research team investigates biological and technical information processing

Elephants have an amazing arsenal of face, ear and trunk movements. The trunk consists of far more muscles than the entire human body and can perform both powerful and very delicate movements. A team of scientists from the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) now examined the facial motor nucleus of African and Asian elephants, the brain structure that controls the facial muscles of these animals. This nucleus contains more facial motor neurons than in any other terrestrial mammal, the scientists show in a paper published in the journal “Science Advances”.

The Arthur Burkhard Foundation for the Advancement of Science gives its award in 2022 to Viola Priesemann from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) and the University of Göttingen. The award, endowed with 10,000 euros, is presented annually to outstanding scientists who have made outstanding contributions to interdisciplinary research.

The Bernstein-CorTeC Award honors outstanding scientific achievements in the field of Computational Neuroscience and Neurotechnology. The prize is awarded annually alternating for Doctoral or Master theses.

Researchers who work with neuronal network models – simplified representations of brains – need to "speak the same language" so that their results can be understood and reproduced. Scientists at the Human Brain Project now propose guidelines for the unambiguous description of network connectivity. The guidelines are based on concepts in use in the computational neuroscience community. To provide an intuitive understanding of network properties, they also propose a graphical notation for network diagrams unifying existing diagram styles.

Germany's up-and-coming AI talent impressed at the finals of the leading artificial intelligence competition. The goal of all participants: To improve the world with the help of AI applications.

Researchers discover a hidden order in seemingly random connections between neurons

Jazz must swing - jazz musicians agree on that. However, even 100 years after the beginnings of jazz, it is still unclear what exactly constitutes the swing feel. With a sophisticated experiment and data analyses on more than 450 well-known jazz solos, physicists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) together with psychologists from the University of Göttingen have unraveled a secret of swing. They were able to demonstrate that certain systematic deviations in timing are a key component of swing. These microtiming deviations are so small that they are not perceived as such even by professional jazz musicians, who nonetheless are using them unconsciously.

If you hate early morning jogs but love Sudokus over breakfast, it sounds ideal. But is it accurate? Neuroscientist Petra Ritter gives it some thought.