One of the outstanding mysteries of the cerebral cortex is how individual neurons develop the proper synaptic connections to form large-scale, distributed networks. Now, an international team of scientists has gained novel insights from spontaneously generated patterns of activity by local networks in the early developing visual cortex. Apparently these form the basis for long-range neural connections that are established through brain activity over the course of cortical development. The scientists report their findings in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The unique ability of cuttlefish, squid and octopuses to hide by imitating the colors and texture of their environment has fascinated natural scientists since the time of Aristotle. Uniquely among all animals, these mollusks control their appearance by the direct action of neurons onto expandable pixels, numbered in millions, located in their skin. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research (MPI Brain Research), and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) and Goethe University (GU) used this neuron-pixel correspondence to peer into the brain of cuttlefish, inferring the putative structure of control networks through analysis of skin pattern dynamics. The scientists report their findings in the journal Nature.

FRANKFURT. How do neighboring synapses interact during learning? Frankfurt scientists have proposed a new mathematical model describing a competition of neighboring synapses for limited resources during learning. The scientists report their findings in the current issue of eLife.

On September 3, 2018, the STIFTUNG GIERSCH and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) invited to the ceremony marking the appointment of Prof. Dr. Edvard Moser as a FIAS Senior Fellow Laureatus. This honorary award is given to outstanding international scientists who are not only distinguished by their excellent research, but are also committed to the scientific community.

The human brain consists of a highly complex network of about 85 billion nerve cells (neurons) that constantly exchange information. To function, all these cells have to organise the production, transport, storage and recycling of countless different molecules such as neurotransmitters, mRNA and proteins - a gigantic logistical challenge at the molecular level. So how do they organize these processes to be both robust and efficient? How do problems in solving these logistical challenges relate to brain diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease? To discuss these questions, neuroscientists from all over the world will meet from 28 August for the 3rd Giersch International Symposium at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS).

How large is a neutron star? Previous estimates varied from eight to sixteen kilometres. Astrophysicists at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the FIAS have now succeeded in determining the size of neutron stars to within 1.5 kilometres by using an elaborate statistical approach supported by data from the measurement of gravitational waves. The researchers’ report appears in the current issue of Physical Review Letters.

Every year, the Friends of the University award prizes for the best PhD theses from various fields. The prize for the best scientific dissertation was awarded this year to former FIAS doctoral student Volodymyr Vovchenko.

This year, the Hessian Minister for Social Affairs and Integration, Stefan Grüttner, honoured personalities with a migration background from all over Hesse for outstanding achievements in the fields of education, business and science at a ceremony in Schloss Biebrich in Wiesbaden. One of them is Hanna Kamyshanska, a former PhD of the Frankfurt Institute for Avanced Studies (FIAS).

In an exhibition of a different kind, Frankfurt bioinformatician Prof. Franziska Matthäus and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) show that basic theoretical research does not only consist of series of numbers and formulae, but can also be beautiful. For the "Night of Science" on Friday, June 8. 2018, large-format works of art will decorate some buildings on the Riedberg campus of Goethe University.

FIAS Fellow Hannah Petersen has been awarded the Zimanyi Medal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The award recognizes her work in the field of relativistic heavy ion collisions. The theoretical physicist has been a Fellow at FIAS since 2013, heads a Helmholtz junior research group at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research and teaches as a professor at Goethe University in Frankfurt.

In its programme of 26.05.2018, the broadcasting station of Hesse reports about the FIAS initiative "Wissenschaft zum Anfassen", which has been regularly inspiring the public at major events about research at FIAS, since 2013.

FRANKFURT. Even after the direct measurement of their gravitational waves, there are still mysteries surrounding black holes. What happens when two black holes merge, or when stars collide with a black hole? This has now been simulated by researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) using a novel numerical method. The simulation code "ExaHyPE" is designed in such a way that it will be able to calculate gravitational waves on the future generation of “exascale” supercomputers.

Korbach: From 25 May to 3 June 2018, scientists from the FIAS* and the research projects of the State Initiative for the Development of Scientific and Economic Excellence (LOEWE)** will once again be invited to experiment, be amazed and discuss at the "Hessen schafft Wissen" stand.

On 2 and 3 May 2018, the FIAS hosted the kick-off meeting of the DFG priority programme "SPP 2041 - Computational Connectomics". The goal of SPP 2041 is to better understand the interconnection and function of our brain and nervous system. Under the term "computational connectomics", the scientists involved use computer science and mathematics methods to better understand the structure of the connections between individual nerve cells or entire brain regions.

The "Hessenschau" reported on the work of our director Volker Lindenstruth and our Fellow Hans-Jügen Lüdde in its programme of 8 April.

Born in 1927, the former General Director of Nestlé and holder of the Federal Cross of Merit, he has been committed for years to science and FIAS in particular. Since the founding days of FIAS, he has been a member of the Presidium of the Board of Trustees and was its first chairman. Helmut Maucher has accompanied and shaped the development of our institute with prudence and an eye for the essentials.

"What came after the Big Bang is still a big question. We don't know exactly what happened there. But we know that the universe was probably filled with a quark-gluon plasma millions of seconds after the Big Bang. The big difference to today's universe was that it was extremely hot and extremely dense," FIAS Fellow Hannah Petersen explains in the podcast of Welt der Physik.

The present study is a proof of principle study where Long-Gang Pang, Kai Zhou, Nan Su, Hannah Petersen, Horst Stöcker and Xin-Nian Wang (University of California in Berkeley, USA) used more than 20.000 pictures from relativistic hydrodynamic simulations of heavy ion collisions in a convolution neural network (CNN) to classify two regions in the phase diagram.

FRANKFURT. Since their discovery in the 60's, scientists have worked on answering a crucial question: How massive do neutron stars actually get? Differently from black holes, in fact, these stars cannot be arbitrarily massive; past a certain finite limit in mass, no physical force in nature can contrast their enormous gravitational forces. For the first time, astrophysicists at Goethe University Frankfurt have succeeded in calculating a stringent upper bound on the maximum mass of neutron stars.