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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS)'s project "hands-on science" was awarded second place in the 2017 Award of the Anneliese and Heinz Frisch Foundation on Thursday, 16 November 2017.

Researchers from the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research and the Ernst-Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience have studied why such differences between these animal species exist using two different computer models. Unexpectedly, the researchers found that the existence of this ordered structure is not only determined by the connectivity in the circuit, but also by the total number of neurons. Their findings were recently published in the scientific journal PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences].