Female cuckoos have two color variants. This ancient polymorphism is encoded in specifically female DNA and maintained by maternal inheritance even across species boundaries, a new study by Jochen Wolf & Miguel Carneiro could show: bi.mpg.de/news/2024-04-w…
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Happy birthday, Max Planck! 🎂🎉🙃The accomplished pianist, revolutionary physicist, #NobelPrize winner & brilliant thinker, whose pioneering work in #quantumtheory reshaped the landscape of physics, was born #OTD .

Upcoming Joint IMPRS Lecture with Christof Osman OsmanLab from the Universität München this Thursday 25 April at 5 pm CET🗓️! The talk is free for everyone, on campus or via Zoom.

↪️More info: imprs-ml.mpg.de/38279/Joint-IM…

Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (MPIB) MPI for Biological Intelligence TU München

What a fly fly flight simulator! Stefan Prech developed an #immersive visual stimulation device for insects that lets you take a peek into the brain. Read about it: PLOS ONE #Drosophila #VR #Neuroscience MPI for Biological Intelligence doi.org/10.1371/journa…

Young zebra finch males take 90 days to learn their song by listening to adult tutors. A new study by Albertine Leitão & Manfred Gahr shows that prelinguistic babbling is necessary for memory formation and initiates the first stage of song learning (sensory learning phase). Read

Why do young males have lower mating success? Emmi Schlicht and colleagues show in a new study on blue tits that 'extra-pair' reproductive success of yearlings increases when older males are absent: bi.mpg.de/news/2024-04-k…

Paper alert! We combine modeling and experiments to study “balanced” EI assemblies of co-tuned excitatory and inhibitory neurons in a memory network. TL; DR: EI assemblies suppress “runaway activity” & “runaway correlations” - which interfere w/ memory capacity & discriminability

Fieldwork with the #Ceuta snowy plovers has started. No nests yet, which is unusual. It’s far to dry for this time of the year and the birds seem to take it slow.

Are you passionate about microscopy and would like to take wonderful pictures of the brain, pushing resolution, depth and speed?
Then APPLY to be a specialist in my team!
bi.mpg.de/2678133/job_fu…
The deadline is in 10 days!

Congratulations, Lisa Fenk! Our group leader receives an ERC Consolidator Grant of two million euros for her research on the Drosophila visual system. In the coming years, she and her team will investigate how retinal movements benefit visual perception in flies. Find out more:

In this study, in which researchers from MPI for Biological Intelligence and Universität München also collaborated, Scientists analysed thousands of cells using informatics tools to determine the genetic trajectory of these cells and their respective lineages.

Upcoming Joint IMPRS Lecture with Peter Murray Peter J Murray from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (MPIB) this Thursday 11 April at 5 pm CET🗓️! The talk is free for everyone, on campus or via Zoom.

↪️More info: imprs-ml.mpg.de/38279/Joint-IM…

MPI for Biological Intelligence Universität München TU München

Redistribution of mitochondrial protein genes from mtDNA to nucleus early in evolution put a hard challenge for nervous system much later. Neurons need somehow to supply mito in axon terminals with proteins. And transport of substances through a long axons could take days - a

#pictureofthemonth : This picture of a zebrafish shows the lateral line, a sensory system that helps fish to sense water flow and movements in the water. @Baierlab studies the neuronal circuits that generate behavior in zebrafish. Find out more: bi.mpg.de/baier

April -

🐦🐦🐦Disinhibition enables vocal repertoire expansion after a critical period in birds🐦🐦🐦 Fabian Heim Ezequiel Mendoza Avani Vallentin Lab
biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

How do birds learn their distinctive songs? A new review by Vallentin Lab gives a comprehensive overview of the different sensory and neural mechanisms that influence song learning and vocal communication in a wide range of songbirds: doi.org/10.1016/j.conb…

Art by julia kuhl at somedonkey.bsky.social

Spring is here! The cherry blossoms at our Martinsried location are in full bloom 🌸😍📸

How are birds adapting to seasons? Zebra finch parents emit 'heat-calls' during incubation at high temperatures. Eve Udino & team found that exposure to such heat-calls can increase the overall resilience of their offspring in summer, but also winter.

Read more:

How the brain spoils your appetite: A research team around Rüdiger Klein found the brain circuit that suppresses appetite when feeling nauseous. Special nerve cells are activated during nausea and elicit appetite-inhibiting signals which prevent eating.

Read more:

Study 'Multiple parallel cell lineages in the developing mammalian cerebral cortex' led by LuciadelValleAnton and Borrell Lab is published. Congrats to our lab members Florian Neuhaus Elena Dvoretskova Yiğit Koray Babal chao feng for their contribution! Link: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… MPI for Biological Intelligence