Silvia Arber and Botond Roska, both professors at the University of Basel, have been selected as co-recipients of the 2018 W. Alden Spencer Award in recognition of their outstanding contributions to understanding developmental and functional mechanisms of motor and visual system circuitry respectively.
Between April and August this year, Switzerland and central Europe have experienced the driest summer season since 1864. Especially the forest seems to suffer from this dry spell: As early as August, trees began to turn brown this year. A current study by the University of Basel indicates now that native forest trees can cope much better with the drought than previously expected. It is, however, too early to give the all-clear as a consistently warmer and dryer climate might still put our native forests at risk.
Physicists at the University of Basel are working on using the spin of an electron confined in a semiconductor nanostructure as a unit of information for future quantum computers. For the first time, they have now been able to experimentally demonstrate a mechanism of electron spin relaxation that was predicted 15 years ago. The scientists also succeeded in keeping the direction of the electron spin fixed for almost a minute – a new record.
Scientists have demonstrated that the motor cortex is necessary for the execution of corrective movements in response to unexpected changes of sensory input but not when the same movements are executed spontaneously. Signatures of differential neuronal usage in the cortex accompany these two phenomena.
If more phosphate is consumed with food, blood pressure and pulse rate increase in healthy young adults. These findings were shown by a study led by the University of Basel and published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Jan Gründemann one of the coveted ERC Starting Grants. The junior scientist from the University and University Hospital Basel will receive approx. 1.5 million euros over the next five years for his research project in the fields of neurophysiology and brain research.
Autism spectrum disorders are a heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental disorders, one of the main characteristics of which is impaired social communication. But what happens in patients’ brains that disrupts their social skills? According to scientists from the Universities of Geneva and Basel, in Switzerland, whose work is published in Nature Communications, a malfunction of the synaptic activity of neurons present in the reward system seems to be at stake.
Researchers at the University of Basel and the University Hospital Basel have discovered a factor that could support the early detection of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. This cytokine is induced by cellular stress reactions after disturbances of the mitochondria, the “cell’s power plants,“ as neuropathologists write in the journal Cell Reports.
For the first time, researchers were able to study quantum interference in a three-level quantum system and thereby control the behavior of individual electron spins. To this end, they used a novel nanostructure, in which a quantum system is integrated into a nanoscale mechanical oscillator in form of a diamond cantilever. Nature Physics has published the study that was conducted at the University of Basel and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute.
