Welcome
The Neuromag is a science-focused magazine created by graduate students in Tübingen, Germany. Our intention is to create a magazine that is interesting for scientists and non-scientists alike. We hope that you enjoy it!
The mechanisms of mindfulness meditation Can you imagine staying two weeks in a house in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by people you are not allowed to talk to, where your daily task is being Read more…
GTC in the next 20 years The Graduate Training Centre (GTC) of Neuroscience of Tübingen University has recently said its goodbyes to Prof. Dr. Horst Herbert and welcomed PD Dr. Marc Himmelbach as the new Read more…
Albrecht Vorster: Bringing the science of sleep to the public Albrecht Vorster is a PhD student at the Institute for Medical Psychology and Behavioural Neurobiology who decided to take a year off during his doctoral Read more…
Mental Health of university students in Germany “One in four students in Germany feels strongly stressed. Almost equally high is the proportion of those who report exhaustion.” This is the result of a 2018 online Read more…
TübingenNeuroCampus – connecting Tübingen’s neuroscience community The neurosciences in Tübingen with more than 100 active research groups have the potential to rank among the most successful neuroscientific sites in Europe. Scientists in Tübingen pursue theoretical, Read more…
Our brains enable an array of amazing properties that we enjoy unconsciously on an every-day, every-moment basis: We listen to great music and react with limb movement and emotional involvement, almost as if it were Read more…
Collaborative Science Symposium in Africa Inspired by the educational programs of the non-profit organization TReND in Africa1, we – a group of seven volunteers – organized a two-week Collaborative Science Symposium at the Universities of Read more…
Tübingen has emerged as an interesting industrial hub in the southern Germany – currently, it is a home to approx. 26 companies and university’s core facilities providing a range of biotechnological, biopharmaceutical and bioinformatical services. Read more…
“Have you ever considered opening up? No worries, I am talking about opening your scientific activities”, says Vanessa Teckentrup. She is a PhD student at the department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University Hospital Read more…
Fascinated by the diversity of careers presented at the Neuroscience Alumni Meeting in September in Tübingen, I was intrigued to find out about more GTC alumni that pursued a career path other than academia. I Read more…
International Neuroscience Alumni Meeting in Tübingen From September 23rd to 25th 2018, the Graduate Training Centre of Neuroscience, the International Max Planck Research School, and the Tübingen Research Alumni Network TRACe held the first Neuroscience Read more…
The School of Athens is one of the most well-known frescoes in the world. It is a Renaissance masterpiece depicting the great philosophers of the classical era, painted by Raphael between 1509–1511. Figure 1: The Read more…
Shaping the future direction of neuroscience The Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen has attracted two renowned scientists, Dr. Peter Dayan and Prof. Dr. Zhaoping Li. A GTC doctoral student, Aiste Seibokaite, talked Read more…
The 19th annual NeNa conference organized by Tübingen’s junior neuroscientists featured three keynote lecturers and three days of magic-inspired illusions and perception. This year’s NeNa conference attracted 58 participants from as far as Mexico and Read more…
The magazine you’re reading right now, Neuromag, was founded at the University of Tübingen by graduate students of the Graduate Training Centre of Neuroscience (GTC). The seeds were planted in 2015 by Michael Paolillo, a Read more…
When Darwin handed over the baton to Churchland Inspired by Patricia Churchland’s talk “The Neurobiology of Moral Conscience” at the Forum Scientiarum (6 June 2018), I discuss the evolutionary basis of morality and how our Read more…
At what point must you euthanize an animal in scientific research? In this day and age, there are several areas of research using animals to propel scientific and medical advancements. Animal research has provided a Read more…
The University of Tuebingen and the University of Uppsala are carrying out a study in which maternal and fetal changes during pregnancy and the infants’ development after birth are investigated. This will shed light on Read more…
Any discussion on prosthetic arms must inevitably start (or end) with Luke’s hand from The Empire Strikes Back. It was, for any prosthetics researcher or aficionado, the holy grail of the field: a hand that Read more…
Whether you like Harry Potter or not, you can’t deny its massive success, which raises the question: How did J.K. Rowling’s saga become so enormously successful? The answer is a multifaceted one. One explanation could Read more…
How to find a disease signature in DNA The German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases or DZNE is part of the Helmholz Association and one of the German Centers for Health Research established to combat the Read more…
“What are your plans for the weekend?” Almost every week we face this question from our friends and co-workers and we often answer with, “I don’t know yet, meet friends probably and just hang out”. Read more…
An academic environment can be unforgiving for the casual procrastinator. On the one hand, work to be done abounds while on the other hand, the lack of direct oversight and clear deadlines may lead even Read more…
On the first week of February, researchers from around the world gathered in Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Tübingen to discuss the relationship between sex hormones and the brain. It was Read more…
Washington DC, 15th November 2017, Society for Neuroscience Conference 2017 In the classical book of Homer, Odysseus had to cross the island of Anthemoessa to be reunited with his homeland. “Dive thy ship swiftly past Read more…
I have accompanied quite a few PhD students and postdocs in the transition to a job in industry. Even at a later stage – that is a PhD of 5 years and more – this Read more…
The microscope is one of the most iconic symbols of science, at least equal to the white coat or bubbling neon liquids in its ability to endow scientific credibility in the eyes of TV viewers Read more…
NeNa came alive again this October, embracing evolution, artificial neural networks, and brain scaling. Eighteen years in the making, the conference organized for junior scientists by junior scientists celebrated its birthday with many friendly companions: Read more…
You have most surely seen an image of the iconic lab mouse, a pristinely white rodent with dark red eyes standing on its hindlegs while looking quizzically up at the camera. Less certain is what Read more…
Prometheus Science has a crystal clear goal in mind: To spread the availability of science and education by creating affordable scientific-grade equipment. These tools will empower people to interact with their environments around them, as Read more…
Writing a literature review is a daunting task. It takes a lot of time and, at the beginning of the journey, it will seem impossible to finish. You will have to read many papers and Read more…
Our genes are the ultimate blueprint for who we are and how we look. They decide simple characteristics of our appearance like hair or eye colour as well as more complex traits such as height Read more…
It’s that time of the year again. And no, I am not talking about Christmas. I am talking about Graduate School Applications. Chances are that if pursuing a Master’s or a PhD has crossed your mind Read more…
As scientists, contributing to society is one of our main goals – or at least it probably was when we started out. We all, at some point, longed for the trust and appreciation granted to Read more…
With the advancement of medicine and health practices in the modern era, the average age of the population has increased. The healthcare system has continually been pushed to adapt in order to properly care for Read more…
Introducing new scientists in Tübingen – presenting: Dr. Ivana Nikić- Spiegel The Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN) is part of the Cluster of Excellence at the University of Tübingen and provides space for Read more…
Who does not know the slightly awkward situation when a family member asks you what exactly your thesis or dissertation is about? Everyone has probably realised at some point that breaking your research down to Read more…
Leon Gatys is a PhD student in the lab of Prof. Matthias Bethge at the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience in Tübingen. In his PhD work, he uses deep convolutional neural networks, computational algorithms inspired by Read more…
By Eric James McDermott Do you see it? Look around. If you can see —if you can see anything at all— from the words you are reading to the trees outside to your steaming cup Read more…
Replication – the ability to find the same effect repeatedly in independent experiments — is a cornerstone of experimental science. However, the published literature is likely full of irreplicable results [1, 2]. There are many Read more…
Cross-breeding between species has long been reported for horses and donkeys, which gives rise to mules and more recently for tigers and lions (‘Liger’) and bovines and antelopes (‘Beefelo’), but is cross-breeding between great apes Read more…
On October 8th, 2016, about a dozen people sat in an auditorium in Zürich and raced each other purely with their thoughts. Hooked up to various computers and sensors, they used their brain activity to Read more…
Pro-Test Deutschland e.V. started out as a small grassroots organization, fueled by the disinclination of scientists to speak openly about the use of animals in research. It was the reluctance to open up about science Read more…
We work in a town with a green mayor, a state with a green prime minister, and a country that aims to effectively eliminate carbon emissions by 2050. While political decisions play an important part, Read more…
On a cool September day, a handful of young neuroscientists gathered in Tübingen to kick-off the start to another NeNa conference (in German, Neurowissenschaftliche Nachwuchskonferenz). Like the year before, and the year before that, we Read more…
Science is great. We get to learn about a topic we love and see things that no one, or very few people, in the world have seen before. We try to find solutions for unanswered Read more…
Visual ecology in the deep sea: bioluminescence The deep sea is by far the largest habitat on earth and yet our knowledge about its inhabitants is rudimentary at best, and progressing only slowly. Historic concepts about Read more…
In past years NeNa has always been that conference where young scientists go to have a good time, all the while engaging in the usual scientific activities, such as presenting posters, giving talks and attending Read more…
I’d be extremely curious right now to see how popular science is in secondary schools. In my time at secondary school during the early days of social media, science was still considered an old fashioned Read more…
A review of Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits by John D. Barrow In our academic and professional lives as young scientists, we are encouraged to memorise facts and to focus on Read more…
Finches What are birds? Just wind-up toys, given a tickle by the cherubic sun, off to set their clockwork tumbling? And we eat it up rhapsodic, study their ineffable blood and guts in labs, with Read more…
From the very beginning, right after deciding to study science, the academic career seems to be fixed: bachelor’s, master’s, PhD, and probably a series of post-docs afterwards. But this path is not made for everyone. Read more…
So much of research tends to be a sort of chaotic self-directed learning experience, little nuggets of information coming from many different resources, sometimes with no way to tie them all together. Our lives today Read more…
I love science. I really love science (and particularly neuroscience), humanity’s great cultural endeavor to understand the world and ourselves. Unfortunately, science is broken. It is broken in many ways, not only in the way Read more…
Ever been curious to know a little more about what your friends and colleagues in Tübingen work on, what secrets they have uncovered while living here, and what inspired them to come and work here Read more…
If you are a neuroscientist, whether your day-to-day involves running rats through a radial arm maze or changing the medium in your stem cells, you might not have had much experience programming. If you happen to Read more…
At 10 am, a bus filled with 50 people pulled away from the main train station of the small Swäbisch town, Tübingen. The bus was headed for the outskirts of the Black Forest, or the Read more…
The leaves wore the sun like a dress, elegant and fitting. Their crisp outlines were recreated by the water, or perhaps a painter, intricately melding the warm autumn palate together. I let my fingers drag like Read more…
At some point, after slaving away, beating back the failures, and tasting the sweet success of a scientific discovery, we must ask ourselves, ‘How do I present this to other people?’ I’m referring to the visual Read more…
Though most people believe that it is the supervisor’s position to ask the questions, my personal experience has taught me that you (the PhD student) have a lot to ask as well. A PhD project Read more…
It all began in the past century – It was 1999 when the first international neuroscience graduate program was launched at Tübingen University, the Graduate School of Neural & Behavioural Sciences. Back then, it was the Read more…
Do you feel passionate about a neuroscience topic that people should also be aware of?
Do you find yourself talking about science topics with friends at the bar?
Do you have career advice for young scientists?
Do you enjoy writing?
We invite you to tell us about your idea!
We are also looking for people who would like to contribute to the magazine in an artistic way with photos, drawings, comics or creative design ideas. If you would like to see your artistic work featured in the Neuromag then hit us up via the form here!
