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05.02.2012 Whale Communication and Zipf's Law

Trevor Pinch of Cornell University / New York and Mark Lane from Paris present a radio show on the widespread phenomena (roughly) following Zipf's law statistics. Jan Nagler and Heike Vester's research on whale communication compared to the size statistics on cities and other seeminly unrelated topics.

11.01.2012 Schiefer Ton, guter Ton

Report in the German "Die Zeit Online" on "The nature and perception of fluctuations in musical rhythms"

External link to Die Zeit Online (GERMAN)

02.12.2011 Perfecting the Not Quite Perfect

Science (Editor's Choice) on "The nature and perception of fluctuations in musical rhythms"

External link to Science

01.12.2011 Musical rhythms: Perfecting imperfection

Nature Physics News and Views on "The nature and perception of fluctuations in musical rhythms"

External link to Nature physics

10.11.2011 Doctoring the beats

Nature Research Highlights on "The nature and perception of fluctuations in musical rhythms"

External link to Nature

Press Releases (most recent)     see all

The pace of forgetting

Scientists from Göttingen are able to calculate for the first time how long neural networks in the cerebral cortex are capable of memorizing sensory information.

08.12.2011 Chaos Despite Symmetry

The collective dynamics of many systems in biology and physics are well characterized by strongly coupled limit cycle oscillators, ranging from certain neural circuits to coupled Josephson junctions. So far it was believed that symmetry in these system forces the collective dynamics to be regular, for instance periodic. A new study has now uncovered that equally chaos can emerge in such system, and in which forms it does.

The study is published in Physical Review Letters

Christian Bick, Danilo Paulikat, Dirk Rathlef, Marc Timme, Peter Ashwin,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 107:244101 (2011)
and made its title page (issue of 9th of December)


27.10.2011 Coloring Musical Rhythms with Colored Noise

Max Planck researchers discover the statistical laws governing rhythmic fluctuations in human musical performances.

23.06.2011 Impact of microscopic motility on the overall swimming behaviour of parasites

The causative agent of African sleeping sickness, annually responsible for several thousands of deaths in Africa and South America, is a motile cell: it propels itself through its host's bloodstream until -- in the last stage of the disease -- it overcomes the blood-brain-barrier and penetrates its victim's brain. In order to fight this deadly disease, scientists are trying to understand the parasite's exact patterns of movement. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS) in Germany as well as from the Universities of Würzburg, Göttingen and Basel have now succeeded in identifying three different swimming modes. In addition, they were able to show for the first time, that these swimming modes correspond to the shape and stiffness of the parasite.

17.01.2011 Beating the competition

A single new connection can dramatically enhance the size of a network – no matter whether this connection represents an additional link in the Internet, a new acquaintance within a circle of friends or a connection between two nerve cells in the brain. The results, which are published in Nature Physics, were part of a theoretical study carried out by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Göttingen and the University Göttingen. This study mathematically describes for the first time the influence of single additional links in a network. Jan Nagler, Anna Levina, and Marc Timme, Nature Physics, published online on January 16th, 2011, DOI: 10.1038/nphys1860