Integrated Calendar

The presentation will cover the projects in the lab of Dr. Ilan Lampl in which I took part during the last several years. Specifically, I intend to speak about the following topics: (i) existence of repeating motifs in subthreshold neuronal activity in the cortex, and its relationship to the synfire chain model; (ii) balance of excitation and inhibition in the cortex; and (iii) understanding spike-LFP relationships using intracellular recordings. I will also briefly describe some of our ongoing and future research projects.

VHE gamma astronomy is a very young field of research. The 'window' of VHE gamma astronomy was opened only 21 years ago with the first detection of a TeV gamma source by the Whipple collaboration. In my talk I will at first summarize the physics goals and give a short overview of the detection techniques with emphasis on the currently most efficient instruments, the large diameter atmospheric imaging Cherenkov telescopes, such as the 17 m Ø MAGIC telescope(s). In the main part of the talk an overview of selected results from galactic and extragalactic sources observed mainly by MAGIC will be given. The talk will conclude with an outlook for the future project of a large Cherenkov telescope array CTA.

Stress related dissorders are likely to result from atypical processing and integration of information by several serieses of neural networks. These dissorders have been associated with neuroadaptations found at molecular and cellular levels within reward-related brain regions. The nucleus accumbens (NAcc) is a central component of the reward system. Convergence of glutamatergic innervations from limbic and cortical structures under intense dopaminergic modulations, places the NAcc as the major site for integration of emotional salience, contextual constraints and executive/motor plans.
In the current study we found the medial shell of the NAcc to exhibit life-experience dependant adaptations. In animals exposed to chronic mild stress (CMS), there was an increase in spontaneous patterned network activity, synaptic potentiation of vSub innervations and increased GluR1 levels in the NAcc shell. In contrast, the ability to sustain time-locked, hippocampally evoked, network response was strongly reduced. That and more, we found evidence for short- and long- term plasticity in the vSub-NAcc pathway of CMS animals, but not in their control counterparts.
Over all, we argue that stressful life-experience is associated with in-vivo, long-term functional adaptations in the reward system. The individual animal’s life experience history was found to leave its mark on the NAcc network activity, properties and response. Taken together with the life-experience dependent plasticity results, these adaptations are suggested to reflect part of the adverse functional mechanism which guide behavioral deficits in stress related dissorders.

Ultra-luminous X-ray sources are extragalactic objects located outside the nucleus of the host galaxy with bolometric luminosities >10^39 erg s^-1. These extreme luminosities - if the emission is isotropic and below the theoretical (i.e. Eddington) limit, where the radiation pressure is balanced by the gravitational pressure - imply the presence of an accreting black hole with a mass of ~10^2-10^5 times that of the Sun. The existence of such intermediate mass black holes is in dispute, and though many candidates have been proposed, none are widely accepted as definitive. Here we report the detection of a variable X-ray source with a maximum 0.2-10 keV luminosity of up to 1.2 x 10^42 erg s^-1 in the edge-on spiral galaxy ESO 243-49, with an implied conservative lower limit of the mass of the black hole of ~500 Msun. This finding presents the strongest observational evidence to date for the existence of intermediate mass black holes, providing the long sought after missing link between the stellar mass and super-massive black hole populations.