Integrated Calendar

The neural mechanisms underlying consciousness have been one of the most intriguing yet elusive questions facing science. We will discuss how the activity of the neuronal population changes during loss of consciousness following administration of general anesthesia drugs.
We measured the changes of Sub-thalamic nucleus neurons activity during administration of propofol (GABAA agonists) and Remifentanil (opiate agonist). This was done during implantation of deep brain stimulation electrodes for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease in humans. Administration of both Propofol and remifentanil leads to a similar reduction of STN multi-unit neuronal spiking activity. Remifentanil seems to interfere with the oscillatory pattern of STN activity whereas propofol does not.
In order to broaden our understanding of the effect of anesthetic drugs, we performed extra-cellular recordings of neuronal activity from the cortex and globus pallidus of vervet monkeys using multiple electrodes. The recordings were performed during sedation with Ketamine (NMDA antagonist). Our results demonstrate the appearance of synchronous oscillatory activity of the LFP at slow (

The top quark is the most massive, point-like, particle known to exist in
nature. It plays a major role both in the experimental and theoretical
frontiers. Experimentally, observation of top quark is challenging, its
signature is similar to that expected from new physics (NP) dynamics. The
recent top rediscovery, at the LHC, is marking the beginning of the hunt for
the unknown. Theoretically, top physics is possibly linked to electroweak
symmetry breaking and likely to be part of the solution to the fine-tuning
problem. We discuss theoretical aspects related to top jets, a new type of
objects, which might be crucial for NP discovery. We also present our recent
experimental results from the CDF, Tevatron experiment, regarding the first
observation of ultra massive jets.

Gene activity (expression) determines the response of a living cell to environmental signals and supports the stabilization of a well-determined cell state in the face of intrinsic and environmental perturbations. How the intracellular complex molecular dynamics self-organizes into stable cell states is one of the most fascinating open questions in biophysics. After presenting the general problem of the emergence of stable cell states, I'll discuss our experimental approach allowing measurements of the long-term intracellular processes in dynamic cell populations, gaining insight into the genes' collective many-body dynamics. We show that two cell populations derived from a single steady-state mother population, fed by the same medium and exhibiting an invariant growth phenotype in response to an environmental challenge, displayed diverse gene activity patterns for genes essential for their metabolism. These degenerate gene expression patterns emerged from population-collective dynamics. This surprising result suggests that in a wide range of biological contexts, gene expression reflects a self-organization process coupled to collective population-environment dynamics.