Integrated Calendar

Glial cells are increasingly recognized as active regulators of neural circuit development, plasticity, and repair. This seminar will highlight how supporting cells in the inner ear and myelinating glia in auditory and prefrontal circuits control circuit function. Our work in the inner ear shows how glia influence hearing, in particular the recently described  “hidden hearing loss”, while our studies of juvenile social isolation demonstrate our early-life experience reshapes prefrontal myelination, neuronal function, and behavior through epigenetic mechanisms. Together, these findings point to glia‑mediated synaptic and myelin changes as key, complementary pathways through which development, experience, and aging impact circuit performance.

"Loop Soup" is a classical statistical physics model, which has a deep connection with many other models, including Gaussian free fields, conformal loop ensembles, loop-erased random walks, uniform spanning trees, the FK-Ising model, (possibly) the phi^4 model, etc. This talk will give an elementary introduction to this model, and present our recent result that the clusters of loop soups on R^3 and the metric graph of Z^3 have different fractal dimensions. This result corrects a key prediction in Wendelin Werner’s blueprint for the scaling limit of metric graph loop soups, and leads to a bunch of open questions. This is a joint work with Jian Ding (Peking University).

Physicists have long viewed life as a non-equilibrium process that fights the 2nd law of thermodynamics by maintaining order. While we understand how extant biological Maxwell Demons work, much less is known about how such Demons come into existence in the first place. Using theoretical and experimental work on DNA copying machinery, we show that the commonly assumed tradeoff between speed and accuracy can be inverted: error correction can actually speed up replication. The key insight is that errors cause `stalling’, i.e., misincorporated bases slow down subsequent steps by factors up to 100,000x. Correcting errors, though costly per base, avoids these long delays and leads to faster overall replication. We support this prediction with data from a large-scale polymerase mutagenesis screen showing that faster polymerases are more accurate. We further show that analogous error-correcting mechanisms, like the dynamic instability of microtubules, can emerge during self-assembly under selection for speed alone. Our work suggests that complex, dissipative error correction can evolve more easily than assumed, as a byproduct of fast replication, even before that accuracy serves any direct function like preserving genetic information.FOR THE LATEST UPDATES AND CONTENT ON SOFT MATTER AND BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS AT THE WEIZMANN, VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://www.bio

One hardly needs to convince theWeizmann community how excitingmathematics and science can be. Yet alltoo often these subjects in school aredreary and mundane, taught as a set offacts that need to be memorized andprocedures that need to be mastered.This does little to help inspire the nextgeneration of mathematicians andscientists. Education researchers havebeen investigating ways to narrow thegap between scientific disciplines andtheir school counterparts for decades,yet this gap has its institutionalrationalities, making the gap frustratinglypersistent. In the talk, I will discuss whythis is a “wicked” problem and presentsome research on approaches to bringthe ethos of the academic disciplinesinto the school subjects.

Dear Colleagues,You are cordially invited to a scientific and application focused webinar entitled Vesiculab: Advancing the Extracellular Vesicle Workflow. This webinar will present state of the art approaches for improving reproducibility, analytical rigor, and translational relevance in extracellular vesicle research, with an emphasis on practical solutions for everyday laboratory workflows. The presentation will be delivered by Dr Dimitri Aubert, PhD, CEO of Vesiculab. Scientific topics include:Fast size exclusion chromatography for efficient EV isolation,Total EV staining strategies for in vitro and in vivo studies,Optimized EV sample preparation for analytical and functional assays,Calibration principles for nanoflow cytometry and fluorescence NTA,Best practices for EV handling, storage, and preservation.