Integrated Calendar

 Vision is an active sense in which an animal's gaze and pupil shape the content of the retinal image. In the first part of my talk, I will discuss how the viewing strategies of mice align with the neural architecture of their visual system to accomplish an essential visual task: predation. In the second part of my talk, I will compare the hunting behavior of mice to that of a specialized predator, similar in size but distant in evolution, and present our initial insights into the organization of visual information in this animal. Finally, I will present ongoing work indicating that the pupillary reflex arc implements a more complex stimulus-response function than previously thought. I will discuss the underlying neural mechanisms and potential purpose and show conservation from mice to humans. 

Over the last 2½ millenia, the world economy depended on prevailing currencies: the Athenian owl (530-
168 BCE), the Roman denarius (211 BCE-250 AD), the Spanish piece-of-eight (16th to 18th C), and today
the US dollar. These reference monies were accepted everywhere and all, at least in the beginning, were
made of silver. What is so special about this metal? Silver is useless and rare, but still abundant enough to
match the wealth of nations and of their long-distance trade.
Silver ores are associated with rare and recent tectonic environments, the Mediterranean world, notably
the periphery of the Aegean Sea and Southern Iberia, and the American cordillera, Peru and Mexico. In
contrast, they were markedly scarce in South and East Asia.
After the virtual destruction of soils by the Anatolian farmers at the end of the Bronze Age, the Near and
Middle East societies depended almost exclusively on the agriculture of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The
Late Bronze Age collapse (ca. 1200 BCE) corresponded to the migration of Greek people and resulted in
the annihilation of all the empires outside of the flood plains. Silver by weight was nevertheless used to
save populations from famine and trade wheat, barley and copper.
Military innovations, hoplites and their phalanx, were, with silver mines, the main resources of the Greeks.
Mercenaries received their wages in silver, notably through the tributes exacted in silver by the
Achaemenid (Persion) kings. By minting silver, the returning Greek mercenaries emerged as strong middle
classes . They soon claimed their share of the power, toppled the tyrants, and installed democracy in
many poleis from Greece and Southern Italy. Modern economics teaches us that egalitarian distribution of
wealth is unfortunately unstable and this case is well illustrated by Syracuse.
At the beginning of the common era, the Roman Empire found itself the owner of centuries of silver
extracted from Greece and from Iberia. This bullion was used to buy luxury products, frankincense from
Arabia, spices and cotton from India, ivory and precious wood from Africa. Leakage of silver towards the
Indian Ocean was so strong that coins were quickly debased by copper and by 250 AD most of the silver
had been lost. The progressive replacement of silver by a bimetallic system, gold for the rich and bronze
for the working class, progressively fractured the society and ushered the brutal Middle Age regimes.
Silver famine had finally destroyed the democratic ideal of the Greeks. This is food for thought as
disappearing mining resources may severely affect our current vision of societies.

The major concerns about industrially used catalytic systems today are: i) the high cost of catalysts; ii) the toxicity of heavy transition metals; iii) difficulties in removing trace amounts of toxic-metal residues from the desired product; and, finally, iv) rare transition metal depletion, which does not meet the requirement of sustainable development. Developing environmentally friendly catalysts is an excellent option in this regard. Naturally, the most recent catalyst development trend heralded a new era of metal-free catalysis or catalysts based on earth-abundant, nontoxic, and low-cost metals. This talk will go over our recent advances [1-4] in using small molecules to systematically mimic transition metal-based catalysis. We designed electron transfer catalysis using the smallest polycyclic odd alternant hydrocarbon, phenalenyl (PLY)-based molecules, which was inspired by a completely different field of molecular spin materials [5]. This talk will focus on how to avoid transition metals when performing various cross-coupling catalysis.

Brainstem nuclei in humans play a crucial role in vital functions, such as arousal, autonomic homeostasis, sensory and motor relay, nociception, and sleep and have been implicated in a vast array of brain pathologies, including disorders of consciousness, sleep disorders, autonomic disorders, pain, Parkinson’s disease and other motor disorders. Yet, an in vivo delineation of most human brainstem nuclei location and connectivity using conventional imaging has been elusive because of limited sensitivity and contrast for detecting these small regions using standard neuroimaging methods. In this talk, Dr. Bianciardi will present the probabilistic atlas and connectome of 31 brainstem nuclei of the arousal, motor, autonomic and sensory systems developed by her team in healthy living humans using structural, functional and diffusion-based MRI at 7 Tesla. She will also show the translatability of 7 Tesla connectivity results to conventional 3 Tesla imaging. Dr Bianciardi will conclude her seminar by presenting the first translational application of the brainstem nuclei atlas to investigate arousal and motor mechanisms in traumatic coma and premanifest synucleinopathy.