The blog of neurobiologist Björn Brembs
This year, our entire lab is attending the FENS 2026 meeting in Barcelona. Four of our students present their projects on three posters. Graduate student Julia Schulz shows her work identifying additional molecular components of the motor learning pathway involving [ ] Read the rest of this entry...
This is an English translation of my original German contribution to the Merkur Blog in response to the contributions by Gehring and Tautz. “Scientific publishing” may sound like a minor rung in the ivory tower. It is not. The system [ ] Read the rest of this entry...
Retractions of scholarly articles are a rare event, affecting only about 0.02-0.04% of articles in total (but yearly rates are going up dramatically). This means that data about retractions are not even close to being representative of the scholarly literature [ ] Read the rest of this entry...
How audit rules and public infrastructure could break science’s publishing monopolies. An English version of my post for the Verfassungsblog from December 19, 2025. Scientific journals that feel straight out of 1665, prices that could come from a MrBeast meet-and-greet, [ ] Read the rest of this entry...
Due to political developments, the US have become a much less welcoming and hence dramatically less attractive place for academic conferences. This year, nobody from our research group was interested in attending our otherwise regular meeting of the Society for [ ] Read the rest of this entry...
I have been involved in the open science movement for nearly 20 years now. By now, it seems to me the problems have been clearly recognized and formulated, the experts agree on the necessary technical solutions (replacing the journals) and [ ] Read the rest of this entry...
Ever since Werner Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle, physics has been grappling with the unsettling realization that the universe does not function like clockwork—a metaphor Newton introduced and which held sway for centuries. In a world where predictability and uncertainty [ ] Read the rest of this entry...
We are looking for two PhD students interested in the regulation of habit formation. Habits are useful to decrease cognitive load, but carry the risk of becoming stereotyped and hard to control it’s hard to shake a bad habit. [ ] Read the rest of this entry...
Universities worldwide currently face a pivotal choice: should they contribute to building a global infrastructure for exchange, science, and discourse, free from the control of oligarchs, to promote democracy, human rights, and digital participation? Or should they continue advertising on [ ] Read the rest of this entry...
For 14 years, the main research funding agency in Germany, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has stated in its guidelines that submitted grant proposals will be assessed primarily on the basis of their content, rather than counting the applicants previous [ ] Read the rest of this entry...