With increasing age, the propensity to take physical, social, legal or financial risks decreases. Researchers from the University of Basel and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin were able to show how factors such as poverty and income equality play a role.
The Thalamus not only relays visual signals from the eye to the visual cortex as previously thought, but also conveys additional, contextual information. Integrating these different signals is essential to understand and interpret what we see in the world around us.
The infection biologist Prof. Petr Broz of the Biozentrum has been awarded this year's Friedrich Miescher Award by the Swiss Society for Molecular and Cellular Biosciences (SSCMB).
For a long time it has been known that the protein TOR – Target of Rapamycin – controls cell growth and is involved in the development of diseases such as cancer and diabetes. Researchers at the University of Basel’s Biozentrum together with scientists from ETH Zurich have now examined the structure of mammalian TOR complex 1 (mTORC1) in more detail. The scientists have revealed its unique architecture in their latest publication in “Science”.
Today, the monitoring committee of the Interreg VA Upper Rhine Program has approved three joint proposals of the Eucor universities. The European Union will provide 5.5 million euros in funding for the three projects of the universities at the Upper Rhine. The Interreg proposal led by the University of Basel seeks to create an Upper Rhine cluster for sustainable research.
Switzerland has honest students: The vast majority of the students that were questioned were against pharmacological cognitive enhancement. Yet the topic should be addressed more actively by the universities.
Basel Biologists hope to develop a new drug to combat bacterial biofilms in the lungs of patients suffering from cystic fibrosis. The Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI) is funding the project “Therapeptix” at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel with 350,000 Swiss francs. Two more Biozentrum researchers are therefore heading towards professional independence and the establishment of a spin-off.
On 9 December 2015, the Universities of Basel, Freiburg, Haute-Alsace, and Strasbourg and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology signed the founding documents for the trinational European Campus. The universities have thus broken new ground in cross-border cooperation in Europe: The alliance is the first “European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation” (EGTC) to be supported entirely by universities.
Between Basel and Rotterdam, the Rhine has one of the highest microplastics pollution so far measured in rivers, with the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area showing peak numbers of up to four times the average. Among investigated rivers, the Rhine is thus among those most heavily polluted with microplastics. This is reported by researchers from the University of Basel, who evaluated, for the first time, the plastic concentration at the surface of one of the big European rivers.
