Max Planck Institutes and Experts

The research project of the Beijing Tsinghua Tongheng Urban Planning & Design Institute THUPDI (Tsinghua University Beijing) and the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome) is devoted to the Western Buildings in the Old Summer Palace Yuanmingyuan in Beijing. The project investigates the interaction between Western architectural forms and Chinese concepts of architecture. It examines how Chinese builders adapted indigenous and imported construction methods to realise the Western palaces and how this intercultural moment was received.

A new method allows gaining insights into the widespread network activity of the brain. The method combines electrophysiological recordings from multi-contact electrodes with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the entire brain. The methodology was applied to identify the brain areas that consistently increased or decreased their activity in relationship to hippocampal episodic memory related events, known as ripples. The findings provide new insights into the system mechanisms of memory consolidation, which can be studied in more detail in the future.

Twenty years into German unification, one would have expected East-West differences in attitudes, living conditions and behavior to have gradually converged. While this holds for many areas of life, this does not apply to the family domain. Family structures and maternal employment patterns still differ radically between the two parts of the country. The panel study DemoDiff, monitored by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, is getting to the bottom of these differences.

The transition to turbulence in a fast moving fluid often starts from a localized turbulent seed that grows until it fills the whole domain. Methods stemming from dynamical systems theory allow first steps towards understanding the observed spreading: Recently constructed special solutions of the underlying equations capture aspects of the characteristic spatiotemporal dynamics. The new solutions are created by known pattern formation mechanisms also believed to underlie the characteristic spots and stripes on leopards and tigers.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the development of infants garnered unprecedented scholarly enthusiasm, with men of science discovering in their own offspring, to borrow Charles Darwin’s phrase, “objects of natural history.” In the USA, college-educated women emerged as key interpreters of infants’ mental faculties. Exploring the at-home observations of Milicent Shinn, a University of California, Berkeley graduate, reveals how she and her female network of observers performed fieldwork in the nursery, producing groundbreaking work on the evolving of the human mind.