Join us at the Akustika Fair at the Nuremberg Exhibition Centre from April 4-6 Meet The Strad team at stand F08 and pick up a free copy of the magazine The Strad Directory Jobs The violist was a prolific educator at the University of Michigan and a former member of the Pittsburgh Cincinnati and Houston Symphony Orchestras Read more news stories here Israeli violist Yizhak Schotten was born in Haifa He began lessons on the violin initially at the age of nine but experienced a turning point in his musical education at the age of 14 ‘I heard Primrose on the radio and when I heard that viola sound, that was it,’ Schotten said in an interview with The Strad in 1998 Schotten had been studying in Israel with Heinrich Jacobi when he was presented with the opportunity to perform for William Primrose Schotten was then offered a scholarship to attend the University of Southern California He also studied with Primrose at Indiana University in 1965 Schotten described studying with Primrose as rough ’He was very nice to me but he was also very professional and I was a bit undisciplined Mr Primrose used to throw me out of the lesson if he thought I was unprepared.’ However he believed Primrose ’[had the] best bow arm in the business and I remember him playing his incredible spiccato.’ Schotten studied at the Manhattan School of Music with Lillian Fuchs whom he described as ’tiny but she had so much energy; and her arm was so extended that she managed to play so well.’ he played in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) from 1967 He held the position of associate principal of the Japanese Philharmonic Orchestra in Tokyo for the 1970-71 season as part of an artist exchange before returning to the BSO after which he went to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra as principal in 1973 switching to the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra in 1976 and staying there until 1979 In Cincinnati, he was a member of the Trio d’Accordo with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Karen André; together they won the Concert Artists’ Guild International Chamber Music Competition in New York in 1978 His final orchestral role was principal viola of the Houston Symphony Orchestra Read: Violist Yizhak Schotten on studying with William Primrose and Lillian Fuchs Read: Violist Cynthia Phelps on studying with William Primrose and Donald McInnes Schotten joined the University of Michigan School of Music faculty in 1985 after having taught at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and the University of Washington in Seattle from 1979 to 1983 He was also on the American Federation of Musician’s Congress of Strings faculty and gave masterclasses across the US and internationally including at the Tertis International Viola Competition the Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem Academies of Music the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in Australia and in Taiwan for the Hsing Tien Kong Culture & Education Development Foundation Schotten was the artistic director of the XIV International Viola Congress and has been a featured artist at six other International Congresses. In 2020 Schotten received the American Viola Society (AVS) Career Achievement Award in recognition for his distinguished contributions to viola performance and teaching His performance career as a soloist and chamber musician took his around the world Joseph Swensen and Arthur Fiedler as collaborators He also recorded seven discs for Crystal Records which extensively covered viola solo and chamber repertoire as well as viola orchestral excerpts with spoken commentary He served on faculties and performed at the Aspen Music Festival He was also music director of the Maui Classical Music Festival in Hawaii and was director of Strings Music Festival in Steamboat Springs Read: Holocaust violin to be played at Cremona Musica Read: Obituary: cellist and carbon fibre instrument inventor Luis Leguia (1935-2024) In The Best of Technique you’ll discover the top playing tips of the world’s leading string players and teachers It’s packed full of exercises for students plus examples from the standard repertoire to show you how to integrate the technique into your playing The Strad’s Masterclass series brings together the finest string players with some of the greatest string works ever written Masterclass has been an invaluable aid to aspiring soloists chamber musicians and string teachers since the 1990s The Canada Council of the Arts’ Musical Instrument Bank is 40 years old in 2025 This year’s calendar celebrates some its treasures including four instruments by Antonio Stradivari and priceless works by Montagnana Jeanne-Louise Moolman shares tips on how to create a sound with core on the viola The documentary film The Lost Music of Auschwitz commemorates 80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp A pioneering Turkish violinist who performed widely around the world and whose career spanned many decades has died at the age of 90 The violinist has been appointed artistic director of Clarion Concerts which provides chamber music concerts and experiences in New York’s Hudson Valley The Astatine Trio and Novo Quartet join the scheme from 2025–2027 Ten ensembles will compete for the chance to win the top prize package at this year’s competition from 25 to 31 August Site powered by Webvision Cloud Metrics details functional neuroimaging has amassed abundant evidence of the intricate interplay between brain structure and function the potential anatomical and experimental overlap and gaps between functions remain poorly understood we show the latent structure of the current brain-cognition knowledge and its organisation Our approach utilises the most comprehensive meta-analytic fMRI database (Neurosynth) to compute a three-dimensional embedding space–morphospace capturing the relationship between brain functions as we currently understand them The space structure enables us to statistically test the relationship between functions expressed as the degree to which the characteristics of each functional map can be anticipated based on its similarities with others–the predictability index The morphospace can also predict the activation pattern of new unseen functions and decode thoughts and inner states during movie watching The framework defined by the morphospace will spur the investigation of novel functions and guide the exploration of the fabric of human cognition The fact that our current understanding of cognitive functions is not entirely segregated challenges the conventional brain-cognition mapping built upon activation models This is because our representation of cognition is largely based on theoretical and experimental paradigms that are recursively validated while functional neuroimaging has revolutionised our understanding of the brain’s structure-function relationship it has also exposed limitations in our ability to formulate coherent theories of cognition resulting in insufficient knowledge of the potential overlap and gaps between functions at the global level As we accumulate more data elucidating the anatomical foundations of cognition synthesising these findings into cohesive theories becomes increasingly challenging we introduce a ‘Morphospace’ and a ‘predictability index,’ which together characterise and quantify the interconnections among task-specific fMRI studies The predictability index also serves as a metric for assessing the predictive validity of past and future fMRI investigations into cognitive processes These tools not only help to synthesise existing data but also provide a framework for future research similar functional meta-analytic maps cluster together The colour bar indicates the predictability index Cognitive domains are indicated next to each branch C Comparison between the measured maps and the 2D and 3D predicted maps’ mean z (see “Materials and Methods” for 4D D Representative examples of the best (listening) and worst (consciousness) measured (left) and predicted (right) pair of meta-analytic maps The colour bar represents the z-statistic of voxels from the Neurosynth meta-analysis maps (measured) and voxels resulting from the voxel-wise linear regression (predicted) Source data are provided as a Source Data file the less predictable maps were primarily situated in the centre of the morphospace while the ‘neuron-shaped’ branches contained more predictable maps These findings suggest that some cognitive functions may be less coherent in terms of theoretical and methodological scaffolding compared to more demarcated functions A The two-sided t-test shows the difference between the mean predictability index of the left (blue) and right (orange) hemispheres left and right medial (bottom) views and 3D reconstruction of the basal ganglia indicating the brain structures that are the most reliably characterised functionally (predictability map) The colour bar represents the t-statistics C Two-sided Spearman correlation between the predictability map and the five resting-state fMRI gradients would require a more systematic and rational investigation of the unexplored gaps in the morphospace The bar plots displayed on the left indicate the predictability index for (A) the Neuroquery meta-analytic maps B Neurosynth meta-analytic maps reported after 2017 These indices were calculated using Spearman rank correlation between predicted and measured activations The colour for each new map’s bar plot corresponds to its five nearest neighbours’ (5nn) predictability index The 888 new maps from Neuroquery (C) were summarised into 25 cognitive macro-categories via topic modelling (see “Materials and Methods”) The macro-categories are based on the terms most frequently associated in the literature with the 888 terms of interest triangles indicate each new map’s coordinate in the morphospace while transparent circles indicate the morphospace meta-analytic maps’ location The “cool” palette characterises the new projected meta-analytic and single activation maps A The projections of the activation maps in the morphospace triangles indicate each representative map’s coordinate in the morphospace and transparent circles indicate the morphospace meta-analytic maps’ location B Localisation of the activations on a brain template (top) and drawings representing the frames from the movie ‘Two Man’ eliciting the activations (bottom) C The cognitive terms whose meta-analytic map had the shortest Euclidean distance from each activation The colour bar indicates the activations’ t-statistics We introduced a framework for understanding the brain’s organisation of cognition which was derived from an extensive meta-analytic database of task-related functional MRI (fMRI) Our results demonstrate that some functions particularly those involving primary cortices (e.g. occipital cortex) and transmodal areas (e.g. have been more distinctly defined within this morphospace facilitating their segregation and characterisation This morphospace not only allows for the predictive modelling of functions that are not yet fully understood corroborated by external neuroimaging data but also offers a lens for interpreting cognitive states during task-based and resting states our framework promises to streamline the exploration of cognition enabling more targeted and hypothesis-driven research the anatomical pattern of auditory-modality fMRI tasks is strikingly different and requires further investigation into the possible influence of stimuli modality on activation studies the pronounced distance of the auditory cluster could reflect a fundamental difference with other cognitive domains that are systematically investigated using The morphospace thus sheds some light on both strengths and weaknesses in our current understanding of cognition and represents an important step toward its improvement and conceptual advancement The study’s findings reveal the reliably explored functions in the 30-year-old history of task-based fMRI literature Our framework shows that maps located in the centre of the space have a low predictability index suggesting low epistemological characterisation of their corresponding functions and our results indicate that the right hemisphere has been less characterised due to limitations intrinsic to its exploration and merits prioritisation in future cognitive investigations using new tasks overcoming the limitations of task-based exploration the current study is challenged by methodological and theoretical limitations The morphospace is based on meta-analytic activation maps built from heterogeneous activation studies as thirty years of fMRI exploration entangle enormous methodological advances in the context of Neurosynth coordinate-based meta-analytic analyses the necessity for dataset normalisation is circumvented This method uses coordinates rather than quantitative values and sidesteps the potential discrepancies that might arise due to variations in scanners or experimental designs This included an expansion to encompass results from 2018 to 2021 that replicated findings ranging from 1997 to 2017 (see Supplementary Materials) the robustness of our predictive framework has been tested with out-of-sample data benefiting from contemporary technological advancements (i.e. meta-analytic maps accounting for recent single findings and single activation results of papers up to 2022) and produced satisfactory results This thorough examination underscores the generalisability of our predictive framework as it adeptly navigates the nuanced terrain of new datasets the ability to predict activation patterns in a particular brain structure doesn’t necessarily imply a comprehensive understanding of its functions While predictability does not equate to a full functional epistemological characterisation we use it in the context of our study as a proxy measure of the degree of understanding of the brain-cognition organisation to characterise the shape of the morphospace Metaphors can sometimes add an element of confusion we chose the neuron metaphor to qualitatively describe the patterns observed in morphospace structure This metaphor provides a useful way to refer to different parts of the structure which are essential for navigating the morphospace properties the morphospace predictive framework and the predictability index can empower researchers to navigate the complexity of brain-cognition organisation comprehensively offering a robust alternative to intuition-led explorations without constraining innovative enquiry challenges and renegotiates the beliefs of the brain-cognition organisation on which fMRI studies have based their theoretical and experimental models for the past three decades Future research has the potential to explore uncharted aspects of the brain cognition organisation with our framework providing a systematic approach for hypothesis generation and experimental design serves not only as a detailed map but also as a catalyst for refining and advancing the understanding of the brain’s intricate workings The 506 meta-analytic maps (Neurosynth 2017) were thresholded at z = 3.4 (p = 0.000337) to ensure the generalisability of the brain-cognition architecture to recent meta-analytic data This threshold became a default parameter in the latest versions of Neurosynth (e.g. We utilised a linear Euclidean metric to compute distances in the morphospace ensuring that these distances accurately reflect the level of similarities between data points This approach allows us to maintain a proportional relationship between points distances and their similarities facilitating the application of linear statistical methods such as linear regression and Pearson’s correlation We leveraged the linear spatial relationship among meta-analytic activation maps to examine the predictability of the function’s anatomy and developed an index referred to as the predictability index This index captures the underlying coherence of the brain-cognition knowledge summarised by the morphospace The established knowledge available on the brain cognition-organisation was retrieved as the linear spatial relationship between the maps The linear spatial relationship was determined by computing the shortest Euclidean distances between the data points embedded in the morphospace To predict the activation pattern of each 506 map we used voxel-wise linear regressions using FSL’s Randomise tool The goal was to create a model that could predict the activation pattern of a new target map based on its proximity to the reference maps Our prediction method involved interpolating a target map’s activation pattern by analysing the weighted contribution of reference maps The weighting was determined by each reference map’s Euclidean distance to the point of interest in the morphospace (i.e. Each map within the morphospace was treated as a target map in 506 regression models with the Euclidean distances between each target map and the remaining 505 reference maps serving as independent variables The activation pattern of the reference maps was the dependent variable The regression analysis produced t-statistic maps which were then converted to z-statistic maps for further examination To maintain consistency with our measured meta-analytic maps we applied a z = 3.4 threshold to the z-maps we calculated a predictability index using Pearson’s R (fslcc in FSL) This correlation measured the alignment between the predicted activation pattern and the actual observed pattern of each meta-analytic map The parcels of the 506 predicted maps were divided into left and right hemisphere parcels, and the mean z-statistic of left and right structures was computed for each predicted functional map. Then, the t-test comparison was conducted in JASP to explore the mean predictability index differences between the left and right hemispheres Recent studies have shown that the inherent spatial autocorrelation of brain maps can lead to spuriously high correlation even between maps that are randomly generated null maps with preserved spatial autocorrelation can be used as a reference point to assess the similarity between brain maps if the findings of our study are led by spatial autocorrelation null maps with preserved spatial autocorrelation should display the same space morphology and predictability index as the measured data We selected 888 meta-analytic maps referring to terms that were not part of the morphospace from the Neuroquery repository (https://neuroquery.org/) The terms referred exclusively to cognitive functions from the healthy adult brain In addition, we sought to include task-related activation maps from studies published after 2017, focusing on cognitive domains or functions identified as having high predictability indices. A total of nineteen new activation maps were carefully selected from Neurovault (https://neurovault.org/) excluding those from studies involving psychiatric or pathological cohorts These new maps were then projected onto the existing morphospace using the UMAP ‘transform’ tool This process embeds new data into a pre-learned space without altering its structure This embedding estimated the hypothetical locations of the new data within the morphospace based on their similarity to the 506 maps used to construct the space Linear regressions were subsequently conducted to predict the anatomy of these new maps from their positions relative to the established 506 maps The resulting predictions were transformed into z-maps The predictions were then compared to the actual empirical data through Spearman’s correlations generating a predictability index that quantifies the morphospace’s ability to accurately forecast the anatomical features of cognitive maps not previously described The movie-watching (MOVIE) fMRI data were acquired using a gradient echo EPI sequence with a 1000 ms repetition time (TR) The MOVIE runs were acquired in 2 of the 4 total sessions starting with a 16-minute resting-state acquisition followed by 2 MOVIE runs Participants were instructed to passively watch a series of video clips with audiovisual content separated by 20 s of rest as indicated by the word “REST” in white text on a black background A total of 3655 t-stat activation maps were generated with each MOVIE run comprising 4 to 5 video clips To allow for comparison with the morphospace meta-analytic maps all t-stats activation maps underwent z-transformation and were parcelled following the same multi-parcellation approach of the morphospace meta-analytic maps The activation maps were thresholded at z = 3.4 The 3655 activation maps were then embedded into the 3D morphospace via UMAP and the coordinates of the locations of each activation map were extracted from the morphospace The Euclidean distances between each activation map and the 506 morphospace-measured maps were calculated and the closest morphospace meta-analytic map to each activation map was identified To match each movie frame and the activation map with the respective closest morphospace term the hemodynamic delay was taken into account Further information on research design is available in the Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article Functional segregation and integration within fronto-parietal networks Temporal dynamics of brain activation during a working memory task Where and when to pay attention: the neural systems for directing attention to spatial locations and to time intervals as revealed by both PET and fMRI Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain A review and synthesis of the first 20 years of PET and fMRI studies of heard speech Activations related to “mirror” and “canonical” neurones in the human brain: an fMRI study The emergent properties of the connected brain Functionnectome as a framework to analyse the contribution of brain circuits to fMRI Refocusing neuroscience: moving away from mental categories and towards complex behaviours Lost in localization: the need for a universal coordinate database Coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis of neuroimaging data: a random-effects approach based on empirical estimates of spatial uncertainty a high-resolution fMRI dataset for cognitive mapping Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals Meta-analytic methods for neuroimaging data explained A data-driven framework for mapping domains of human neurobiology Modeling task fMRI data via deep convolutional autoencoder Modeling and augmenting of fMRI data using deep recurrent variational auto-encoder Focal neural perturbations reshape low-dimensional trajectories of brain activity supporting cognitive performance Situating the default-mode network along a principal gradient of macroscale cortical organization Latent disconnectome prediction of long-term cognitive-behavioural symptoms in stroke Large-scale automated synthesis of human functional neuroimaging data UMAP: uniform manifold approximation and projection “An enquiry concerning human understanding” Containing An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding An Enquiry Concerning The Principles Of Morals Rational expectations and the theory of price movements The real interest rate: an empirical investigation Rational expectations and macroeconomic forecasts Perceiving event dynamics and parsing Hollywood films decision making and the orbitofrontal cortex Small sample sizes reduce the replicability of task-based fMRI studies Replication of fMRI group activations in the neuroimaging battery for the Mainz Resilience Project (MARP) Test-retest reliability of evoked BOLD signals from a cognitive-emotive fMRI test battery FMRI reliability: Influences of task and experimental design Long-term reproducibility analysis of fMRI using hand motor task Reproducibility of the hemodynamic response to auditory oddball stimuli: A six-week test–retest study Long-term test-retest reliability of functional MRI in a classification learning task Stability of amygdala BOLD response to fearful faces over multiple scan sessions How reliable are the results from functional magnetic resonance imaging The future of fMRI in cognitive neuroscience Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in design studies: Methodological considerations Neuro-cognitive architecture of executive functions: A latent variable analysis The architecture of functional lateralisation and its relationship to callosal connectivity in the human brain Mapping patterns of thought onto brain activity during movie-watching A multi-modal parcellation of human cerebral cortex An extended human connectome project multimodal parcellation atlas of the human cortex and subcortical areas Recovery of neural dynamics criticality in personalized whole-brain models of stroke Pacella, V., et al. The morphospace of the brain-cognition organisation. GitHub, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11186952 (2024) Introduction to Linear Regression Analysis Comparing spatial null models for brain maps Generative modeling of brain maps with spatial autocorrelation Local-global parcellation of the human cerebral cortex from intrinsic functional connectivity MRI Download references The authors would like to thank Dr Gaël Jobart Dr Marc Joliot and the Groupe d’Imagerie Neurofonctionelle and Pr Maurizio Corbetta and his team for the inputs and discussions on the study This work was supported by the NextGenerationEU PNRR grant No the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant agreement No M.T.d.S is supported by HORIZON- INFRA-2022 SERV (Grant No 101147319) “EBRAINS 2.0: A Research Infrastructure to Advance Neuroscience and Brain Health” by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant agreement No the University of Bordeaux’s IdEx ‘Investments for the Future’ programme RRI ‘IMPACT’ and the IHU ‘Precision & Global Vascular Brain Health Institute–VBHI’ funded by the France 2030 initiative (ANR-23-IAHU-0001) Institut des Maladies Neurodégénératives-UMR 5293 Majd Abdallah & Michel Thiebaut de Schotten Brain Connectivity and Behaviour Laboratory Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences Donders Centre for Brain Cognition and Behaviour Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics contributed to the study conceptualisation DW provided the methods and materials of the meta-analytic dataset Neuroquery and contributed to the writing–review & editing The authors declare no competing interests Nature Communications thanks Manish Saggar and the other reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations Reprints and permissions Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-52186-9 Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: a shareable link is not currently available for this article Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science Architect and Interiors India Home » Products » Explore the quirky power of magnetic tech in product design with these tables Schotten & Hansen and the Kit Kemp Design Studio launch the PIT-A-PAT  Table showcasing a pioneering magnetic product treatment for floors and tables in celebration of Schotten & Hansen’s 40th anniversary in 2024 has designed the PIT-A-PAT table using the innovative magnetic technique developed by Schotten and Hansen The magnetic insert is made up of wooden veneer pieces that are interchangeable Two striking designs ‘London’ and ‘New York’ have been created with a silky lustre glaze finish Minnie wanted to create fully functioning art pieces that will evolve with you and your space over time The Table has a sophisticated bronze frame with a playful twist and simple solid oak legs that let the table do the talking The collaboration sees Kit Kemp Design Studio and Schotten & Hansen two family businesses that have been working together for twenty years across generations Since first meeting Kit Kemp in the early 2000s Schotten & Hansen flooring and finishes have become an integral part of many Firmdale Hotels Schotten & Hansen has been operating in the UK for over 25 years and the business is now managed by founder Torben Hansen’s son comments: “Partnering with Kit and Minnie to create a table that tells the story of Schotten & Hansen through the products themselves has been thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring We have been working with Kit Kemp Design Studio since the early 2000s and they really are part of the Schotten & Hansen extended family.” design director of Kit Kemp Design Studio comments: “Incorporating wood into interiors goes beyond mere decoration; it creates an environment that echoes the calm and restorative qualities of the outdoors Schotten & Hansen are wood craftsmen who totally understand this It’s so inspiring to see them pushing the boundaries in their field and to work alongside them you feel like anything is possible.” Available at: schotten-hansen.com / kitkemp.com Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates Augustana University’s Alumni Association is proud to announce that it will be hosting a panel discussion at 7 p.m in Hamre Recital Hall (located in the Fryxell Humanities Center) featuring several former Supreme Court Justices of South Dakota and Minnesota in honor of the late professor emeritus Dr The panel will discuss “The challenges of the judiciary in a polarized world.” Hosted by Augustana President Stephanie Herseth Sandlin the panel of judges includes retired Minnesota Supreme Court Justice David Lillehaug ‘76 and retired South Dakota Supreme Court Justices Judith Meierhenry and David Gilbertson professor emeritus of government & international affairs Schotten taught courses in constitutional law and political philosophy at Augustana helping countless students from across disciplines discern if their vocation was law or if their gifts were better aligned elsewhere He provided rigorous preparation for the LSAT exam wrote meaningful letters of recommendation and made necessary phone calls to assist students in gaining admission to some of the finest law schools in the country.  Schotten earned numerous awards during his tenure at Augustana including the Burlington Northern Excellence in Teaching Award and the Vernon and Mildred Niebuhr Faculty Excellence Award He held the Stanley Olson Chair of Moral Values Lofthus Distinguished Professorship and Frederick Kohlmeyer Distinguished Teaching Professorship.  The Sanford Health Peter Schotten Endowed Professorship in Government and International Affairs was established in his honor and is held today by Dr professor of government & international affairs This event is free, but does require a ticket. Please RSVP at augie.edu/SupremeCourt Augustana University is committed to providing equal access to and participation in employment opportunities Augustana complies with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 Rehabilitation Act and other applicable laws providing for nondiscrimination against all individuals AU will provide reasonable accommodations for known disabilities to the extent required by law Kit Kemp Design Studio has partnered with Schotten & Hansen to showcase a pioneering new product at Clerkenwell Design Week 2024 In celebration of Schotten & Hansen’s 40th anniversary in 2024, Minnie Kemp, Design Director of Kit Kemp Design Studio an immersive space centred around the Pit-A-Pat table Using a magnetic technique developed by Schotten and Hansen new designs and colours can be swapped into the template and the design of the table and floor beneath Throughout the space, Kit Kemp Design Studio has designed a series of furniture pieces that demonstrate the beauty in the natural imperfections of wood, including the Tête-à-Tête bench carved from a chestnut tree chosen by Minnie Kemp on her visit to Schotten & Hansen’s headquarters in Bavaria; the Mushroom Table previewing Schotten & Hansen’s forthcoming Graincut Empire finish; a collection of layered veneer frames telling the story of Schotten & Hansen; and two oversized totem sculptures of varying heights illustrating new vibrant veneer colours “We are delighted to be at Clerkenwell Design Week again in what is a significant year for Schotten & Hansen as we celebrate 40 years,” says Torben Hansen “Partnering with Kit and Minnie to create this space that tells the story of Schotten & Hansen through the products themselves has been thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring Minnie Kemp adds: “Wooden finishes and pieces are key to all our projects – it’s the element of nature its rawness and warmth that really completes a space Having this opportunity to explore and play with Schotten & Hansen’s colours in wood and veneers making something quite spectacular out of something quite ordinary Registered in England and Wales with Company Number 06637145 We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website You can find out more about which cookies we are using or switch them off in settings This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings we will not be able to save your preferences This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again More information about our Cookie Policy worked closely with artists such as David Hockney to design art book covers for Thames & Hudson Schotten’s role was not easy as he had to please both publisher and the author, or the artist subject of the book. Naturally, he had his own convictions as to what would make the most aesthetically pleasing design and the best advertisement for the book. Despite this, artists such as Lucian Freud David Bailey and Hockney found him a pleasure to work with So many commented on his kindness and patience his traumatic early life could easily have made him bitter and angry: perhaps it was this very experience that led him instead to be especially understanding Shalom Schotten’s jacket design for David Hockney by David Hockney a leader of the Jewish community in Mattersburg who later made and cleaned feather bedding In 1938 Shalom was sent with his siblings to stay with grandparents in Guta His father was expelled from Austria the same year and went to Chelles were rescued and brought to France by a brave woman named Marguerite Kohn Three other siblings were killed in Auschwitz progressing to employment with the graphic designer Grundmann Deciding that Britain was the best destination for a budding graphic designer Shalom moved to London in 1959 to do a one-year course at the London College of Printing (now London College of Communication who had trained at the Bauhaus and was then designing dust jackets for Thames & Hudson Schotten took over this role in 1960, settling in well at this cosmopolitan company that had been founded after the war by one Austrian and one German refugee. I met Shalom when researching my book Émigrés: The Transformation of Art Publishing in Britain (2014) Shalom worked at T&H for more than fifty years embracing the computer age and producing a wealth of stunning designs for books such as The Great Builders by Kenneth Powell and Nineteenth Century Art by Stephen Eisenman (both 2011) a German student nurse training at Great Ormond Street hospital They had three children and settled in High Barnet She is Jewish and he returned to his faith Schotten Totten 2 is a asymmetrical card game with similar gameplay to the original (see "'Schotten Totten' and 'Rent-A-Hero' ") one player takes on the role of the attacker and tries to breach the other player's castle walls by playing cards at different locations This game using bluffing mechanics along with poker-style hands to facilitate a fast  Iello USA recently released Kitara, a conquest board game (see "Restore the Greatness of the Empire in 'Kitara'") Metrics details Brain lesions do not just disable but also disconnect brain areas which once deprived of their input or output can no longer subserve behaviour and cognition The role of white matter connections has remained an open question for the past 250 years here we reveal the human Disconnectome and demonstrate its relationship to the functional segregation of the human brain Results indicate that functional territories are not only defined by white matter connections but also by the highly stereotyped spatial distribution of brain disconnections While the former has granted us the possibility to map 590 functions on the white matter of the whole brain the latter compels a revision of the taxonomy of brain functions our freely available Atlas of White Matter Function will enable improved clinical-neuroanatomical predictions for brain lesion studies and provide a platform for explorations in the domain of cognition Replication of the disconnection estimates in a lower resolution age matched sample of ten participants indicated a good reproducibility (r = 0.866 ± 0.066) whether the relationship between brain lesion and functional imaging findings is driven by biased clinical observation or the non-stochastic organisation of white matter connections in the human brain is unknown Redundancy in these datasets suggests that we should be able to summarise the pattern of brain areas disconnected by strokes into principal components the correlation between task-related functional activations and the synthetic disconnectome have a significantly weaker relationship than with the stroke disconnectome (t = 4.620; p < 0.001 These statistical differences suggest that on the one hand the disconnectome corresponds with the underlying functional architecture (as revealed by fMRI) better than lesions alone Hence brain disconnections are more appropriate to study the localisation of brain functions than brain lesions alone our results also suggest that the non-random distribution of stroke has distorted the taxonomy of brain function underpinning the behavioural paradigms used in task-related fMRI and other brain mapping methods the stereotyped location of stroke lesions has induced an observational bias in jointly impaired functions that has biased the functional taxonomy used with fMRI in healthy subjects 3D representation of four representative components maps side-by-side with white matter sections Component maps were replicated a second time and indicated a good reproducibility (average Pearson R = 0.813 ± 0.079) a summary map of the white matter function only displaying terms with the highest statistical level (see Supplementary Figs. 50–57 for high resolution) b Effect size related to the prediction of white matter function the value indicates the number of terms related to the prediction of white matter function with a large effect size The atlas white matter function was replicated a second time The atlas of white matter function was replicated a second time and indicated a good reproducibility (average Pearson R = 0.885 ± 0.061) Applying state-of-the-art methods for synthesising meta-analytic functional mapping with white matter connectivity of the largest published set of acute stroke lesions we built an atlas of the function of white matter in the human brain The functions we localised in the atlas of the function of white matter correspond to the joint contribution of connected areas This was made possible because of the redundancy in brain disconnection after a stroke that shows a striking correspondence with task-related fMRI activation patterns Our result suggests that this correspondence is due to the influence of the organisation of white matter connections on the functional segregation of the human brain Since the relationship between disconnection and task-related fMRI activation patterns was significantly stronger for real stroke lesion than simulated lesions we suggest that the biased distribution of brain lesions has also biased our taxonomy of brain functions While our method allowed us to map white matter function and may help to guide patients’ symptoms exploration the bias we report also provokes questioning and further investigation on the definition of brain functions The following workflow was summarised in Supplementary Fig. 2 This produced more than 1 million synthetic lesion masks In order to minimise the bulkiness of the synthetic lesion each mask was subsequently smoothed with a full-width half-maximum of 10 mm we sampled a lesion of the synthetic pool with the same size and localised in the same hemisphere This produced a dataset of 1333 synthetic lesions exactly paired with the stroke dataset but pseudo-randomly distributed in the brain The code used for the production of synthetic lesion paired with real lesions is available as supplementary code (see ‘Code availability’ section) for full details on the processing of the DWI data) tractography maps of the 163 healthy controls were subsequently binarised and averaged together so that each voxel represented a probability of disconnection from 0 to 1 This produced a stroke lesion disconnectome dataset (n = 1333) and a synthetic lesion disconnectome dataset (n = 1333) The MMP provided 360 cortical areas very well characterised by their anatomy and functional specificity As subcortical areas also play an important role in cognition the putamen and the thalamus for the left and the right hemispheres the proportion of damage (for the lesions) or the probability of disconnection (for the disconnectome) was estimated for each region of interest This step produced four matrices in total—2 (lesion or disconnectome) × 2 (stroke or synthetic) Component scores were systematically extracted for all components identified by the PCA by means of multiple regression This provided us with the contribution of each parcel of the MMP and subcortical areas to each component The manual curation consisted in the previously published selection of 590 maps related to specific cognitive processes out of the whole Neurosynth database The curated database represented 590 cognitive term maps that were converted into a matrix using the average z value for each MMP parcels and the manually defined subcortical areas mentioned above We estimated the relationship between each term of the task-related fMRI metanalysis matrix and the component scores extracted in the previous section using Pearson correlation disconnectome and synthetic disconnectome relationship with task-related fMRI metanalysis was assessed by means of a bootstrapped (n = 1000) independent sample t-test the 1333 disconnectome maps dataset was split in two 666 datasets and the multiple regression was run twice Quality of the results duplication was assessed by means of Pearson correlations between the two set of maps derived from the analyses This section resulted in two white matter maps per component we explored the contribution of each component map voxels to the task-related fMRI meta-analytic maps A permuted (n = 1000) linear regression was computed between the correlation value of each task-related fMRI meta-analytic map as an independent variable and each component maps voxels as a dependant variable once for each set of the component maps and its replication quality was assessed as previously mentioned This section resulted in two white matter maps per task-related fMRI meta-analytic term A summary map of the white matter function was computed displaying only the map with the highest statistical level (find_the_biggest in FSL) goodness of fit) was calculated for each voxel in order to provide a visualisation of the effect size of the summary map As several functions can load on the same tract we assessed versatility by counting the number of tasks having an effect size R > 0.3 for each voxel A visualisation of the results was performed using Surf Ice https://www.nitrc.org/projects/surfice/ and Trackvis http://trackvis.org Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article Any additional information is available on request to M.T.d.S Novum Organum with Other Parts of the Great Instauration (John Bill Seeing Things as They are (Oxford University Press Lesion studies in contemporary neuroscience Kirchhof, P. et al. How can we avoid a stroke crisis? https://www.dropbox.com/s/o78dexrsvz6dijv/ehra-stroke-report-recommend-document.pdf?dl=0 (2009) A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage Permanent Present Tense: the Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient Neural systems control of spatial orienting Stroke registry: hemorrhagic vs ischemic strokes Human brain lesion-deficit inference remapped Der Bau der Grosshirnrinde und seine ortlichen Verschiedenheiten nebst einem pathologisch-anatomischen Corollarium Atlas of Human Brain Connections (Oxford University Press Spatial awareness is a function of the temporal not the posterior parietal lobe From Phineas Gage and Monsieur Leborgne to H.M.: revisiting disconnection syndromes Mapping symptoms to brain networks with the human connectome Visualization of disconnection syndromes in humans Damage to white matter pathways in subacute and chronic spatial neglect: a group study and 2 single-case studies with complete virtual “in vivo” tractography dissection Common behavioral clusters and subcortical anatomy in stroke Mapping neuroplastic potential in brain-damaged patients Advanced lesion symptom mapping analyses and implementation as BCBtoolkit Network localization of neurological symptoms from focal brain lesions A human memory circuit derived from brain lesions causing amnesia High-dimensional therapeutic inference in the focally damaged human brain High resolution whole brain diffusion imaging at 7T for the Human Connectome Project The rise of a new associationist school for lesion-symptom mapping Anosognosia for hemiplegia as a tripartite disconnection syndrome Different patterns of confabulation in left visuo-spatial neglect Post-stroke deficit prediction from lesion and indirect structural and functional disconnection The neural correlates of the verbal component of working memory The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map (Clarendon Press Sparse orthogonal population representation of spatial context in the retrosplenial cortex Spatially periodic activation patterns of retrosplenial cortex encode route sub-spaces and distance traveled Deviation of eyes and head in acute cerebral stroke The relationship of corpus callosum connections to electrical stimulation maps of motor Gerstmann meets Geschwind: a crossing (or kissing) variant of a subcortical disconnection syndrome Effects of aging on functional and structural brain connectivity Atlasing the frontal lobe connections and their variability due to age and education: a spherical deconvolution tractography study The Lifespan Human Connectome Project in Aging: an overview Extending the Human Connectome Project across ages: imaging protocols for the Lifespan Development and Aging projects Sur la division des corps matériels en parties Advances in functional and structural MR image analysis and implementation as FSL McInnes, L., Healy, J. & Melville, J. UMAP: uniform manifold approximation and projection for dimension reduction. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03426 (2018) Download references for useful discussion and edits to the manuscript Patrick Friedrich and Sandrine Cremona for discussion of the results We also thank Laurent Petit and his team (GIN) for providing us with fMRI maps of left and right hands finger tapping as well as University of Bordeaux and CNRS for the infrastructural support This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no is funded by the Wellcome Trust and the UCLH NIHR Biomedical Research Centre implemented the methods and wrote the manuscript collected and reviewed the neuroimaging data Peer review information Nature Communications thanks Russell Poldrack and the other Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18920-9 The University of Michigan professor remembers his studies with two very different viola teachers Already subscribed? Please sign in We’re delighted that you are enjoying our website you can try an online subscription to The Strad completely free of charge Sign up now to read this article in full and you’ll also receive unlimited access to premium online content including the digital edition and online archive for 7 days Free trial No strings attached – we won’t ask for your card details To enjoy the best in-depth features and analysis from The Strad’s latest and past issues You’ll also enjoy regular issues and special supplements* and access to an online archive of issues back to 2010 Subscribe * Issues and supplements are available as both print and digital editions Online subscribers will only receive access to the digital versions Man the walls and prepare defences because an attack is on the way in Schotten Totten 2, the upcoming sequel to the 1999 card game by Reiner Knizia Designed for two player mayhem Schotten Totten - which received a rethemed version called Battle Line in 2000 - is a card game that shares similar mechanics to Poker players are each commanding their own army in a clash over nine border stones placed somewhere in the Scottish highlands By laying down lines of units - or cards - players can attempt to overcome their opponent’s defences and win each of the nine stones in turn With a deck of 54 cards numbered from one to nine players must place three cards behind each border stone on their side of the line Depending on what players place - whether the run of cards they play are of matching colours or not - they can claim a border stone before their opponent even begins laying down cards simply because it could be impossible for their run to be beaten by another Schotten Totten 2 is also a two-player card game involving clashing sides in a conflict Schotten Totten 2 is an asymmetrical title meaning that each player will have to achieve a different goal in order to win the game Whilst one player is attempting to defend their walls the other will be trying to breach these defences with both having access to a set of numbered cards that represent their forces players will lay down cards at a series of locations to determine who wins which bouts players will be laying two to four cards - depending on the location - and the winner won’t always be determined by whoever has the strongest hand The defending player will also have access to three boiling oil tokens they can use to clear out the attacking player’s cards from a location with a selection of 10 possible tactical cards also featured in the deck Whichever player successfully completes their objective is named the winner of Schotten Totten 2 Other than designing Lost Cities and Schotten Totten 2, Knizia is also known for creating an enormous catalogue of board games including co-operative adventure game Lord of the Rings (2000), auction board game High Society and the critically acclaimed Tigris & Euphrates Schotten Totten 2 is being published by Iello, a company which has previously released titles such as beginner board game King of Tokyo, Diamant - a quick game about collecting gems whilst avoiding dangerous traps - and Dungeon Mayhem The US release date for Schotten Totten 2 is currently set for September 17th at a retail price of $15/£12 with no confirmation on a worldwide release date as of yet We thank Haneen Maikey and Heike Schotten for their thoughtful and detailed response to our article as well as political commitment and conviction it took to articulate their concerns about our article. We do not necessarily disagree with many of their points to take the opportunity to clarify the methodological approach to our article and acknowledge that some of this elaboration would have been helpfully included in the original essay It is important to translate political disagreement into dialogue and we welcome this opportunity to continue this discussion There are several reasons why we did not provide “examples” or  “evidence.” First of all our piece was informed by numerous conversations over the past several years (Puar has been writing on and speaking about queer organizing in relation to Israel-Palestine since 2005 and participating in such organizing since 2009; Mikdashi has been involved in activism and teaching on these topics since 2006) These conversations often indicated concerns that overlapped with our own; not directly about certain people but more about public forums and the politicization of activists at these forums discourses that emerged from various events and responses to publications on social media we hoped to take part in forging a space for critical discussion among a diverse and growing activist movement We also understood several other political organizing benefits to not naming names: Providing names/examples would have detracted from the overall systemic problem we are discussing by blaming certain individuals and events and lauding other individuals and events by not-naming them person nor event as culpable for these dynamics We are talking about a discursive field of power collectively produced through multiple actors and elements that implicate all of us who struggle with the question of pinkwashing which often undermines—unwittingly—the very kinds of interventions that are originally attempted We did not name any names—neither those whose work we might find to be problematic nor those whose work we laud—precisely to avoid the kind of insider/outsider positioning that happens when one claims greater moral authority (in the name of activism in the name of representing a community with a global reach) to speak about an issue than another This kind of “finger-pointing” would have been divisive creating a binary politics of insiders/outsiders good organizing/bad organizing that we believed to be deeply counterproductive.  we surmised that not-naming names is more beneficial to a long-term solidarity politics.  By this we mean that it potentially can initiate a fruitful self-reflective process We trusted our readers to find themselves in the critique.  Had we named names we would have restricted the freedom to relate to the critique on one’s own terms then there might be something there to think about We were very clear that we were discussing pinkwatching activism in the United States only so we are a bit confused as to why the response takes up the question of regional organizing in the Middle East that regional organizing needs to rely on its own strategies to be effective has in her writing and lecturing highlighted the strategically intricate work of al-Qaws and PQBDS for several years now This misreading of our critique is hardly a minor semantic affair.  Activism in Palestine emerges from a specific set of circumstances because Palestinians live under occupation and settlement and have been scattered throughout the world by practices of ethnic cleansing Activism in the United States emerges from a different context and has a different set of ethical imperatives US-based activists who fight settler colonialism in Israel without acknowledging the ongoing settling of the United States Palestine and the United States do not occupy the same geopolitical space internationally while the United States is the premiere superpower and imperial force in the world today to read our piece as a critique of regional activism in particular as a critique of on-the-ground Palestinian activism is to miss our basic point: “American” pinkwatching activists (we are aware of the complexity and contingencies that such a category references) must work within the framework of US settler colonialism and empire in order to not risk being complicit in the further normalization of both While many activists do work within these frameworks in our experience this approach is far from pervasive among pinkwatching actions We acknowledge that the field of US organizing is diverse This diversity accounts for both sets of positive and critical responses that our piece was met with Indigenous studies scholars and those activists working on indigenous issues in the United States very enthusiastically agreed about our assessment of the need to highlight with greater force the settler colonial status—not historical The absence of this recognition naturalizes settler colonialism as a situation of the past rather than the very lived everyday Their response indicates at least one audience that feels that US settler colonialism of the present day is not being more radically integrated into pinkwatching efforts We could continue to list the positive ways our article has been received by both activists and academics and activist-scholars But to insist that we had the moral authority produced by consensus would only repeat the violence of producing a bounded political movement where only some people are allowed to voice a critique rather than to say “everyone agrees with us” (as Maikey and Schotten insinuate) to simply acknowledge that there are intense political disagreements about how this work should be done Claiming a consensus is dangerous and flattening to the potential productivity of those disagreements we would point out that another insider/outsider politics recurs through continually invoking an uncomplicated and purported transparent academic/activist binary To rely on such a reductive binary is to miss the multiple ways in which many of us who labor for social and political justice do so from and across multiple while any activist/academic tensions must be carefully contextualized and elaborated who have spoken out against Israeli state policy have been subjected to a great deal of institutional censorship and harassment Thus academic freedom is not protected in regards to this issue and we would question the assumption that academia is a safe outsider position free from recrimination and professional blowback.   in regards to what Maikey and Schotten refer to as the overemphasis of homonationalism in relation to pinkwashing and Palestine Homonationalism and pinkwashing are not parallel phenomenon rather pinkwashing is one manifestation and practice that is made possible within and because of homonationalism As theorized by Puar in her formative work on the concept homonationalism is not another identity politics not another way of distinguishing good queers from bad queers It is rather a facet of modernity and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as those now worthy of protection by nation-states homonationalism is not a state practice per se It is instead the historical convergence of state practices transnational circuits of queer commodity culture and human rights paradigms and broader global phenomenon such as the increasing entrenchment of Islamophobia.  These are just some of the circumstances through which nation-states are now vested with the status of “gay-friendly” versus “homophobic.” More importantly homonationalism is an analytic category deployed to understand and historicize how and why such a status (“gay-friendly”) has become desirable in the first place.  Like modernity homonationalism can be resisted and re-signified but not opted out of: we are all conditioned by it and through it Arguing that some pinkwatching rhetorics reproduce the queer exceptionalism of homonationalism is simply to note that we are subjects formed through apparati of state and legal recognition that are engendered by the historical advent of what we can now identify as homonationalism.  rather than accusing us of somehow negating the specificity of Palestine is that we were mapping out the relations between pinkwashing and homonationalism the global conditions of homonationalism that make a practice such as Israeli pinkwashing possible and legible in the first place In connecting Israeli pinkwashing to a broader global system of power networks rather demonstrating the myriad of actors that converge to enable such a practice Of course it is important that concepts mutate and merge freely as they find their usefulness in various contexts We therefore reiterate Puar’s original framing not as a corrective but simply to clarify how our usages of the terminology operated Ultimately our piece was generated from a profound and deep commitment to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli Occupation and from a genuine desire to dialogue about what we now see as some hegemonic forms of pinkwatching activism That there is not agreement on the presence or impact of these forms should be expected and even productively welcomed in a global solidarity movement We hope to continue these conversations with our allies in the struggle for Palestinian liberation reviews and features from the experts at T3 Metrics details Functional lateralisation is a fundamental principle of the human brain a comprehensive taxonomy of functional lateralisation and its organisation in the brain is missing we report the first complete map of functional hemispheric asymmetries in the human brain and its relationship with structural inter-hemispheric connectivity Our results suggest that the lateralisation of brain functions is distributed along four functional axes: symbolic communication The similarity between this finding and recent work on neurological symptoms give rise to new hypotheses on the mechanisms that support brain recovery after a brain lesion We also report that cortical regions showing asymmetries in task-evoked activity have reduced connections with the opposite hemisphere This latter result suggests that during evolution brain size expansion led to functional lateralisation to avoid excessive conduction delays between the hemispheres a comprehensive mapping of functional lateralisation in the brain is It is also not known whether putatively lateralised cognitive functions share similar or different spatial patterns of functional activation and whether these functional activations can be categorised to a limited number of spatial patterns—have a low-dimensional structure the generalisation of these theories and findings to the whole brain’s functional organisation remains unknown a comprehensive map of the functional brain architecture of lateralised cognitive functions characterise its low-dimensional structure and examine its relationship to corpus callosum connectivity these represent the significant groups of voxels showing significant functional lateralisation in Neurosynth by regressing lateralisation profiles onto terms’ coordinates in the embedded space we constructed predictions for the maps located at the coordinates of the vertices The archetype perception/action map involved left sensorimotor cortex, left SMA and left thalamus. Right dominant activations included frontal eye field, intraparietal region, and ventral frontal regions, frontal eye field, presupplementary motor area, basal forebrain and anterior cerebellum (i.e. Areas V/VI and VIII) as well as part of the vermis (Fig. 2b) The archetype emotion map involved the left anterior cingulate cortex, the basolateral complex of the right amygdala, the posterior part of the right inferior frontal gyrus, the right intraparietal sulcus and the posterior part of the right temporal lobe (Fig. 2c) Finally, the decision-making archetype map involved mostly the right prefrontal cortex (i.e. medial orbital gyrus), the right frontal eye field, the left intraparietal sulcus together with the striatum (right putamen and left caudate) and the left basal forebrain (Fig. 2d) Given that the microscopic diffusion of water molecules in the brain is easier along rather than across axons, tractography derived from diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging allows for peering into the structural organisation of brain connectivity (Fig. 3a). b Histogram of the difference between lateralised and non-lateralised regions in the corpus callosum axonal water fraction c Histogram of the difference between lateralised and non-lateralised regions in the corpus callosum probability of connection The measure was calculated as the proportion of participants in which a connection exists between brain’s voxels and corpus callosum to the overall HCP sample size d Dimensional relationship between the degree of functional lateralisation and the corpus callosum probability of connectivity which we will refer to as probability of connection for shortness the plots suggested a slightly lower axonal water fraction for left hemisphere regions as compared to the right hemisphere Next, we constructed an analogous distribution for the probability of connection. Figure 3c demonstrates that lateralised regions when compared to non-lateralised voxels did not differ in this macrostructural measure of connectivity The previous analysis failed to reveal a categorical difference between lateralised and non-lateralised regions in macroscopic measure of connectivity. However, the degree of functional hemispheric dominance (see Methods for the definition of this measure) can vary —from a unilateral to a relatively asymmetric pattern of activity both hemispheres are involved in a function we explored whether a proportional relationship existed between the degree of functional lateralisation and the probability of corpus callosum connectivity Figure 3d indicates a negative relationship between the probability of connection and the degree of functional lateralisation for both the left and the right hemispheres (Pearson correlation r = –0.81 and r = –0.69 As the overall level of activation of two homotopic areas in the left and the right hemispheres may have an influence on its corpus callosum connections we duplicated the same analysis after regressing out the left and right hemispheres average level of activity for every functionally lateralised voxel The relationship between the level of functional dominance and the probability of connection to corpus callosum remained unchanged for the left hemisphere (Pearson correlation r = –0.79) and increased for the right hemisphere (Pearson correlation r = –0.85) Additional supplementary analyses indicated that there was no relationship between the difference in corpus callosum connectivity of lateralised and non-lateralised voxels and their distance from the midsection of the corpus callosum (Supplementary Figure 3) we provide for the first time a comprehensive mapping of the functional brain architecture of lateralised cognitive functions The lateralisation of brain functions had a low-dimensional structure distributed along four functional axes: symbolic communication were connected to regions of the corpus callosum with reduced microstructural connectivity corpus callosum macrostructural connectivity was proportionally associated with the degree of hemispheric functional dominance The emotion axis include right hemisphere biased maps for terms such as /expression/fearful/social interactions/ but left hemisphere foci for /autobiographical memory/ the present analysis provides us with a comprehensive view of functional lateralisation in humans which appears to be organised in four domains: symbolic communication emotion-related and decision-making functions such as the relationship between functional lateralisation and the strength of communication between the hemispheres The similarity between the current findings and recent work on neurological symptoms give rise to new hypotheses on the mechanisms that support brain recovery after a brain lesion We downloaded the Neurosynth database that contained 3107 reversed unthresholded functional maps and the details of 11,406 literature sources as of the 25th of September 2017 This was funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University were related to specific cognitive processes The selection procedure consisted of two stages the judges made their selection independently “alzheimer”) terms were systematically excluded The two judges agreed on 422 terms as related to cognitive processes as well as 2309 unrelated terms that were to be discarded (88% reproducibility) 590 cognitive terms were selected for the study The symmetrical template was downsampled to a 2 mm voxel size to match the voxel dimensions of the standard template The estimated transformation between non-symmetrical and symmetrical MNI spaces were then applied to all functional maps Positive and negative values in these maps would signify a higher meta-analytic evidence for right and left lateralisation of the function associated with a term motion and geometrical distortion were corrected using the EDDY tool as implemented in FSL a step size of 0.5 mm and a minimum streamline length of 15 mm This step produced a whole-brain streamline tractography and axonal water fraction maps in the standard MNI152 space general linear modelling was employed to identify voxels with a significant lateralisation associated with a particular component the principal components were used as a set of predictors to fit the LI maps and obtain beta maps The permutation test was performed to identify significantly lateralised regions Given that varimax rotation may impose some correlations between the columns of the principal component matrix we performed permutations on the rows of the unrotated matrix subsequently applying component rotation and calculating a random map on each permutation in the same way as it was done for the real principal components This procedure allowed us to mimic the correlational structure of the unpermuted data and provide a more robust test of significance In order to account for multiple comparisons the maximal statistics approach was used whereby the spatial map values for the real principal components were compared to the maximal (either positively or negatively) value across a whole random map on each permutation The voxels were considered as showing a significant lateralisation if they simultaneously satisfied two criteria: (1) their spatial map values were in 97.5% cases higher or lower than maximal positive and negative the values obtained via permutations (i.e. two-tailed and FWE-corrected); (2) they formed a cluster of at least 20 voxels The second criterion was used to exclude small and possibly spurious effects observed in a small number of voxels These values were compared to the t-ratios of random LI maps These random maps were obtained by generating 2000 sets of 590 random maps via the permutation of the voxel order random LI maps were calculated for each pair and then submitted to varimax analysis with the number of principal components = 171 The embedding procedure was identical to the procedure applied to non-random LI maps The dimensional span of triangular organisation was evaluated by testing if t-ratio for non-random LI maps was greater than t-ratios of random LI maps in each two-dimensional subspace of embedding (p < 0.05 The label for the axes was defined ad-hoc according to one or a few terms situated at the vertices of the triangle Archetype maps were approximated using multiple regression approach We first regressed the values in each voxel across the “denoised” LI maps onto corresponding maps’ coordinates in the first 171 dimensions of the embedded space (i.e. matching the number of components used for “denoising”) This provided an estimated contribution of each embedded dimension to the lateralisation index We then obtained the archetype maps by evaluating regression coefficients for the dimensions where the triangular structure was observed at the estimated locations of the archetypes (i.e. at the vertices of “simplex” - multidimensional triangular) the analysis was run in the symmetrical space and for the left and right hemispheres separately The voxels were considered to have no significant lateralisation if they met the following criteria: (1) passed the significance threshold for at least one component and one hemisphere; (2) were non-overlapping with lateralised voxels; and (3) were homologues of the voxels meeting criteria (1) and (2) in the opposite hemisphere A shortcut term “non-lateralised” regions was used to denominate voxels without significant lateralisation in the remaining text This provides a conservative contrast for the lateralised regions because by virtue of the frequentist statistical approach the non-lateralised regions would also include voxels demonstrating a considerable lateralisation but failing to meet the statistical criteria of significance used in the study The number of non-lateralised voxels was 3.6 times greater than the number of lateralised voxels The following steps were used for structure–function relationships we combined the spatial maps of significantly lateralised voxels irrespective of the left and right polarity of lateralisation we transformed the combined map back into the regular MNI space for a joint analysis with diffusion information using an inverse of the MNI non-symmetrical to MNI symmetrical template deformations estimated above we projected the combined map onto the white matter boundary of the non-symmetrical MNI template in each hemisphere and subsequently selected tractography from these voxels to the corpus callosum The same procedures were applied to the maps of non-lateralised regions as a proportion of participants in which a connection exists between brain’s voxels and corpus callosum to the overall HCP sample size We will refer to this measure as a “probability of connection” for shortness The comparison of connectivity between lateralised and non-lateralised regions was performed by sampling subsets of voxels (without replacement) from the pools of lateralised and non-lateralised cortical voxels A sample from each pool was equal to 5% of the entire number of voxels in that pool (i.e. ensuring that the within-pool spatial frequency of drawn samples was equal between pools) For each subset we calculated an average value for probability of connection and a weighted average for callosal axonal water fraction where a weight for a voxel was given as a connection replicability between this voxel and any voxel in a sampled subset A negative value would indicate a weaker connectivity of the lateralised voxels The distributions of the difference in the connectivity measures between lateralised and non-lateralised cortical regions were obtained by repeating the procedure 1000 times and for each hemisphere separately The degree of functional hemispheric dominance was evaluated in radians as an arctangent of the ratio between the strengths of activation in two hemispheres Pi/4 was subtracted from this value to ensure that the absolute magnitude of this value increases if the task activation is unilateral and decreases if both hemispheres demonstrate comparable levels of task activity Given that a partial spatial overlap between lateralised regions associated with different components is possible in the analyses we picked the dominance values associated with components that rendered the largest z-score in a particular voxel In order to obtain robust estimate for the relationship between hemispheric dominance and the strength of inter-hemispheric connectivity the voxels were binned by the probabilities of connection such that the smallest bin width was of the size equal to 1/163 and increased with the probability of connection (given by logspace function in Matlab) This procedure was used to partially compensate for the fact that only a very limited number of voxels had a high probability of connection to the corpus callosum whereas the majority were characterised by small values We also estimated the voxel’s average activity between left and right hemispheres (i.e. (left + right hemisphere activity)/2) and used it as a covariate of non-interest in the analyses looking at the relationship between hemispheric dominance and other measures The dataset analysed during the current study are available at https://www.humanconnectome.org and http://www.neurosynth.org processed data are available on request to the corresponding authors michel.thiebaut@gmail.com and http://vyacheslav.karolis@ndcn.ox.ac.uk The code used in the following analyses is available on request from http://vyacheslav.karolis@ndcn.ox.ac.uk Lateral Specialization in the Surgically Separated Hemispheres (Rockefeller University Press Mapping cortical brain asymmetry in 17,141 healthy individuals worldwide via the ENIGMA Consortium Revisiting human hemispheric specialization with neuroimaging Cerebral laterality and psychiatry: a review of the literature Cerebral asymmetry and language development: cause Let thy left brain know what thy right brain doeth: inter-hemispheric compensation of functional deficits after brain damage Anatomical predictors of aphasia recovery: a 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For Graduate Students (Springer International Publishing The evolution of distributed association networks in the human brain Semenza, C. & Benavides-Varela, S. Reassessing lateralization in calculation. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 373, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0044 (2017) Hemisphere asymmetry for imitation of hand and finger movements Apraxia and beyond: life and work of Hugo Liepmann The geometry of locomotive behavioral states in C Archetypes of human cognition defined by time preference for reward and their brain correlates: an evolutionary trade-off approach Evidence from intrinsic activity that asymmetry of the human brain is controlled by multiple factors On the low dimensionality of behavioral deficits and alterations of brain network connectivity after focal injury AICHA: an atlas of intrinsic connectivity of homotopic areas The neural bases of hemispheric specialization Cerebral specialization and interhemispheric communication: does the corpus callosum enable the human condition The development of the corpus callosum in the healthy human brain Behavioural clusters and predictors of performance during recovery from stroke Publication bias in neuroimaging research: implications for meta-analyses Facial recognition and brain asymmetries: clues to underlying mechanisms Asymmetries in face and brain related to emotion The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception The challenge of mapping the human connectome based on diffusion tractography AxTract: Toward microstructure informed tractography New insights in the homotopic and heterotopic connectivity of the frontal portion of the human corpus callosum revealed by microdissection and diffusion tractography A reproducible evaluation of ANTs similarity metric performance in brain image registration with 16-fold acceleration using partial parallel imaging with application to high spatial and temporal whole-brain fMRI Design of multishell sampling schemes with uniform coverage in diffusion MRI A comprehensive Gaussian process framework for correcting distortions and movements in diffusion images Advances in diffusion MRI acquisition and processing in the Human Connectome Project How to correct susceptibility distortions in spin-echo echo-planar images: application to diffusion tensor imaging The B-matrix must be rotated when correcting for subject motion in DTI data The importance of correcting for signal drift in diffusion MRI A modified damped Richardson-Lucy algorithm to reduce isotropic background effects in spherical deconvolution Can spherical deconvolution provide more information than fiber orientations Hindrance modulated orientational anisotropy a true-tract specific index to characterize white matter diffusion The white matter query language: a novel approach for describing human white matter anatomy Rostro-caudal architecture of the frontal lobes in humans The varimax criterion for analytic rotation in factor analysis Spectral Graph Theory (American Mathematical Society Download references We particularly thank Nathalie Tzourio-Mazoyer and her team (GIN) for useful discussion and for providing us with fMRI maps of left and right hands finger tapping This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No We also thank Lauren Sakuma for useful discussion and edits to the manuscript The research leading to these results received funding from the “Agence Nationale de la Recherche” [grant number ANR-13-JSV4-0001-01] Additional financial support comes from the program “Investissements d’avenir” ANR-10-IAIHU-06 and the Fondation pour la Recherche Medicale [grant number DEQ20150331725] and a strategic grant from the University of Padua was a visiting professor at the Institut du Cerveau and Moelle Epiniere (ICM) in Paris where the research was conducted Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière (ICM) performed the analyses and wrote the manuscript Journal peer review information: Nature Communications thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work Publisher’s note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09344-1 Footage from a video uploaded to Twitter appears to show police forces engaging in crowd control exercises in UMB's Bayside parking lot 4:30 p.m.)— Members of UMass Boston’s faculty union raised objections and demanded answers from university leadership this week after parts of the campus were used as staging areas and parking for State Police before a large rally and vigil in Dorchester on Tuesday The criticism prompted a response from UMass Boston's top administrator on Thursday that began: "I write to tell you that the state police presence on campus has ended." The decision to bar state police from using the campus later drew a sharp rebuke from the State Police Association of Massachusetts Photos and video taken by a student showed scores of police officials in formation in the Bayside parking lot on Tuesday in space that is normally filled with UMB student and faculty vehicles during the school year Other photos showed police vehicles parked beside the university’s West Garage and a line of MBTA buses parked near the university’s Campus Center told the Reporter the police presence provoked strong reactions from her colleagues prompting them to email university administration for an explanation and astonished that our campus was being used as a staging ground for police to practice riot control and crackdown on protests and on protesters,” said Schotten and in the context of the specific political moment we found it repulsive.” In a letter sent to the UMass Boston community on Thursday evening interim chancellor Katherine Newman explained what happened and said: "This presence should not be understood by anyone as tantamount to endorsing police misconduct." Newman wrote that "the state police presence on campus has ended," and explained that the university has had a "long-running practice" allowing them to use campus grounds "The campus was tapped for access to parking space in accordance with a long-running practice among the commonwealth’s public safety agencies of providing mutual support," wrote Newman "It has been similarly used in the past for events such as the Boston Marathon and President Barack Obama’s visit to Boston when the city was crowded and in need of overflow parking for police agencies This presence should not be understood by anyone as tantamount to endorsing police misconduct." communications director of UMB’s Faculty Staff Union saying the situation reflects negatively on the campus we draw so heavily from communities of color for our students and our staff,” Melnick said which is to be a part of and a servant of the communities we’re embedded in how can we participate in making it more possible for the police to train and stamp hard on these protests that are about people of color and black people being the object of police violence?” Newman went on to acknowledge that "for people who have historically and even routinely been victims of police misconduct the presence of such an intimidating display of police power is unnerving it can also serve as an implied deterrent to the right to protest that is a foundation on which the nation was built." UMass Boston Police Chief Donald Baynard also addressed the situation in messages to the campus community Thursday evening Baynard wrote that he is implementing a "Police Community Advisory Board" consisting of students and staff that will be "a vehicle to enhance the relationship and communications between our Department and the university community We can use this group to discuss national topics and more importantly we can use it to come together and affect change." "This presence was not in response to any campus conditions and is not part of any long-term plan and staff’s First Amendment right to free speech and the right to peacefully assemble," Baynard said the State Police Association of Massachusetts issued a statement that said UMass Boston had "barred the use of its campus as a parking area for police claiming that it is an intimidating display of police power and can serve as an implied deterrent to the right to protest." The statement included a defense of the State Police noting that: "We have stood with many peaceful gatherings of concerned citizens as they march to advocate for change to not only our justice system but to how our nation as a whole dissimilarly treats its citizens As to the events that were the catalyst for where we are today let us be very clear: The State condemns the abuse of power by police officers Our members joined the State Police to uphold the law and keep people safe these Sergeants and Troopers do so with courage the State Police Association called the UMass decision "shameful" and said it "overtly pander[s] to the false rhetoric and anti-police agenda of the few." they fail to support our defense of the peaceful calls for change of the many These actions place needless hurdles to the protection of life and property and they put the public at large at risk," read the statement from the association "Our members put their lives on the line every day to uphold the First Amendment and to ensure peace We will continue to do so in these very troubling and challenging times." Download this week's Reporter print issue or subscribe today to "Dorchester's Hometown Weekly Newspaper!" Just $50 for 52 Issues in the continental US Download this week's Reporter print issue or subscribe today to "Dorchester's Hometown Weekly Newspaper!" Just $60 for 52 Issues in the continental US Please enable JavaScript to view this page correctly Metrics details the field of functional neuroimaging has moved away from a pure localisationist approach of isolated functional brain regions to a more integrated view of these regions within functional networks the methods used to investigate functional networks rely on local signals in grey matter and are limited in identifying anatomical circuitries supporting the interaction between brain regions Mapping the brain circuits mediating the functional signal between brain regions would propel our understanding of the brain’s functional signatures and dysfunctions We developed a method to unravel the relationship between brain circuits and functions: The Functionnectome The Functionnectome combines the functional signal from fMRI with white matter circuits’ anatomy to unlock and chart the first maps of functional white matter we provide the first functional white matter maps revealing the joint contribution of connected areas to motor The Functionnectome comes with an open-source companion software and opens new avenues into studying functional networks by applying the method to already existing datasets and beyond task fMRI Functional connectivity consists of the coordinated activity of distant brain regions The resulting brain maps reveal functional networks across brain regions that work in synchrony functional connectivity does not offer any information about the causal relationship between these regions effective connectivity uses a directional interaction model between brain areas unmasking the modulatory effect some areas have on others within a functional cascade These methods have demonstrated that the brain is functioning as an interconnected unity rather than a fractionated entity both methods cannot identify the anatomical circuits supporting the interaction between brain regions Knowing the underlying structural substrates would be crucial when the interaction between regions is significant but is supported by an indirect anatomical network This additional knowledge would have far-reaching implications on the functioning of the healthy brain and in the presence of brain damage Although dissections have enhanced our understanding of the physical connections between brain regions their use remains limited to post mortem specimens and requires laborious and inherently destructive procedures While tractography allows us to study the connections between brain regions it does not inform us about their functions a method that can directly project task-related fMRI on the white matter is still needed to shed light on the functional role of specific brain circuits task-based neural activation patterns are usually derived from the statistical analysis of each voxel’s time-course typically using a general linear model (GLM) with the task’s predicted hemodynamic response To evaluate the participation of white matter pathways in these tasks we first produced normative anatomical connectivity maps later referred to as priors 228,453 maps—one per brain voxel—were generated and are part of the Functionnectome software’s priors The Functionnectome uses the probability indicated in these priors to project the signal from a given voxel to the brain We used the second set of “simplified” priors for validation (i.e comparison with resting-state networks) and possible replication of the analyses in more modest configurations such as laptops the independent component analysis applied to resting-state fMRI data of the HCP test–retest dataset produced 17 resting-state networks (out of 20 components) the independent component analysis applied to the 438 “region-wise” priors produced 50 components Top panel (a) correlation matrix between the spatial maps of the 17 RSN with the grey matter maps of the 50 scICs RSN2 and RSN4 are highlighted in white and further described in the bottom panel (b) alongside their corresponding scICs scIC: structural connectivity independent components a Classical blood-oxygen-level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (BOLD fMRI) in the cortex is projected onto the white matter circuits using (b) anatomical priors of the brain circuits and a (c) weighted average equation The priors are derived from (d) 100 high-resolution diffusion-weighted imaging datasets The output of the Functionnectome is subsequently entered (e) in the same statistical design as classical fMRI M: grey matter mask defining which voxels from the input fMRI volume to use in the analysis (which the 3 voxels in a would be part of here); ts: time-series b: classic) and left hand (c: functionnectome d: classic) finger-tapping activation maps These results were elegantly mirrored by the Functionnectome and activation analyses for the left finger tapping task (Fig. 3c–d) b: classic) and left foot (c: functionnectome A left-right flipped pattern of results was observed for the left foot motor task Functionnectome and classical analysis (Fig. 4c, d) a Functionnectome-derived activation map Cer-SPl: Superior Posterior lobe of the Cerebellum PSA: Posterior Segment of the arcuate fasciculus IFOF: Inferior Fronto-Occipital Fasciculus For each analysis reported above, we repeated the analysis in a replication dataset of the same participants (same session, opposite phase of acquisition). Table 1 indicates the reproducibility rate of the results The Functionnectome results were systematically more reproducible (r = 0.82 ± 0.06) than the classical analysis (r = 0.72 ± 0.05) to investigate brain circuits’ functional involvement during task-related cerebral processes based on openly available anatomical connectivity priors Applying the Functionnectome to a high-quality functional neuroimaging dataset revealed—for the first time in healthy human brains—the white matter circuits supporting motor Results also indicated a higher reproducibility of the Functionnectome maps compared to classical task-related activation methods To support this method’s broad uptake and facilitate its application to a wide range of datasets we provide a GUI and a terminal-based companion software as well as simplified priors for faster processing for more modest configurations This toolbox allows the application of the Functionnectome to any previously acquired fMRI dataset The toolbox is flexible and users can integrate their own priors and the current release opens up novel avenues for research on the integrative function of white matter the Functionnectome allows for a statistical assessment of the white matter circuits involved standard fMRI analyses employ spatial filtering before the statistical analysis that is agnostic to the structural connection between the voxels and may mix the signals from functionally unrelated voxels the Functionnectome does not require filtering statistical analysis of the functionnectome should reveal statistically significant white matter circuits with precision and sensitivity the similarity between structural connectivity components and resting-state components reaffirms the premise that structural connections of the brain determine its activations and functioning The Functionnectome maps distinctly isolated these circuits This new result highlights the exploratory potential of the Functionnectome toward understanding the white matter support of complex cognitive systems Our results thus prompt a closer inquiry into the role of the anterior corpus callosum and fornix in semantic processes and offer a non-invasive tool to study its involvement in healthy participants our application of the Functionnectome to classical fMRI allows the confirmation and the exploration of the involvement of circuits for specific tasks for the first time in the healthy human brain As reproducibility of findings is of utmost importance in science64 we verified whether our activation maps were consistent across different acquisitions The replication of our analysis confirmed the high reproducibility of the results highlighted by our method the Functionnectome results were more reproducible than classical task-related activation methods While the two methods are not identical and not perfectly comparable with regards to filtering the observed differences also emerge from the fact that they rely on different assumptions for the assessment of the functioning of the brain While classical fMRI computes differences between regions of the brain independently the Functionnectome associates their circuits to brain function Higher reproducibility for the Functionnectome would then suggest that the functioning of the brain is mediated by interactions via anatomical circuits rather than the isolated contribution of brain regions the Functionnectome can leverage the wealth of MRI modalities to explore the involvement of white matter circuits in different aspects of brain dynamics it could be applied to resting-state functional connectivity or cortical thickness to open up new perspectives onto the study of functional synchronisation Future developments in this area will likely improve the quality of current tractograms These improvements will be implemented in the Functionnectome as priors can easily be replaced in the future to incorporate novel advances in tractography Future developments of the priors might include a separation into interhemispheric (i.e association circuits) to better disentangle brain circuitries Overall, we introduced and demonstrated the potential of the Functionnectome method and its open-source companion software (see Supplementary note 2: Functionnectome User-guide in the supplementary information) opening the field of in vivo study of the function of white matter in healthy humans Despite the unavailability of a ground truth to completely validate the results obtained we were able to identify strong indicators of both the sensitivity (the expected pathways were detected) and specificity (plausible activation of pathways that are yet to be formally associated with a function the FSL fasciculus with working memory) when using the Functionnectome the Functionnectome promotes a paradigm shift in the study of the brain focusing on the interaction of brain regions in the support of a brain function rather than the fractionated contribution of independent regions The workflow was summarised in Fig. 7. Dashed orange lines delimitate the original part of the processing workflow called “Functionnectome” from other classical processing Arrows indicate the direction of the workflow the 3 T task-based fMRI acquisitions (46 participants and the 3T resting-state fMRI acquisitions (45 participants In order to ensure that the results obtained here would be generalisable to other datasets the 100 participants of the DWI dataset were randomly chosen as a normative population that was independent from the participants of the test–retest dataset used in the fMRI analyses HCP data was acquired by the WU-Minn Consortium with IRB approval and informed consent from all participants and the WU-Minn HCP Consortium Open Access Data Use Terms were respected in the present study which applies movement and distortion corrections and performs a registration to the MNI152 space the resting-state acquisitions were further preprocessed with despiking This step produced a whole-brain streamline tractography in the standard MNI152 space These probability maps serve as the anatomical priors for brain circuits Similarity between both sets of maps was subsequently assessed by means of Pearson correlation The Functionnectome method projects the BOLD signal obtained for each grey matter voxel onto the related white matter voxels The whole principle of the method is akin to a weighted average of the BOLD signal from the voxels sharing a structural link (given by the anatomical priors) to this voxel the mathematical formulation of the concept can be summed up by the following equation: For a given voxel v (spatial coordinates) at a given time-point t the value of that voxel in a functionnectome is With M the set of voxels selected by the input mask; Pm the probability map derived from the voxel m; and F the original fMRI 4D volume if we focus on a single functionnectome voxel v the value of this voxel is equal to the sum of the BOLD signal from every voxel in the brain weighted by the probability of their connection to v (which is 0 if they are not part of the involved circuit) and divided by the sum of all those probabilities This last step of division ensures that all voxels have the same range of values as the classical grey-matter BOLD signal the signal of the resulting functionnectome would not be homogeneous over the brain voxels in dense white matter circuits showing signals of higher amplitude than the rest of the brain the algorithm used to apply this method follow these few steps: the Functionnectome was provided with a mask selecting the voxels whose functional signal will be projected onto the white matter Here we used the masks available from the HCP that excluded noisy voxels These masks exclude voxels with a high coefficient of variation higher than 0.5 standard deviations compared to neighbouring voxels (saved by the HCP pipeline in the file “RibbonVolumeToSurfaceMapping/goodvoxels.nii.gz”) the time-series was extracted for each voxel and multiplied with its associated probability map In doing so the functional signal is projected on the white matter and weighted by the probability of the presence of a streamline All 4D volumes are subsequently fused together by voxel-wise addition and divided by the sum of all probability maps to produce a weighted average of the voxel-wise 4D volumes This final step ensures that all voxels have a comparable range of values (equivalent to the range of values of the BOLD signal) The final output of the algorithm is a functionnectome 4D volume the motor tasks consisted of finger tapping (left or right hand) and toes clenching (left or right foot); the working memory task was a 2-back task; and the language task corresponded to the comparison of comprehension of high and low semantic content (stories The activation analysis was applied to both the original functional dataset and the functionnectome 4D volumes Processing was identical except for the application of a traditional spatial smoothing (FWHM = 4 mm) on the functional dataset (i.e as a usual step to improve the signal/noise ratio and misalignment) no spatial smoothing is required for the functionnectomes 4D volumes Usual smoothing aims at improving the signal/noise ratio (SNR) using a weighted average of the local signal assuming that neighbouring voxels share some signal of interest The functionnectome method combines the signal from distant yet structurally linked voxels which has an analogous effect of improving the SNR Note that the assumption of identically independently distributed residuals in the linear modelling applied to the functionnectome volumes should hold true as the signal of the voxels results from a simple linear combination of the signals (the classic BOLD time-series) for which the assumption was already considered valid To test the reproducibility of our results we used the two acquisitions realised for each subject: one with a left-right encoding phase (main analysis) the other with a right-left encoding phase (reproducibility analysis) As the reproducibility analysis used the data from the same original subjects the sample size was the same as the one of the main analysis We compared the z-maps resulting from the full processing of these two acquisitions using Pearson’s correlation coefficient (excluding voxels outside the brain) Functional z maps and functionnectome maps were displayed on a standard template in MRIcron (https://www.nitrc.org/projects/mricron) Labelling for cortical regions and white matter pathways were added manually by expert anatomists (SJF and MTS) The visualisation of 3D structures in 2D is limited and may appear ambiguous at times but the full trajectories of pathways were considered before labelling especially in regions of overlap between white matter structures The 3D renderings were generated using the associated z-map All functionnectome maps (slices and 3D renderings) were masked to remove the grey-matter parts of the volume in order to improve readability of the figures The mask used here was generated using the segmentation provided in the HCP dataset and was composed of the voxels defined as white matter or brain stem in at least 10% of the subjects of the test–retest dataset This very permissive 10% threshold was chosen to prevent the underestimation of the extent of the functionnectome maps Note that the grey-matter parts of the maps are also of interest and were only removed here to avoid confusion between the two methods All the raw anatomical and functional data are available on the HCP website The Functionnectomes and the associated maps are available on demand to the authors The python compatible algorithm (version 3.6 or higher) for the Functionnectome analysis is freely available and comes with an optional GUI code Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article https://www.humanconnectome.org The Functionnectome and the associated maps are available on demand to the authors. The python compatible algorithm (version 3.6 or higher) for the Functionnectome analysis is freely available and comes with an optional GUI code (https://github.com/NotaCS/Functionnectome and http://www.bcblab.com) Twenty years of functional MRI: the science and the stories Brain magnetic resonance imaging with contrast dependent on blood oxygenation Functional connectivity in the motor cortex of resting human brain using echo-planar MRI The human brain is intrinsically organized into dynamic Functional connectivity: the principal-component analysis of large (PET) data sets Graph analysis of the human connectome: promise Direct evidence for a parietal-frontal pathway subserving spatial awareness in humans Cerebral white matter lesions and subjective cognitive dysfunction: The Rotterdam scan study Atlas Cerebri Humani: Der Innere Bau Des Gehirns Diffusion MRI fiber tractography of the brain Spin diffusion measurements: spin echoes in the presence of a time‐dependent field gradient Sporns, O. 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D. & Pandya, D. N. Fiber Pathways of the Brain. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195104233.001.0001 (2006) Motor mechanisms of the CNS: cerebrocerebellar interrelations The primate cortico-cerebellar system: anatomy and function Inhibitory and excitatory interhemispheric transfers between motor cortical areas in normal humans and patients with abnormalities of the corpus callosum Monkey to human comparative anatomy of the frontal lobe association tracts Cortico–cerebellar networks for visual attention and working memory Is the rostro-caudal axis of the frontal lobe hierarchical Specific cerebral networks for maintenance and response organization within working memory as evidenced by the ‘Double Delay/Double Response’ paradigm Prosody meets syntax: the role of the corpus callosum 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility UK biobank: an open access resource for identifying the causes of a wide range of complex diseases of middle and old age The autism brain imaging data exchange: towards a large-scale evaluation of the intrinsic brain architecture in autism Anatomical accuracy of brain connections derived from diffusion MRI tractography is inherently limited Pushing spatial and temporal resolution for functional and diffusion MRI in the Human Connectome Project The minimal preprocessing pipelines for the Human Connectome Project Function in the human connectome: task-fMRI and individual differences in behavior Temporal autocorrelation in univariate linear modeling of FMRI data Multilevel linear modelling for FMRI group analysis using Bayesian inference Download references We thank the University of Bordeaux and CNRS for the infrastructural support This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No 818521) and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme (Grant agreement No Data were provided by the Human Connectome Project WU-Minn Consortium (Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil; 1U54MH091657) funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University Laurent Petit & Michel Thiebaut de Schotten S.J.F wrote the manuscript and reviewed the neuroimaging data implemented part of the methods and revised the manuscript reviewed the neuroimaging data and revised the manuscript Peer review information Communications Biology thanks Bharat Biswal and the other Primary Handling Editors: Jeanette Mumford and Karli Montague-Cardoso Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02530-2 Climate change poses risks to the financial system. Yet our understanding of these risks is still limited. As we explain in a recent paper central banks and financial regulators could contribute to the development of methodologies and modelling tools for assessing climate-related financial risks If it becomes clear that these risks are substantial central banks should consider taking them into account in their operations Both central banks and financial regulators might also consider supporting a low-carbon transition in a more active way so as to contribute to the reduction of these risks What are the climate-related financial risks Climate change is likely to increase the severity and frequency of extreme events such as floods, heat waves and hurricanes. These events, combined with the incremental changes in climate, can lead to property damages, lower productivity and severe economic disruptions that could result in financial losses Such losses could destabilise both the insurance sector and the banking system But the potential impact of climate change on financial stability moves beyond the physical risks The transition to a low-carbon economy itself might potentially cause severe disruptions and losses for the companies with business models that rely directly or indirectly on fossil fuels And this could harm not only the banks that have provided loans to these companies but also the financial investors that have bought stocks and bonds issued by them A tightening of energy efficiency standards could also affect broader financial exposures Both the physical and the transition risks are potentially significant for the financial sector And the financial losses that they might cause could be substantially exacerbated because of the highly interconnected global financial system Assessing climate risks: what are the challenges But the analysis of these risks is still at a preliminary level and the challenges for researchers are significant the data that are necessary to analyse the exposure of the financial system to climate risks are not always available or sufficiently detailed defining which assets are exposed to climate risks is not a trivial task and can lead to different conclusions about the importance and the implications of climate risks an evaluation of climate-related financial risks requires the modelling of dynamic interactions between the macroeconomy expectation of tighter future climate policies could lead to sharp shifts in investment and asset prices across sectors potentially triggering sharp increases in the default rate and falls in asset values in high carbon sectors Conventional macroeconomic models cannot easily capture these issues and new approaches to macroeconomic modelling might be needed to assess such risks will need to do further work to make such disclosures comprehensive societal and governance (ESG) criteria for their own investments could be reflected in the collateral frameworks and the asset purchase programmes of central banks and to mobilise mainstream finance to support the transition toward a sustainable economy The NGFS has since expanded to include seventeen members and five observers It has also been proposed that central banks and financial regulators in high-income countries could consider supporting green finance directly by using their own tools. For example, the EU High-Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance has recently suggested that green differentiated capital requirements could be considered This would mean that banks could be allowed to fund ‘green’ loans to projects which are likely to reduce long-term environmental risks with less capital the case for increasing capital requirements to ‘brown’ sectors would still need careful evaluation Important considerations include whether risks created by such lending can be meaningfully quantified and whether such a policy can be designed to avoid penalising carbon-intensive borrowers that are trying to shift towards more sustainable business models Climate change as a key financial challenge for the 21st century climate change is likely to transform our economies in a fundamental way Elected governments are primarily responsible for managing the transition to a low-carbon economy Yet central banks and financial regulators cannot ignore the potentially serious risks that climate change poses to the financial system Understanding and addressing these risks is a major task and more research in this area is necessary to inform policy development in all areas Emanuele Campiglio is assistant professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) and a visiting fellow at LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. He is also currently leading the ‘Green Macro’ work package of the Mistra Financial Systems programme His most recent work focuses on macroeconomic modelling and sustainable finance Pierre Monnin is a fellow with the Council on Economic Policies where he is focusing on the environmental and social effects of monetary policy Prior to that was with the Swiss National Bank (SNB) in various roles for a total of ten years – counselling SNB’s board members on issues concerning financial markets and monetary policy as well as developing measures of financial stability and integrating them into the bank’s monetary policy framework He also worked at Man Investments as a quantitative analyst developing asset allocation strategies for alternative investments Pierre holds a PhD in economics from the University of Zurich as well as a MSc in statistics and a BA in economics from the University of Neuchatel Zed books) which featured in the Financial Times’s economics editor Martin Wolf’s top summer reads of 2017 Guido Schotten is an economic policy advisor for the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) who specialises in climate change energy policies and global imbalances/current accounts He is the author of DNB’s occasional study “Time for Transition” and DNB’s position paper “Bottlenecks in Green Finance” His work mostly focuses on the effects of carbon pricing on competitiveness the relationship between climate policies and economic growth stranded assets and the role of the financial sector in the energy transition He has a master’s in economics and a master’s in history where he has also worked as a lecturer in international economic relations Misa Tanaka is head of research at the Bank of England She joined the Bank in 2002 after completing a D.Phil in Economics at Nuffield College She has held a number of positions across monetary analysis Misa’s current research interests include macroprudential policy microprudential policy and the impact of climate change on the financial system Emanuele Campiglio is assistant professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) and a visiting fellow at LSE's Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. Yannis Dafermos is a a senior lecturer in economics at the University of the West of England His research focuses on financial macroeconomics He has co-developed a novel ecological macroeconomic model that analyses the interactions between the ecosystem Pierre Monnin is a fellow with the Council on Economic Policies Prior to that was with the Swiss National Bank (SNB) in various roles for a total of ten years – counselling SNB’s board members on issues concerning financial markets and monetary policy as well as developing measures of financial stability and integrating them into the bank’s monetary policy framework Josh Ryan-Collins is head of research at UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) working on the the economics of innovation economic rent in modern economies and measuring public value he was senior economist at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) There he led a research program focused on money banking and the macroeconomics of land and housing Josh has written two co-authored books: 'Where Does Money Come From?' (2011 a best-selling guide to the UK monetary system which is used as a textbook to teach economics in the UK and U.S.; and ‘Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing’ (2017 Misa's current research interests include macroprudential policy Guido Schotten is an economic policy advisor for the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) who specialises in climate change He is the author of DNB's occasional study "Time for Transition" and DNB's position paper "Bottlenecks in Green Finance" He has a master's in economics and a master's in history This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed In new research published in Nature scientists have produced the first comprehensive atlas of the tiny energy producers in the human brain By slicing a donated brain into more than seven hundred small cubes and measuring both the number of mitochondria and their energy output in each piece they discovered that mitochondria vary widely across brain regions They found that the parts of the brain that evolved most recently in our lineage not only contain more mitochondria but also house mitochondria tuned to work more efficiently lays the groundwork for linking energy use in the brain to mood and the development of neurological and psychiatric disorders Mitochondria are microscopic structures inside nearly every cell that transform nutrients into the energy that powers all cellular activity little was known about how many mitochondria the brain contains whether they are spread evenly through its many regions the research team set out to chart the distribution and functional diversity of brain mitochondria at a resolution comparable to that of a standard magnetic resonance scan “There’s an emerging notion that energy is really important to health,” explained Martin Picard, an associate professor of behavioral medicine and director of the Mitochondrial Psychobiology Group at Columbia University “But we don’t have a way to look at bioenergetics across the entire human brain.” Picard led the study along with Michel Thiebaut de Schotten research director at the University of Bordeaux “My interest in this research topic was sparked by a longstanding desire to bridge the gap between neuroimaging and histological biology,” Thiebaut de Schotten told PsyPost who is a leading expert in mitochondrial research I was genuinely excited by the possibility of integrating our respective areas of expertise Collaborating with him offered a unique opportunity to explore how mitochondrial biology could be linked with advanced MRI techniques.” the team obtained a frozen coronal slice of the right hemisphere from a neurotypical fifty-four-year-old man with no history of neurological or psychiatric conditions they used a computer-controlled milling device to engrave a three-millimeter grid into the tissue and then picked out each cube by hand each roughly the size of a large grain of sand they measured two markers of mitochondrial quantity—the activity of a key enzyme and the amount of mitochondrial DNA—and three markers of energy-transformation capacity by testing the activity of three enzymes in the respiratory chain each measure was repeated in duplicate and corrected for any batch differences the researchers performed single-nucleus gene sequencing on samples drawn from four distinct brain regions: the cortex and the corpus callosum (the brain’s major communication pathway) This approach yielded data from more than 32,000 individual nuclei allowing the team to relate mitochondrial measures to specific cell types they combined these laboratory data with MRI scans from nearly 2,000 healthy adults they linked common imaging signals to the mitochondrial features they had measured By training the model on 80 percent of their tissue samples and testing it on the remaining 20 percent they were able to predict mitochondrial density and energy output at the resolution of one cubic millimeter across the entire brain The results revealed striking regional and cellular patterns which contains most of the brain’s cell bodies and connections showed both higher mitochondrial density and greater energy-production capacity than white matter which is made up of long projections that carry signals evolutionarily newer regions—such as parts of the frontal and temporal lobes involved in complex thought and language—harbored more mitochondria that were tuned for efficient energy production a deeply buried structure involved in movement control which displayed exceptionally high mitochondrial markers perhaps reflecting its dense network of projections and synapses “One of the most surprising and exciting findings was the link between mitochondria and brain evolution,” Thiebaut de Schotten explained “We didn’t expect to see such a clear relationship and it opens up fascinating new questions about how mitochondrial function may have shaped the development of the human brain over time and how it will interact with future evolution.” Gene sequencing largely supported these biochemical findings When the team examined expression levels of genes involved in mitochondrial energy production they found higher expression in regions with greater enzyme activity and others—showed subtle differences in mitochondrial gene activity the strongest driver of variation was the brain region itself a neuron in one part of the brain had a gene-activity profile more similar to its neighbors than to neurons in far-flung regions “One of the key takeaways from our study is that we now have a better understanding of how mitochondria—the energy processors of our cells—are distributed across the human brain on average,” Thiebaut de Schotten said “This is important because mitochondria play a vital role in brain function and health Our next goal is to map these mitochondrial patterns in individual brains which could eventually help us understand how they relate to brain health To test how well their MRI-based model would generalize the researchers applied it to a slice from the donor’s occipital lobe The predicted patterns of mitochondrial density and energy capacity closely matched the laboratory measurements giving confidence that routine brain scans can serve as a window into cellular energy factories When the model was extended to every cubic millimeter of the standard brain reference it produced three-dimensional maps that align with known imaging measures of brain evolution and variability “This work helps us understand the energetic basis of brain function and brain health,” Picard told PsyPost MitoBrainMap v1.0 helps us understand how energy flows to make this possible.” Because the atlas is based on a single human brain it remains to be seen how mitochondrial patterns vary among individuals of different ages The tissue-preparation method for gene sequencing involved aggressive mechanical disruption which may have biased which cell types survived the process Future research will need to include samples from multiple donors and refine sequencing protocols to capture a broader array of cell types “A major limitation of our study is that our model and conclusions are based on data from a single brain,” Thiebaut de Schotten noted “While this provides valuable initial insights studying more brains to understand how mitochondrial patterns vary across individuals is essential as it will allow us to explore individual differences and strengthen the broader applicability of our findings.” “The long-term goal is to noninvasively quantify mitochondrial biology using only MRI for both research and health monitoring,” Picard said “Our work is showcased at http://www.humanmitobrainmap.bcblab.com,” Thiebaut de Schotten added Your brain’s memory center plays a surprising role in appetite. A study in mice reveals that neurons storing sugar and fat memories influence eating behavior and weight gain, opening new paths for treating overeating. A surprising discovery in spider brains has led scientists to uncover a hidden waste removal system in the human brain. Its breakdown may explain the progressive neuron loss seen in Alzheimer’s disease, offering a new target for early intervention. As obesity rates climb worldwide, a new study highlights the brain’s own estrogen as a key player in appetite control. Researchers show that neuroestrogen increases the activity of hunger-suppressing pathways in mice, suggesting a novel hormonal target for future interventions in weight-related health problems. Researchers tested whether brain structure or connectivity could forecast how children with anxiety would respond to therapy—but found little predictive power. Despite using advanced imaging and machine learning, the models failed to identify meaningful patterns linked to treatment outcomes. Neuroscience continues to reveal how our brains respond to the world around us in unexpected and powerful ways. A new study suggests that the way the brain responds to mistakes could help explain how depression is passed from mothers to daughters. Researchers found that certain neural signals related to error processing were altered in mothers with depression and were linked to similar patterns in their daughters. A new study reveals that chronic high blood sugar alters how the brain processes spatial and reward-related information. Diabetic rats showed weaker reward coding in the anterior cingulate cortex, offering insight into why type 2 diabetes is linked to cognitive and motivational impairments. Please enter your username or email address to reset your password. This month’s regular roundup of the best new tabletop titles features Star Wars Destiny Welcome to our monthly roundup of the best new board games we’ll be fighting desperate battles in the Star Wars universe confronting deadly diseases in 19th-century Spain battling for first place in a prestigious cycling race and leading warring clans in medieval Scotland which hands players control of bands of characters from the original films before throwing them into a deadly battle of wits using cards and dice each player assembles their squad of characters as well as a deck of cards representing the allies equipment and tactical ploys that will guide them towards victory Different cards interact with one another in different ways testing and refining your deck is a big part of the game’s appeal but what sets Destiny apart is the pace at which battles play out Where other card games can feel like an exercise in grand strategy it feels more like one of the heart-pounding action sequences from the Star Wars movies with players alternating taking one action at a time gives the feeling of a furious back-and-forth struggle and a handful of dice determine how well your characters perform at any given moment forcing both players to react to a rapid-fire succession of unpredictable events While the goodies-vs-baddies starter sets give you enough cards and dice to try the game out you’ll need to buy add-on packs if you want to build your own personalised decks But it means that you can expect regular releases of new cards adding more characters and tactical options and for Star Wars fans this is an adrenaline-fuelled and faithful take on the lasers-and-lightsabers epic Released in 2008, the best-selling cooperative game Pandemic casts players as a team of medics working to eradicate diseases from cities around the globe and over the years it has spawned a series of spinoffs Pandemic Iberia is the latest addition to the lineup set in 1848 with the nascent forces of medical science locked in a battle with cholera yellow fever and typhus across Spain and Portugal a board that looks like an old vellum map and some striking Moorish-inspired graphics and at its heart it plays similarly to the original Pandemic you’ll have to travel by ship and build railway connections between cities to make your way across the map And while the limitations of 19th-century medicine mean you don’t have the power to eradicate diseases outright you’ll attempt to slow their spread by purifying water supplies in different areas of the board and alternate game modes that see panicked citizens flooding towards hospitals or individual diseases behaving in different ways forcing you to adapt your tactics to defeat them and it’s hard to find anything about Pandemic Iberia to criticise although at almost £50 it’s quite an investment If you’re not already a fan of the Pandemic series then the original game is a better place to start this is a brilliant new spin on a modern classic Full disclosure: This game’s co-designer Matt Leacock once paid for the use of some of my photography Recently republished with updated artwork, 1999 card game Schotten Totten sees rival Scottish clans compete to snatch land from one another by moving the boundary stones between their two villages The game begins with nine stones up for grabs and players take turns laying cards against them to establish a superior claim and seize them for their side Each card comes with a number and a colour and certain combinations are more powerful than others you’ll attempt to build stronger three-card sets than your opponent against each stone and the whole process feels a bit like playing nine simultaneous rounds of poker but the game’s real challenge comes from the fact that you and your opponent will both be drawing new cards from a shared deck There’s no way of knowing what you’re going to draw or what your opponent might already have in their hand and it means that while Schotten Totten is an engaging quick fix of head-to-head brainy competition that squeezes a lot of thoughtful gameplay out of a simple set of rules Named after the red flag used to mark the final kilometre of a cycling race, Flamme Rouge puts players in control of a team of riders in a competition that’s similar to but legally distinct from the Tour de France The game comes with a stack of interlocking road sections that can be assembled to form different tracks and you’ll control cyclists represented by toy-like plastic miniatures but it also attempts to capture the essence of a real-world road race You’ll take charge of two cyclists: a rouleur who specialises in aggressive bursts of speed Each rider comes with a corresponding deck of cards and on every round you’ll draw four at random from each deck choosing one to play and returning the rest to the bottom of the pile to be re-drawn later in the game Cards move your riders a varying number of spaces along the track but you won’t always want to play the fastest cards available Use a slower card on a downhill section of the track and you’ll gain a speed boost Play a fast card on an uphill stretch and you’ll suffer a penalty to your movement If your rider finds themselves at the head of the pack they’ll be forced to add low-speed cards to their deck representing physical strain It means that for much of the race you’ll want to actively avoid taking the lead hugging your opponent’s rear wheel and letting them tire themselves out before the decisive dash to the finish line It’s a nice concept, but after a few rounds it starts to feel a little flat. You’re repeating the same process again and again, and while perfecting your tactics and timing is a challenge, it feels like the game would benefit from a little more variety. Given the choice, I’d rather play the excellent motor racing game Automobiles which uses some similar ideas but injects quite a bit more depth Schotten Totten 2 is the brand new hand management and set collection card game featuring artwork from Jean-Baptiste Reynaud this two player only game sees one player defending against the other with asymmetrical abilities and ways to win will you want to keep attacking or defending Schotten Totten 2 sees one player attempting to breach the walls of the other player Each of these wall tiles will have cards played to them to either the attackers or defenders side with each holding between 2 – 4 cards – the exact number being denoted on the specific wall tile The cards that make up the formations come in 5 colour sets and have numbers ranging from 0 to 11 Starting with 6 cards each the attacking player makes the first move playing a card from their hand to their side of any of the seven wall tiles Attempting to build up Poker like formations in front of the wall tiles the attacker is aiming to make an unbeatable formation Formations can take a number of forms such as a run of numbers The strongest formation type is a colour run a run where all the cards are identical colour with the weakest being a simple sum formation Most of the 7 wall tiles can be won with any formation type while others and damaged wall tiles can only be won with specific formations When all formations are allowed then the player with the better formation (i.e Until the defender has put all of their cards down though the attacker can only win by proving they cannot be beaten as an example the attacker may have two 0s and a 1 played Unless the remaining zeros are all played elsewhere or discarded the attacked cannot prove that the defender won’t be able to mount a stronger formation as a defence For the first few turns play will go back and forth with the attacker playing a card and drawing a card from the deck to replace it Before long the wall tiles will start to build up with cards and what your opponent is trying to do will become clearer with what formations they are building up where becoming apparent The attacker can retreat at the start of their turn This may sound unhelpful but the defender cannot retreat whenever a defender plays a card somewhere it is locked in for good If the defender builds a formation of three 4s to beat the attackers three 2s the attacker can simply remove them and start building a better formation The defender however can spend one of their three oil cauldron tokens to discard the closest attacker card on any of the wall tiles At the end of each of their turns if the attacker can prove any of their formations is unbeatable they damage the wall section This sees the wall tile flipped over to the damaged side and all cards from both sides of that wall tile discarded The aim of the game of the attacker is to either wear down the defences of the defender enough by damaging an already damaged wall section The defender merely needs to stop this from happening though the attacker always gets the final turn of the game to have a last ditch attempt Many games aim to go down to the wire but Schotten Totten 2 is one of those games that actively manages it game after game Causing this consistency is the way that the attacker must be able to prove that the defender cannot beat them At the offset of the game a player can play a phenomenal formation to a wall section and be unable to yet prove they are unstoppable playing two 11s and one 10 to the sum formation tile can still be beaten by three 11s Until part way through the game when another 11 is played it cannot be proved giving the defender ample time to use one of their cauldrons Towards the end of the game more and more information becomes available allowing the attacker to prove more and tweak attacks accordingly There is the possibility for Schotten Totten 2 to have a very low entry point into the hobby or come with a bit of a learning curve For those whom have played Poker before then the formations from runs to same strength are like straights and flushes the step to colour runs isn’t exactly a huge leap which makes the game extremely quick to pick up and instantly players can compete Coming into the game without that prior knowledge could see players struggle to see how the game will play out in that initial play Getting past those awkward first few turns and players will be able to start to see how the sets of cards in front of the wall pieces build up and things then start to click Pitting a player with experience against someone without therefore sees an unbalanced matchup Though within a game or two that balance can be obtained It would feel like an uphill battle for the player with less experience and this could put them off the game if not coached through it a bit Despite the game going down to the wire there are little moments to remember sprinkled throughout the experience There is a rule which comes into play when a 0 or an 11 is played as a 0 and an 11 of the same colour will cancel each other out These moments feel like you’ve pulled off a little victory over your opponent though it’s part of an interesting choice as you know that 0 or 11 can’t be cancelled if played elsewhere It’s never the case that all of the action is on one turn As the attacker you will be going after different sections of the wall or at least the same section twice there will be that initial mini win of damaging a wall tile before being able to win stopping a formation in its tracks with an oil cauldron can also be rather satisfying For a small box game Schotten Totten 2 still has a fair bit of table presence and a bit of flair that makes it stand out The deck of cards is of good card stock and each number in the deck has its own unique and entertaining artwork with the colours of tartan tweaked based on the colour of the suit The wall tiles down the middle of the table give the game some size making it look more impressive on the table – though this does mean the game requires at least a medium sized flat surface to play on The cauldrons that the defender gets to use could easily be small cardboard chits the cauldrons are laser cut chunky wooden components that add that bit of flair to the experience They also offer the defender something to play with in their hands while waiting for the attacker to play their next card Once past the barrier of entry (learning the way the formations work) the enjoyment in Schotten Totten 2 starts to flow There is certainly a disparity between new and experienced players that has caused a spot of negative reaction to the game when on the same level it is incredible how close it can be to pulling off a defence or just breaking through the wall on the final turn of the game Schotten Totten 2 provides an enjoyable twist on typical Poker logic with the addition of asymmetrical choices that make the two roles feel unique It might not be for everyone but for those that it clicks with there is plenty of entertainment to be had (Editor’s Note: Schotten Totten 2 was provided to us by Coiledspring Games for the review. The game is currently available from local board game stores! Find your local store here.) Flight Distance Calculator is a great app to calculate distances and duration of your flights Flight Distance Calculator is a great app to calculate distances and duration of your flights.You can create an unlimited number of pins on the map The app calculates their distances and how long it will take to fly.You will always see the shortest flight route on the map.More Functions:- Locate yourself and create a pin at your current location with only one click- Move pins on the map The route adapts automatically.- Search for places cities and more- Save and load your route- Choose your preferred map type (standard hybrid)- Choose your preferred distance unit (meter