Four young scientists competed in the second semi-final of the fifth season of HSE University Science Battles, which was held at HSE Cultural Centre. What tasks lead students to cheat on exams, how babies learn to talk, whether artificial intelligence is subject to copyright, how to deal with false modesty — each researcher presented their work while the audience and the jury chose a winner to compete for the main prize of the season — an academic travel grant.

As part of an international project conducted with the participation of Roscosmos and the European Space Agency, a team of researchers used differential tractography to analyse dMRI scans ofcosmonauts’ brains and found significant changes in brain connectivity, with some of the changes persisting after seven months back on Earth. The paper is published in Frontiers in Neural Circuits.

Applications from HSE departments for the ‘Mirror Laboratories’ open project competition are open until May 20. One of the ‘mirror laboratories’ successfully operating today was created as a result of a similar competition in 2020 by economists from HSE University and Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) to study institutes and preferences in economic behaviour. Alexis Belianin, Head of the HSE International Laboratory for Experimental and Behavioural Economics, talked about how peers from Moscow and Vladivostok collaborate.