The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Prof. Dr. Laurent Gizon of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) and the Faculty of Physics at the University of Göttingen one of its prestigious ERC Advanced Grants. Over the next five years, the funding of 2.5 million euros will support the project INSIDE ("Mapping Magnetic Fields in the Solar Interior"), which seeks to answer one of the most important unresolved questions in…

Birgit Abels, Professor of Cultural Musicology at the University of Göttingen, has been awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC has funded her project “Vibrant Environmentality: Sonic Agentivity in the Anthropocene” (VibE) with around 2.6 million euros over a period of five years. This award will allow Abels and her team to investigate how people co-create their world through interaction with sound and how making…

For his doctoral thesis, Alexander Rotsch investigated a molecular biological “criminal case”: the theft of mRNA caps by influenza viruses. Caps mark mRNAs as cell-derived molecules and thus as harmless. If a cap is missing, the immune system recognizes the mRNA as foreign and potentially harmful – and triggers an antiviral response that degrades the RNA. The caps are therefore essential for the protection of mRNA molecules. To camouflage itself…

Humans and other primates possess a highly developed and hierarchically organized visual processing system in the brain. The conscious processing of visual information begins in the primary visual cortex. Here, features such as edges, lines, motion, and color are detected and ultimately relayed to higher-level areas such as the lateral prefrontal cortex. This brain region plays a key role in working memory, which is also essential for processing…

Inside cells, certain functions are fulfilled by locally adjusting the molecular composition. This condensation of material results in the formation of dense droplets which can re-arrange dynamically. For this, particularly the interaction between such dense regions determines the shaping of condensates. Scientists from the department of Living Matter Physics at the MPI-DS recently developed a model that can describe such phase separation…

At more than one million degrees, the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona, is incredibly hot. However, not everywhere. Time and again, huge structures of significantly cooler solar plasma - about 10,000 degrees - appear within the corona. These structures are known as prominences. They span up to several thousand kilometers and often resemble flickering flames that can take on a wide variety of shapes. Despite their delicate appearance, they are massive…

Professor Holger Militz at the University of Göttingen has been awarded the 2026 Marcus Wallenberg Prize. This honour, from the Marcus Wallenberg Foundation for International Scientific Collaboration, recognises Militz for his ground-breaking contributions to the research and industrial application of wood modification technologies. Considered the world’s most prestigious research award in this area, it recognizes scientific achievements which…

The WHO declared the global health emergency associated with the COVID-19 pandemic to be over in 2023, as most individuals had developed immune protection against the virus through vaccination and/or infection. However, even after 2023, the virus has continued to generate new variants that evade antibody responses and spread globally. This pattern may now be changing in a sustained way. Infection researchers at the German Primate Center – Leibniz…

Cyanobacteria are among the most significant life forms in the history of our planet. As one of the first organisms to produce oxygen through photosynthesis, they shaped the early Earth and created the atmosphere in which complex life could develop. A new study shows that filamentous cyanobacteria also developed a navigation mechanism to control their movement when gliding across surfaces. The bacterial filaments typically rotate clockwise…

An international research team led by Henrik Kaessmann from Heidelberg University and Stein Aerts from Leuven University mapped the activity of genetic control elements in individual cells of the developing cerebellum of four primate species, mice, and marsupials. Based on this, advanced AI models were developed and validated to predict the activity of these control elements based solely on their DNA sequence. Genetic control elements determine…