Since April 2019, the University of Göttingen has been coordinating a European research team preparing the European part of the World Humanities Report (WHR) for UNESCO. From this summer, the Volkswagen Foundation has supported the project with around 244,000 euros, for one year in the first instance. The WHR provides insights into current developments in the humanities and forms the basis for future UNESCO recommendations. "This report…

Modern livestock farming increases the pressure to use arable land for fodder production. The result: modern dairy farms no longer send their cows out to pasture. The "Green Grass" project, led by the University of Göttingen, brings researchers, industry and stakeholders together in an interdisciplinary network stretching across Germany. They are investigating how grazing livestock can be brought back into the landscape and finding new ways of…

Imagine that you are watching a crowded hang-gliding competition, keeping track of a red and orange glider’s skillful movements. Our brain uses separate circuits to achieve such outstanding tracking ability, one specialized to process color information and the other specialized for processing directions of motion. This allows for optimal perceptual performance, but how do we perceptually combine the color and direction information into our…

Researchers at the University of Göttingen have developed a new method that takes advantage of the unusual properties of graphene to electromagnetically interact with fluorescing (light-emitting) molecules. This method allows scientists to optically measure extremely small distances, in the order of 1 ångström (one ten-billionth of a meter) with high accuracy and reproducibility for the first time. This enabled researchers to optically measure…

Angus, or Highland Cattle: not all cows are the same when it comes to a preference for different herbaceous, grass and shrub species. Research carried out the Universities of Heidelberg and Göttingen in collaboration with the Swiss institute of Agroscope shows that cattle breed influences the botanical composition of pasture.  The results were recently published in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment. It is well known that by…

People in England were using balance weights and scales to measure the value of materials as early as the late second and early first millennia BC. This is what Professor Lorenz Rahmstorf, scientist at the University of Göttingen and project manager of the ERC "Weight and Value" project, has discovered. He compared Middle and Late Bronze Age gold objects from the British Isles and Northern France and found that they were based on the same unit of…

The function of the visual photopigment rhodopsin and its action in the retina to facilitate vision is well understood. However, there remain questions about other biological functions of this family of proteins (opsins) and this has ramifications for our understanding of several evolutionary pathways. Now, an international research team led by the University of Göttingen has shown there are other functions of opsin outside vision and this…

An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has deciphered the defence mechanism of filamentous fungi. Moulds are a preferred food source for small animals. As fungi cannot escape predation by running away, they produce defence metabolites, thereby rendering themselves toxic or unpalatable. After decades-long unsuccessful investigation, these defence compounds have now been identified. The results were published in Nature…

The flight through our atmosphere can be quite turbulent for an insect: In addition to long periods of calm flight, extreme accelerations can occur from time to time, especially when the insect encounters small-scale turbulence in the form of vortices. Such vortices also play a major role in the formation of rain, for example, as they significantly influence the collision of very small droplets in clouds, from which falling raindrops eventually…