Violent storms rage in the middle atmosphere above Jupiter's poles: With wind speeds of up to 1450 kilometers per hour, they exceed even the strongest terrestrial tornadoes by a factor of three. This is the result of observations performed by an international team of scientists, including three researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. The winds could indicate giant vortices over Jupiter's poles. To…

A spring without birdsong, a summer without humming insects – this ecological horror scenario could become reality if species loss continues at its current pace. In Germany, the bird population has collapsed by 65 percent since 1965, that of insects by 80 percent since 1980. According to the United Nations Diversity Report 2019, around one million species are at the verge of extinction worldwide. “We want to help counteract this dramatic…

The Universe is criss-crossed by a cosmic web consisting of large filamentary gas structures in which galaxies should form. The existence of this network confirms the most important predictions about how the structure of the Universe changes. An international research team, led by the University of Lyon, have now for the first time produced images of the network of filaments and corresponding maps of the young Universe. The University of…

“A good 20 years ago, we fundamentally broke the diffraction resolution limit of fluorescence microscopy with STED. Until then, that was considered impossible,” says Hell. “Back then we dreamed: With STED we want to become so good that one day we will be able to separate individual molecules that are only a few nanometers apart. Now we've succeeded.” At that time, the STED principle amounted to a revolution in light microscopy. For this…

Synapses, the communication sites between nerve cells, are key to the function of the neural system and have been extensively studied over the last decades. Especially synaptic vesicles, which store, transport and release messenger substances (neurotransmitters) and are thus crucial to synaptic transmission, have been described in great detail. During information transmission between nerve cells, synaptic vesicles release neurotransmitter by…

The Max Planck Institutes (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry and for Experimental Medicine will merge. The decision-making bodies of the Max Planck Society (MPS) approved the plan submitted by the two institutes on March 12. Formally, both institutions will be closed and a new MPI will be founded, keeping the existing Göttingen sites in Hermann-Rein-Straße and at Faßberg. The future institute will bring together natural science and basic medical…

Corporate strategies should be as unique as possible, in fact highly specific to each individual company. This enables companies to compete successfully in the long term. However, the capital market and others, including analysts, often react negatively to the idea of unique strategies. The reason is that deviating from typical industry standards makes them more complex to evaluate. This regularly discourages companies from focusing on unique…

For their outstanding doctoral theses in the fields of infection research and primate biology, the two young scientists Prerna Arora and Delphine De Moor have received the PhD Thesis Award of 500 euros each from the Sponsorship Society of the German Primate Center ("Förderkreis des Deutschen Primatenzentrums e.V.). Prerna Arora, who completed her doctorate in the Infection Biology Unit at the DPZ, was honored for developing a new therapeutic…

How much do people have to pay for a travel permit to another country? A research team from Göttingen, Paris, Pisa and Florence has investigated the costs around the world. What they found revealed a picture of great inequality. People from poorer countries often pay many times what Europeans would pay. The results have been published in the journal Political Geography. Dr Emanuel Deutschmann from the Institute of Sociology at the University of…

If travel to distant stars within an individual’s lifetime is going to be possible, a means of faster-than-light propulsion will have to be found. To date, even recent research about superluminal (faster-than-light) transport based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity would require vast amounts of hypothetical particles and states of matter that have “exotic” physical properties such as negative energy density. This type of matter either…