News from the Göttingen Campus

On Thursday the space probe BepiColombo will fly past Venus. Measurements in the planet's magnetosphere are planned.
On its way to Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun, the European-Japanese space probe BepiColombo will change course again on Thursday, 15 October. Following the Earth flyby in April this year, the first of two Venus flybys is now imminent. It will take the spacecraft, which was launched into space two years ago, past our neighboring planet at a distance of 10720 kilometers. Some of the scientific instruments on board, to which the Max Planck…
Only in the course of several million years did the trans-Neptunian object Arrokothn acquire its bizarre, pancake-flat shape
The trans-Neptunian object Arrokoth, also known as Ultima Thule, which NASA’s space probe New Horizons passed on New Year's Day 2019, may have changed its shape significantly in the first 100 million years since its formation. In today's issue of the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) suggest that the current shape of Arrokoth, which resembles a…
Die Corona-Pandemie bewältigen: Erstmals vernetzt die bundesdeutsche Universitätsmedizin ihre Forschungsressourcen. UMG koordiniert Verbundprojekt „B-FAST“ zu Test- und Überwachungsstrategien und Verbundprojekt „COMPASS“ zur Entwicklung einer Plattform für Pandemie-Apps mit und ist Partnerin in weiteren acht Verbundprojekten.
Die Corona-Pandemie stellt das Gesundheitssystem, die Entscheidungsträger*innen und die Bürger*innen vor neue und enorme Herausforderungen. Ziel ist es, das Wissen um bestmögliche Strategien zu erhöhen. Dafür haben sich alle 36 Universitätskliniken bundesweit zum nationalen Forschungsverbund „Netzwerk Universitätsmedizin“ (NUM) zusammengeschlossen. Ziel des Netzwerks Universitätsmedizin ist es, gemeinsam mit anderen Akteuren des…
Researchers at Göttingen University discover new disease affecting maize
Protecting crops against pests and diseases is essential to ensure a secure food supply. Around 95 percent of food comes from conventional agriculture, which uses chemical pesticides to keep crops healthy. Increasingly, however, organic pesticides are also being sought as an alternative. Some organic pesticides contain live spores of the fungus Trichoderma, which have the ability to suppress other pathogens. Researchers at the University of…
When you get a cup of hot coffee and a glass of cold beer, what should you drink first? Does the coffee get cooler faster than the beer warms up? Based on our everyday experience, one would expect that the answer depends only on how much the temperature of the two drinks differs from their ambient temperature. If the difference is the same, both processes should occur at the same rate. This does not apply on the nanoscale though: Small systems warm up faster than they cool down. The Göttingen Max Planck researchers Aljaz Godec and Allesio Lapolla have now mathematically proven this.
When thermodynamic equilibrium is restored after a rapid change in temperature – in this example, the temperature of beer or coffee – the so-called free energy is the driving force. It is composed of two driving forces that work against each other: entropy and potential energy. “When we tap a cold beer, its ambient temperature changes because it is much cooler in the barrel,” explains Lapolla, a PhD student in Godec's research group at the Max…
Agroecologists from Göttingen University compare pesticides, fertilisers, manual pollination and farming costs in Indonesia
Cocoa is in great demand on the world market, but there are many different ways to increase production. A research team from the University of Göttingen has now investigated the relative importance of the use of pesticides, fertilisers and manual pollination in a well replicated field trial in Indonesian agroforestry systems. The result: an increase in both cocoa yield and farming income was achieved – not by agrochemicals, but by manual…
Soft matter on new ways to self-organization
Nematic materials, such as the liquid crystals in our displays, contain molecules that align themselves in parallel. When they are constructed from microtubules and kinesins, materials found in our cells, they become active and move and deform without the supply of energy from the outside. In a new paper published in Nano Letters, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen report the creation of a 3D…
Scientists from Göttingen compare cognitive skills of different primate species
Chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans are our closest relatives, and like us they have relatively large brains and they are very intelligent. But do animals with larger brains really perform better in cognitive tests? A research team from the German Primate Center (DPZ) - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research in Göttingen has for the first time systematically investigated the cognitive abilities of lemurs, which have relatively small brains…
University of Göttingen research team investigates influence on meat quality
Current practices of the poultry industry have raised ethical and ecological concerns: ethical concerns include the culling of day-old male chicks of egg-laying breeds; ecological concerns include the import of large quantities of soybeans for feedstuff. Now a research team at the University of Göttingen has investigated alternatives such as using a regional protein crop like broad beans (also known as faba or fava beans), and dual-purpose…
International research team led by Göttingen University shows patterned vegetation regenerates by “ecosystem engineering” of the grasses
Fairy circles are one of nature’s greatest enigmas and most visually stunning phenomena. An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has now, for the first time, collected detailed data to show that Alan Turing’s model explains the striking vegetation patterns of the Australian fairy circles. In addition, the researchers showed that the grasses that make up these patterns act as “eco-engineers” to modify their own hostile…