The emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants that can spread rapidly and undermine vaccine-induced immunity threatens the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. The delta variant (B.1.617.2) emerged in India and subsequently spread globally within a short time period. Also in Germany, almost all recent infections are due to this variant. In addition to Delta, so-called Delta Plus sub-variants have been observed, which carry additional mutations that may make…

By this, he demonstrated that climate models can deliver reliable predictions despite short-term weather fluctuations, proving also the connection of increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and global warming. Klaus Hasselmann completed his doctoral thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS) in 1957 before he continued his scientific career at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. The…

The mechanism of molecular self-organization was assessed in a new model by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS). In their study, they simulated how environmental factors such as temperature influence the size of oil droplets in elastic matrices. The study will also help understanding droplet formation in biological cells, where biological molecules self-organize in condensates. The full paper was…

For researching new methods to track cellular processes, Stefan Glöggler of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and the Center for Biostructural Imaging of Neurodegeneration of the University Medical Center Göttingen (Germany) is awarded with the Felix Bloch lecture by the German Chemical Society (GDCh). He received the prize on September 29. Glöggler and his team recently succeeded in developing new efficient and fast methods to…

Cells, the fundamental building blocks of all living organisms, stick to other cells via a process called cell adhesion. For multicellular organisms like ourselves, cell adhesion plays a crucial role in our immune response, in wound healing and cancer development, and it prevents us from degrading into a pool of individual cells. The last twenty years of experiments and theory have shown that cell adhesion may be accurately described by a model…

The direction of movement of a microbe directly depends on the curvature of its environment – this is the key finding of a recent publication in the journal PNAS with participation of the universities of Loughborough, Düsseldorf and Bayreuth, as well as the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS) in Göttingen. The researchers investigated the navigation of a model microbe, a small self-propelling microalga, in confined…

Ecosystems provide a wide range of services to people. These services depend on basic ecosystem functions, which are shaped by natural conditions like climate, the mix of species and by human intervention. A research team including the University of Göttingen has identified three key indicators that describe the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems: the capacity to maximise primary productivity; the efficiency of using water; and the efficiency…

The Moon’s polar regions are home to craters and other depressions that never receive sunlight. Today, a group of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany presents the highest-resolution images to date covering 17 such craters in the journal Nature Communications. Craters of this type could contain frozen water, making them attractive targets for future lunar missions, and the researchers focused…

It was thought that the survival of animal species over a geologically long period of time without sexual reproduction would be very unlikely, if not impossible. However, an international research team of zoologists and evolutionary biologists at the Universities of Cologne and Göttingen, as well as Universities in Lausanne (Switzerland) and Montpelier (France), has now demonstrated for the first time that animals can reproduce successfully…

The global decline of pollinators threatens the reproductive success of 90 per cent of all wild plants globally and the yield of 85 per cent of the world’s most important crops. Pollinators – mainly bees and other insects – contribute to 35 per cent of the world's food production. The service provided by pollinators is particularly important for securing food produced by the more than two billion small farmers worldwide. An agroecologist at the U…