The physicist Professor Metin Tolan will become the next President of the University of Göttingen. The Senate of the University unanimously agreed this decision today. The University Foundation Committee also approved this proposal unanimously. Tolan succeeds Professor Reinhard Jahn, who held the office until 31 December 2020. Since that time, full-time Vice-President Dr Valérie Schüller has been Acting President of the University on an interim…

On a remote island in Papua New Guinea, an international research team including the University of Göttingen has made an important geological discovery from a garnet-rich sand. By analysing tiny “inclusions” (minerals trapped inside another mineral during its formation) in the garnet grains, they gained understanding of the recycling pathway from the surface of the Earth to deep within the upper mantle and back to the surface, due to tectonic and…

With this prize the Louis-Jeantet Foundation honors the director at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry for his pioneering work in the field of gene transcription. Transcription is a copying process enabling living cells to produce transcripts of their genes that then serve as blueprints for making proteins. Cramer’s research focuses on the molecular machines, called RNA polymerases, that control this fundamental process of…

X-rays are usually difficult to direct and guide. X-ray physicists at the University of Göttingen have developed a new method with which the X-rays can be emitted more precisely in one direction. To do this, the scientists use a structure of thin layers of materials with different densities of electrons to simultaneously deflect and focus the generated beams. The results of the study were published in the journal Science Advances. To generate…

Engineers have spent considerable efforts to improve the fuel economy of aircraft, cars or ships in the past decades. A similar process has been going on in biology, where swimming microorganisms have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to move efficiently. Many biological microswimmers like Paramecium use their small hair-like appendages to “slip” the fluid at their surface and gain locomotion. This general swimming technique however…

Laser beams can be used to change the properties of materials in an extremely precise way. This principle is already widely used in technologies such as rewritable DVDs. However, the underlying processes generally take place at such unimaginably fast speeds and at such a small scale that they have so far eluded direct observation. Researchers at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen…

An international research team, including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, has reconstructed solar activity up to the year 969 without gaps and with a high temporal resolution of only one year from measurements of radioactive carbon in tree rings. The data, which the team led by ETH Zurich recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience, not only impressively confirm the Sun’s known,…

In the summer of 2022, the balloon-borne solar observatory Sunrise will embark on its third stratospheric flight. From the airborne observation site more than 35 kilometers above the Earth's surface, the observatory will enjoy a unique view of the Sun during the several-day flight from northern Sweden to Canada: around the clock, undisturbed by air turbulences in the Earth's atmosphere, and with access to the ultraviolet radiation from our star.…

Am Donnerstag, dem 14. Januar 2021, öffnete das UMG-eigene Impfzentrum seine Türen. Die Universitätsmedizin Göttingen (UMG) hat in den neuen Räumen die Impfungen für ihre Mitarbeiter*innen fortgesetzt. Bereits am ersten Tag impften die Betriebsärzt*innen der UMG in einem ersten Schritt über 120 Mitarbeit*innen in der Reihenfolge fest vergebener Termine. Zusammen mit den bereits in der zurückliegenden Woche Geimpften werden bis zum Freitag über…

The fascinating compound eyes of insects consist of hundreds of individual eyes known as “facets”. In the course of evolution, an enormous variety of eye sizes and shapes has emerged, often representing adaptations to different environmental conditions. Scientists, led by an Emmy Noether research group at the University of Göttingen, together with scientists from the Andalusian Centre for Developmental Biology (CABD) in Seville, have now shown…