Ensuring global food security is a key challenge, especially because of the challenges of climate change and increasing demand from a population expected to reach almost ten billion. A high diversity of crops can help ensure food security in agriculture. But this diversity alone is not enough. It also depends on ‘asynchrony’ or how the timing to sow or harvest crops differs in its distribution across the seasons, writes a research team with the…

Many people are familiar with turbulent flows from their own experience, for example from a stormy fall walk or from a flight to their vacation destination. However, turbulence also plays an important role in the formation of rain, electrical power fluctuations in wind farms or mixing processes in the atmosphere and the oceans. Unfortunately, turbulent flows are still difficult to calculate and predict today. This is a consequence of the highly…

Every day we effortlessly make countless grasping movements. We take a key in our hand, open the front door by operating the door handle, then pull it closed from the outside and lock it with the key. What is a natural matter for us is based on a complex interaction of our eyes, different regions of the brain and ultimately our muscles in the arm and hand. Neuroscientists at the German Primate Center (DPZ) - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research…

25 years ago, the space probe SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory), a joint project of ESA and NASA, was launched. Since then, it has been orbiting around our star synchronously with Earth and, thanks to its uniquely unobstructed and multifold view, has shaped our current understanding of the Sun. Despite the increasing competition from more modern space observatories and despite a few technical aches and pains, SOHO's continuous data stream…

The German Research Foundation (DFG) will be funding a new Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) at the University of Göttingen to start 1 January 2021: ‘Mathematics of Experiment: the challenge of indirect measurements in the natural sciences’. CRC 1456 comprises 16 scientific projects in which researchers from mathematics and natural sciences work together to analyse specific experimental data. The total funding amounts to around nine million…

The sensor JEI (Jovian Electron and Ion Sensor), which scientists and engineers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) developed and built for ESA's JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer) mission to Jupiter, has reached a further milestone on its way into space. Together with other sensors of the PEP (Particle Environment Package) instrument package, JEI has now arrived safely at Airbus Defence and Space GmbH in Friedrichshafen.…

Researchers from Bochum, Göttingen, Duisburg and Cologne have developed a new method for detecting bacteria and infections. They use fluorescent nanosensors to track down pathogens faster and more easily than with established methods. A team headed by Professor Sebastian Kruß, formerly at Universität Göttingen, now at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), describes the results in the journal Nature Communications, published online on 25 November 2020. …

Despite their reputation, rats are surprisingly sociable and actually regularly help each other out with tasks. Researchers at the Universities of Göttingen, Bern and St Andrews have now shown that a rat just has to smell the scent of another rat that is engaged in helpful behaviour to increase his or her own helpfulness. This is the first study to show that just the smell of a cooperating individual rat is enough to trigger an altruistic and…

"It is an extraordinary pleasure and great honor to be elected as a new member of this time-honored society, the AAAS," said Eberhard Bodenschatz. In the laudatory speech, Bodenschatz is honored for his "outstanding research contributions to nonlinear phenomena including fluid turbulence, cardiac dynamics, cloud physics, thermal convection, chemotaxis and Lagrangian dynamics". Fellows have been elected to the AAAS since 1874. The certificate and…

Since methods for genetic paternity analyses were introduced it became clear that many pair-living animal species, including humans, do not take partnership fidelity that seriously. In most species there is some proportion of offspring that is not sired by their social father. Coppery titi monkeys living in the Amazon lowland rainforest seem to be an exception. Scientists from the German Primate Center (DPZ) – Leibniz Institute for Primate…