“Okay, are you ready? Let's go,” Peter Iltis speaks into the little microphone standing on the table in front of him. Shortly thereafter, the sounds of a brass instrument are broadcasted via the intercom. But the music does not come from a recording studio or a stage, but out of a large medical device – an MRI system located two rooms away. The US American is a professor of kinesiology at Gordon College Wenham in Massachusetts (United States)…

How does rain develop? Will rain fall from a cloud, does it pass without rain, or even disolve? To help solve these question a team of five researchers led by Eberhard Bodenschatz, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), were conducting in cloud measurements in the mid-Atlantic. On their journey from Montevideo in Uruguay to Las Palmas on Gran Canaria on the German research vessel Maria S. Merian they took…

Future aircraft need to be lighter and hence more fuel-efficient. For this reason, the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) in Göttingen has now tested two wing designs as part of an EU project. These types of wings have hitherto been impossible to manufacture. Alongside more fuel-efficient engines and higher-aspect-ratio wings, weight reduction is regarded as the most important way to reduce fuel consumption…

Do differences in performance have an impact on the appetite for risk-taking in decision-makers? Economists at the University of Göttingen have addressed this question. The result of their study is that people's willingness to take risks increases as soon as they get a lower return than other people with whom they compare themselves. At the same time, decision-makers take lower risks if they get a higher return than their peers. The study was…

The German postal service “Deutsche Post” has dedicated a stamp to ESA’s comet mission Rosetta. The stamp with a value of 60 cents is officially released today as part of a special series of stamps devoted to topics related to space and astrophysics. In addition to the Rosetta spacecraft, the motif shows part of the surface of Rosetta’s comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko captured by the onboard scientific camera system OSIRIS. “Seeing the Rosetta…

A new study from the University of Göttingen and international partners has analysed the effects of Fairtrade certification on poor rural workers in Africa. The results show that Fairtrade improves the situation of employees in agricultural cooperatives, but not of workers in the smallholder farm sector, who are often particularly disadvantaged. The study was published in “Nature Sustainability”. When consumers of cocoa, coffee and other…

When a new life begins, only half of the genetic information is provided by the egg, the other half comes from the sperm. To this end, the egg has to eliminate half of its chromosomes. This happens during a specialized cell division, called meiosis. This process, however, is error-prone: It can happen that too many or too few chromosomes remain in the egg, resulting in an embryo whose cells have an incorrect number of chromosomes. Such embryos…