Otto Lilienthal is considered to have been the very first aviator, but until now there had been no final proof that his designs were actually airworthy. Now, for the first time, there is video footage of flights performed by a historically accurate replica of the world's first biplane glider, which was designed by Otto Lilienthal. Markus Raffel, who works at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) in…

Proteins are essential for every living cell and responsible for many fundamental processes. In particular, they are required as bio-catalysts in metabolism and for signalling inside the cell and between cells. Many diseases come about as a result of failures in this communication, and the origins of signalling in proteins have been a source of great scientific debate. Now, for the first time, a team of researchers at the University of Göttingen…

The Welcome Centre for the Göttingen Campus and the Südniedersachsen region continues to work hard to strengthen sustainable collaboration with its existing project partners. As a result, the University of Göttingen, as the sponsor of the Welcome Centre of the Göttingen Campus, has now agreed a cooperation agreement with the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. In the future, researchers at the MPI will be able to…

Launch of the new "Matter to Life" programme in Göttingen. Students with an excellent bachelor's degree will receive special support at the three Max Planck Schools "Matter to Life", "Photonics" and "Cognition". (in German)

Since April 2019, the University of Göttingen has been coordinating a European research team preparing the European part of the World Humanities Report (WHR) for UNESCO. From this summer, the Volkswagen Foundation has supported the project with around 244,000 euros, for one year in the first instance. The WHR provides insights into current developments in the humanities and forms the basis for future UNESCO recommendations. "This report…

Modern livestock farming increases the pressure to use arable land for fodder production. The result: modern dairy farms no longer send their cows out to pasture. The "Green Grass" project, led by the University of Göttingen, brings researchers, industry and stakeholders together in an interdisciplinary network stretching across Germany. They are investigating how grazing livestock can be brought back into the landscape and finding new ways of…

Imagine that you are watching a crowded hang-gliding competition, keeping track of a red and orange glider’s skillful movements. Our brain uses separate circuits to achieve such outstanding tracking ability, one specialized to process color information and the other specialized for processing directions of motion. This allows for optimal perceptual performance, but how do we perceptually combine the color and direction information into our…

Researchers at the University of Göttingen have developed a new method that takes advantage of the unusual properties of graphene to electromagnetically interact with fluorescing (light-emitting) molecules. This method allows scientists to optically measure extremely small distances, in the order of 1 ångström (one ten-billionth of a meter) with high accuracy and reproducibility for the first time. This enabled researchers to optically measure…

Angus, or Highland Cattle: not all cows are the same when it comes to a preference for different herbaceous, grass and shrub species. Research carried out the Universities of Heidelberg and Göttingen in collaboration with the Swiss institute of Agroscope shows that cattle breed influences the botanical composition of pasture.  The results were recently published in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment. It is well known that by…

People in England were using balance weights and scales to measure the value of materials as early as the late second and early first millennia BC. This is what Professor Lorenz Rahmstorf, scientist at the University of Göttingen and project manager of the ERC "Weight and Value" project, has discovered. He compared Middle and Late Bronze Age gold objects from the British Isles and Northern France and found that they were based on the same unit of…