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…

Wood scientists at the University of Göttingen, together with the Swiss company Archroma, a global specialty chemicals company, have developed a new method for turning affordable and ecologically friendly wood from European forests into high-quality, fire-resistant construction timber. Until now, European softwood and hardwood could either be structurally modified to have physical and biological properties similar to tropical hardwood, or it…

Mitochondria are organelles within our cells that generate the majority of chemical energy required to sustain life. They contain a dedicated genome with a special set of genes that need to be expressed to fulfill their function. An important step in mitochondrial gene expression is RNA processing, during which the premature RNA is cut into functional entities by specialized RNA-cutting enzymes. Defects in this process lead to severe human…

Phosphorus is an essential plant nutrient that is becoming increasingly scarce around the world. This means the fertiliser has to be used as efficiently as possible and any loss of nutrients due to leaching and erosion must be minimised. This is challenging for potato farmers, as potatoes need a lot of phosphorus due to their weak root systems. A research team from the University of Göttingen has investigated how a limited phosphorus supply…

Urbanization is one of the most drastic forms of land-use change, and its negative consequences on biodiversity have been studied extensively in temperate countries such as Germany. However, less research has been conducted in tropical regions from the Global South, where most of the ongoing and future urbanization hotspots are located, and little is known about its effects on agricultural biodiversity and associated ecosystems. A research team…

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS), the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Twente created a new model for a new transport mechanism on the microscale in a combined experimental and theoretical approach. They investigated small self-propelling objects, so-called micro-swimmers, and monitored a directed transport of particles in the surrounding fluid. Using this observation, they…

Pepper has flexible features like easily preserved and transportable in dried form, needed in moderate quantity to enrich dishes, easy to produce and wide scale. Genetic data stored in genebanks confirm that pepper has been spread along with the very earliest intercontinental traders, being among the first examples of a globally traded, mass-market, consumer-discretionary good. These are the conclusions of a study conducted by an international…

The United States recently secured 1.7 million doses of a compound that could help to treat Covid-19 patients. In preliminary studies, Molnupiravir reduced the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and the Julius Maximilians University (JMU) Würzburg have now elucidated the underlying molecular mechanism. The antiviral agent incorporates RNA-like building…

Large turbines in gas-fired power plants are some of the most effective machines for reliable energy supply. As this technology is set to continue to play a central role in the energy transition, the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) is working with Siemens Energy to develop the next generation of turbines. Reliable and efficient operation at partial load and flexible use of fuels There is a dual focus to…

The Submillimetre Wave Instrument (SWI), which will embark on a research mission to the Jovian system next year aboard ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE), has reached an important milestone. After eight years of development and construction at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, the instrument arrived yesterday at Airbus Defence and Space in Toulouse, France. At the same time, another, much larger new arrival…