On 10 February, the Solar Orbiter solar mission is scheduled to launch into space. Equipped with 10 scientific instruments, the probe of the European Space Agency (ESA) will in the coming years venture to a distance of only 42 million km from the Sun. This is only a little more than one quarter of the distance between the Sun and the Earth. Solar Orbiter will also leave the orbital plane of the Earth and investigate the poles of the Sun for the…

Johannes Geiss began his unprecedented scientific career at the University of Göttingen, where he received his doctorate in the early 1950s as a student of the later Nobel laureate Wolfgang Paul. After research stays at the University of Bern, the University of Chicago, and the University of Miami, he accepted a call to the University of Bern in 1960, where he established a laboratory for extraterrestrial research and operated it until his…

Can the biodiversity of ecosystems be considered as a factor affecting production? In fact, can greater biodiversity increase the economic value of managed ecosystems? A research team with participation from the University of Göttingen has analysed the economic advantages farmers and foresters have when they focus on several species instead of just one. The researchers also looked at the benefits of biodiversity for society in an extensive…

The number is gigantic: About 100 million examinations are carried out with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) every year – and every scanner worldwide uses the technology developed by Jens Frahm with his team at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry. For his achievements, the physicist has now been awarded the Werner von Siemens Ring, one of the most important German technology prizes. Back in the early days of MRI in the 1980s,…

In 1931, Duke Ellington and Irving Mills even dedicated a song to the phenomenon of swing which they called "It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Ain't Got That Swing". Yet, to this day, the question of what exactly makes a jazz performance swing has not really been clarified. A team drawn from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen and the University of Göttingen recently carried out an empirical study into the role…

Graphene is often seen as the wonder material of the future. Scientists can now grow perfect graphene layers on square centimetre-sized crystals. A research team from the University of Göttingen, together with the Chemnitz University of Technology and the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt Braunschweig, has investigated the influence of the underlying crystal on the electrical resistance of graphene. Contrary to previous assumptions, the new…

The research report “Refugee Protection in Germany” by the EU project “Multilevel Governance of Migration (RESPOND)” paints a gloomy picture of the human rights protection for asylum seekers in Germany. Among other things, the authors speak of a “differential exclusion” of ever larger groups from German asylum law on the basis of more or less arbitrary criteria. Although the basic right to asylum in Germany is officially unaffected, the authors…

Bees are pollinators of many wild and crop plants, but in many places their diversity and density is declining. A research team from the Universities of Göttingen, Sussex and Würzburg has now investigated the foraging behaviour of bees in agricultural landscapes. To do this, the scientists analysed the bees’ dances, which are called the “waggle dance”. They found out that honey bees prefer strawberry fields, even if they flowered directly next to…

Many companies work hard to present an environmentally responsible public image. But how well do these claims stack up? In a new study led by the University of Göttingen, researchers investigated the claims regarding sustainability, including conservation and fair-pay, as presented by the French Michelin Group. The researchers then compared these claims with the effects described by local people in the village of Muara Sekalo in Indonesia. The…

When it comes to predicting the extent of global warming by the end of the century, clouds are one of the greatest uncertainty factors. Cumulus clouds in lower layers of the atmosphere, reflect sunlight, thereby cooling the surface of the Earth. An international team will be starting the almost six-week-long EUREC4A (Elucidating the role of clouds-circulation coupling in climate) field study on the 20th of January 2020 to gain a better…