news 2024

Light pollution is more serious than expected: Moths not only lose their orientation directly under street lamps. Their flight behaviour is also disturbed outside the cone of light. The increasing use of artificial light at night is one of the most dramatic man-made changes on earth. Streetlights and illuminated buildings are significantly changing the environment for nocturnal animals.

Plants can extract even the smallest traces of the important nutrient potassium from the soil. A team led by Würzburg biophysicist Rainer Hedrich describes how they achieve this in 'Nature Communications'. Potassium is one of the nutrients that plants need in large quantities. However, the amount of potassium in the soil can vary greatly: potassium-poor soils can contain up to a thousand times less of this nutrient than potassium-rich soils.

Researchers are breeding protein-rich rice varieties that cause minimal increase in blood sugar levels Rice is a staple food for over four billion people. By nature, it contains a lot of carbohydrates but very little protein. A team of researchers from the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam, Germany, has now identified the genes that control the carbohydrate composition and protein content of rice.

Researchers from Bonn and Aachen elucidate the role of individual brain neurons in human odor perception We often only realize how important our sense of smell is when it is no longer there: food hardly tastes good, or we no longer react to dangers such as the smell of smoke. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB), the University of Bonn and the University of Aachen have investigated the neuronal mechanisms of human odor perception for the first time.

Researchers study marks on spearheads creating reference data to understand fighting in past   How can we tell whether and how a prehistoric weapon was used? How can we better understand the dexterity and combat skills involved in Bronze Age spear fighting? A research team including Göttingen University present a new approach to answering these questions: they simulated the actual fight step-by-step to get new insights into fighting styles and the formation of marks on the weapons.

Using ammonia is regarded as a promising method of transporting hydrogen. However, an efficient process is also needed to convert it back into hydrogen and nitrogen. An international research team has gained new insights into the mode of operation of an iron catalyst that can be used to split ammonia into nitrogen and hydrogen.

Thanks to these results, researchers now better understand how α-latrotoxin works. "The toxin mimics the function of the calcium channels of the presynaptic membrane in a highly complex way," explains Christos Gatsogiannis.

A new study reveals groundbreaking findings on visual navigation in the brain of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster An international research team from Freie Universität Berlin and the University of California Santa Barbara has conducted the first systematic analysis of all synaptic connections in the brain of an adult animal in a groundbreaking study.

Genome instability can cause numerous diseases. Cells have effective DNA repair mechanisms at their disposal. A research team at the University of Würzburg has now gained new insights into the DNA damage response. Whenever cells divide, there is a high risk of damage to the genetic material. After all, the cell has to duplicate its entire genetic material and copy billions of genetic letters before it divides.

On the early Earth, the atmosphere did not yet contain oxygen; nevertheless, the iron dissolved in the oceans was oxidized in gigantic quantities and deposited as rock, for example as banded iron ore in South Africa. Various bacteria excrete insoluble iron via their own metabolic reactions: Some, the phototrophic iron oxidizers, gain energy by oxidizing the iron with the help of sunlight, and others by converting the iron with nitrate as an oxidizing agent.

A study by the Universities of Bonn and Montreal opens up new ways to produce important chemical compounds Researchers at the University of Bonn and University of Montreal have developed a new type of catalyst and used it in their study to produce methane out of carbon dioxide and water in a highly efficient way using electricity.

Nested morphology of gas streams confirms a mechanism that helps infant stars to grow by ingesting disk material. Planet-forming disks, maelstroms of gas and dust swirling around young stars, are nurseries that give rise to planetary systems, including our solar system. Astronomers have discovered new details of gas flows that sculpt and shape those disks over time.

Study by researchers from Freie Universität Berlin and the University of California, Santa Barbara published in "Nature" delivers new insights into how fruit flies process visual information and use it to navigate the world around them An international team comprised of researchers from Freie Universität Berlin and the University of California, Santa Barbara have carried out the first-ever systematic analysis of all synaptic connections in the brain of an adult animal.

International research team led by Göttingen University identifies new model to explain amethyst formation Amethyst is a violet variety of quartz which has been used as a gemstone for many centuries and is a key economic resource in northern Uruguay. Geodes are hollow rock formations often with quartz crystals, such as amethyst, inside.

International research team led by the University of Göttingen develops new model Amethyst is a type of purple quartz that has been used as a gemstone for many centuries and is an important economic resource in northern Uruguay. Geodes are hollow rock formations that often contain quartz crystals. Amethyst geodes in Uruguay are found in cooled lava flows that originate from the break-up of the supercontinent Gondwana around 134 million years ago.

Many areas in North Rhine-Westphalia are paved over by impervious surfaces such as roads, housing estates and industrial sites. While this is obvious from aerial photographs, it is difficult to analyze. In accordance with the German Sustainability Strategy, new impervious surfaces are to be limited to less than 30 hectares per day nationwide.

Bonn researchers reclassify leading gene variants, a large proportion of them as benign The genetic confirmation of a suspected diagnosis of "hereditary colorectal cancer" is of great importance for the medical care of affected families. However, many of the variants identified in the known genes cannot yet be reliably classified in terms of their causal role in tumor formation.

In a recent study, researchers from the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology (Leibniz IPHT) and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena have shown how they can investigate the growth and interactions of the green algae "Ulva" and its bacterial community non-invasively and non-destructively using Raman spectroscopy.

A recent study challenges previous assumptions about the connection between CO2 in the atmosphere and temperatures in the tropics. Between 1959 and 2011, the CO2 content in the atmosphere responded twice as strongly to temperatures in the tropics than before. This has often been attributed to increasing droughts in the tropics and to changes in carbon cycle responses caused by climate change.

The study of metabolism in living plants poses challenges for science. A research team from Leipzig and Würzburg has now developed a technique that changes this in some areas. The "omics" technologies - genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics - are at the forefront of discovery in modern plant science and systems biology.