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There is very little difference between people living in eastern and western Germany or those in rural and urban areas when they assess their quality of life. This surprising result is one of the key findings of the Germany Monitor 2023 , a newly developed annual scientific study that provides a new perspective on the social and political attitudes and assessments of the German population.

Researchers have developed a new way to control and manipulate optical signals by embedding a liquid crystal layer into waveguides created with direct laser writing. The new devices enable electro-optical control of polarization, which could open new possibilities for chip-based devices and complex photonic circuits based on femtosecond-written waveguides.

An international research team has successfully conducted ultra-precise X-ray spectroscopic measurements of helium-like uranium. The team, which includes researchers from Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Helmholtz Institute Jena, has published results demonstrating their success in disentangling and separately testing one-electron two-loop and two-electron quantum electrodynamic effects for extremely strong Coulomb fields of the heaviest nuclei for the first time.

People in ancient times knew five planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, which they considered to be "wandering stars". It was only with the Copernican revolution in the 16th century, the Earth itself also became a planet, orbiting our planet host star - the Sun - just like the previously known and later discovered representatives Uranus and Neptune.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. The development of breast cancer often originates from epithelial cells in the mammary gland - the very cells that specialise in milk production during and after pregnancy. A team of researchers from Friedrich Schiller University Jena , the university in Shenzhen (China) and Jena University Hospital has taken a closer look at this specialisation process and deciphered a molecular mechanism that also appears to play an important role in cancer development.

Small Tortoiseshell butterflies (Aglais urticae) are an example of a species with formerly high local abundances that has declined in number. Insect decline is being driven by losses among the locally more common species, according to a new study published in "Nature".

The investigation of the biosynthesis of panepoxydone, an important substance for biomedical research, in basidiomycetes has revealed a new enzyme as an important catalyst. The results of the researchers from the Leibniz-HKI, the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Cluster of Excellence Balance of the Microverse have now been published in the journal "Angewandte Chemie International Edition".

Eyewitness statements are one of the key sources for identifying perpetrators - and one of the most error-prone. For example, the Innocence Project - an organisation that works to clear up miscarriages of justice in the US - states that incorrect eyewitness statements played a role in 64 per cent of the cases in which it was able to secure the release of people who had been wrongly convicted.

For hydrogen to be sustainably produced using sunlight, it's not just an efficient catalyst system that's needed - it must also be economical, readily available, and resource-efficient. A team led by chemist Kalina Peneva from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Macromolecular Chemistry at the University of Jena has made a step in this direction.

A new study has revealed a natural solution to mitigate the effects of climate change, such as extreme weather events. Researchers from Leipzig University, the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig (iDiv) and other research institutions have discovered that high plant diversity acts as a buffer against fluctuations in soil temperature.

For many people, science has become a question of faith - the acceptance of research results increasingly depends on whether they fit in with their own world view. This poses new challenges for science communication. Simply preparing content in an appealing and accessible way for the public in order to close gaps in knowledge and present new innovations is no longer enough.

A new collection of papers on artificial light at night show the impact of light pollution to be surprisingly far-reaching, with even low levels of artificial light disrupting species communities and entire ecosystems. Published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the special theme issue, which includes 16 scientific papers, looks at the effects of light pollution in complex ecological systems, including soil, grassland, and insect communities.

Photos of plant and animal species that are posted on social media can help protect biodiversity, especially in tropical regions. This is the conclusion of a team of researchers led by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (FSU), and the University of Queensland (UQ).

Narcissistic personality traits are related to poorer response to psychotherapeutic treatment. This is the result of a German multi-site study with more than 2,000 participants receiving inpatient and outpatient psychotherapy. The findings of the research team at Jena University Hospital and University of Münster, now published in the scientific journal The Lancet Psychiatry, can contribute to further individualization of psychotherapy.

Scientists from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg have successfully developed nanomaterials using a so-called bottom-up approach. As reported in the scientific journal ACS Nano, they exploit the fact that crystals often grow in a specific direction during crystallisation.

The prebiotic resistant starch could play an important role in the treatment of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in the future. Initial indications suggest that a specially adapted diet with resistant starch not only positively influences the intestinal microbiome but also leads to an alleviation of the disease.

While the German government is planning to relax legislation on the use of cannabis, researchers from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, together with colleagues from Italy, Austria and the USA, have identified the mode of action underlying anti-inflammatory effects demonstrated by cannabinoids.

Knowledge Transfer and Innovation Published: Researchers from the University of Jena, the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences and the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague have developed a platform that uses artificial neural networks to translate chemical structural formulae into machine-readable form.

Whether you have a sports injury, repetitive strain injury or pain in the knee, cortisone preparations are often used to treat acute inflammations. Chronic inflammatory diseases such as asthma, diabetes and chronic inflammatory bowel diseases are also treated with drugs containing cortisone or derived drugs.

An international team of linguists and geneticists led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has achieved a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of Indo-European, a family of languages spoken by nearly half of the world's population.