In both the Arctic and Antarctic, the contamination with hazardous chemicals has been increasing. The German Environment Agency (UBA) and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon together hosted the workshop „Act now – Legacy and Emerging Contaminants in Polar Regions“. On January 25th and January 26th, experts from four continents met and discussed potential impacts of legacy and new hazardous chemi-cals, which accumulate in snow, ice and wildlife. Today, we live in the “Chemical Anthropocene” and our society, the environment and human health…

Astrophysicists including Axel Weiß/MPIfR, have developed a new method of measuring the cosmic microwave background temperature only 880 million years after the Big Bang. It is the first time that the temperature of the radiation has been measured at such an early epoch. The prevailing cosmological model assumes that the Universe has cooled off since the Big Bang. The model also describes how the cooling process should proceed, but so far it has been directly confirmed only for relatively recent…

European joint experiment prepares transition to large-scale ITER project. European scientists have achieved a major success on the road to energy production through fusion plasmas: They produced stable plasmas with 59 megajoules of energy output at the world’s largest fusion facility, JET, in Culham near Oxford, UK. The team, which also includes researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), used the fuel of future fusion power plants. These were the first experiments of their kind in the…

A team including researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon has developed new methods for repairing the latest generation of aircraft engine blades as part of the “Novel Engine Repair Methods” project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK). The Hereon researchers together with Lufthansa Technik AG were able to develop two patentable repair processes. Minimizing resource usage is a major goal of modern industry, with a longer service life being the best way to achieve…

Transfer project strengthens robot autonomy and teamwork with humans. Autonomous mobile robots that work safely and intuitively with humans are not only an important building block of Industry 4.0. In future space missions, they are expected to support infrastructure construction on foreign planets. In the recently completed transfer project TransFIT, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the University of Bremen and Siemens AG developed the robotic skills required for the autonomous and collaborative execution of complex assembly work….

Novel material with promising properties for quantum computers and networks discovered – KIT researchers report in nature. Quantum information will revolutionize not only research and industry, but also our everyday life. Among others, it promises enormous progress in the simulation of materials and processes, which will push the development of new medical substances, the improvement of batteries, transport planning, and secure information and communication. A quantum bit (qubit) can assume many different states between 0 and 1 at the same…

HALO-(AC)3 field campaign investigates a worrying phenomenon. In mid-March 2022, the large-scale international HALO-(AC)3 research campaign will begin investigating transformations of air masses in the Arctic. Three German aircraft will be deployed, scientists from the UK and France will also be involved during joint flights with two further aircraft. The team of researchers will be focusing particularly on northwards-flowing warm air reaching into the central Arctic, which are often called warm air intrusions. The counterpart, cold air outbreaks with southwards-moving…

For 50 years, interplanetary probes have returned thousands of striking images of the surface of Mars, but never a single sound. Now, NASA’s Perseverance mission has put an end to this deafening silence by recording the first ever Martian sounds. The scientific team1 for the French-US SuperCam2 instrument installed on Perseverance was convinced that the study of the soundscape of Mars could advance our understanding of the planet. This scientific challenge led them to design a microphone dedicated to the…

KIT Researchers use CRISPR-Kill to prevent the formation of specific organs during plant development. With the help of the CRISPR/Cas molecular scissors, genetic information in a plant can be modified to make the latter more robust to pests, diseases, or extreme climatic conditions. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have now developed this method further to eliminate the complete DNA of specific cell types and, thus, prevent their formation during plant development. This will also help to better understand…

Experimental platform combines Large Plasma Device with lasers, magnetic dipoles; reveals insights about Earth’s shield against solar wind. A magnetosphere forms around any magnetized object, such as a planet, that is immersed within a stream of ionized gas, called plasma. Because Earth possesses an intrinsic magnetic field, the planet is surrounded by a large magnetosphere that extends out into space, blocks lethal cosmic rays and particles from the sun and stars, and allows life itself to exist. In Physics of…

KIT researchers use polymer membranes coated with titanium dioxide for photocatalytic cleaning – results are reported in Nature Nanotechnology. Wherever people are living, hormones used in e.g. contraceptives or agriculture enter the wastewater. Steroid hormones, such as sex hormones and corticosteroids, may accumulate in the environment and adversely affect humans and animals, as they impair behavioral development and fertility. Sex hormones, for instance, may cause male fish to develop female sexual characteristics. It is therefore important to remove hormones, together…

How climate can benefit from the conservation of biodiversity. When the global community is expected to meet for the second part of the UN Biodiversity Conference in Kunming, China, in autumn, it must also adopt the next generation of UN biodiversity targets. These will then replace the Aichi Targets that were aimed for until 2020 – and have hardly been achieved. 21 “Post-2020 Action Targets for 2030” have already been pre-formulated. While they still have to be finally agreed, they…

The drought event from 2018 to 2020 was the most intense in over 250 years. Withered meadows and fields, dry stream beds, dead forests, and reduced power plant outputs – the drought years of 2018, 2019 and 2020 were exceptional and had substantial impacts on nature and the economy. Previously it was not clear where they should be classified in their historical dimension. Now we know: “The 2018 to 2020 drought sets a new benchmark for droughts in Europe”, says…

User-friendly deep learning model analyzes bioacoustics signals from whales, dolphins. Lurking beneath the ocean’s surface, marine mammals use sound for navigation, prey detection, and a wide range of natural behaviors. Passive acoustic data from underwater environments can provide valuable information on these animals, such as their presence or absence within an area, their density and abundance, and their vocal response to anthropogenic noise sources. As the size and number of acoustic datasets increase, accurately and quickly matching the bioacoustics signals…

Climate research: KIT researchers prove global increase of ultrafine particles from exhaust gases of fossil fuels and warn of major weather effects. Strong precipitation or extreme drought – the frequency of extreme weather events is increasing worldwide. Existing climate models, however, do not adequately show their dynamics. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) assume that ultrafine particles in the atmosphere have a significant impact on cloud physics and, hence, on weather. Their aircraft measurements confirm an increase in particle…

In conventional wisdom, producing a curved space requires distortions, such as bending or stretching a flat space. A team of researchers at Purdue University have discovered a new method to create curved spaces that also solves a mystery in physics. Without any physical distortions of physical systems, the team has designed a scheme using non-Hermiticity, which exists in any systems coupled to environments, to create a hyperbolic surface and a variety of other prototypical curved spaces. “Our work may revolutionize…

Results may offer new insight into properties of quark-gluon plasma (QGP)—the hot mix of fundamental nuclear-matter building blocks that filled the early universe. Scientists studying particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have revealed how certain particle-jets lose energy as they traverse the unique form of nuclear matter created in these collisions. The results, published in Physical Review C, should help them learn about key “transport properties” of this hot particle soup, known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). “By…

Equivalent total oxidation potential of a plasma-activated medium has implications for cancer treatments. Chinese researchers may have found a new approach to treat cancer by using a plasma treatment to induce apoptosis, the death of cancer cells, without any obvious side effect to normal cells. The catch is that while a plasma-activated medium (PAM) can be treated as a drug, there is always a dose-effect relationship. And within the plasma community, many researchers are defining the plasma dose as either…

After three years: ATLAS detector more powerful than ever – with major contributions from Mainz University. Tomorrow (on July 5th) protons are expected once again colliding with each other at speeds close to that of light in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, also giving physicists of the PRISMA⁺ Cluster of Excellence of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz something to celebrate. Over the last three years, they have made important contributions to the upgrade of the ATLAS detector, ensuring that…

Researchers at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Chemnitz University of Technology have succeeded for the first time in 3D printing and subsequent sintering of housings for power electronic components. Researchers at the Professorship of Electrical Energy Conversion Systems and Drives at Chemnitz University of Technology have succeeded for the first time in 3D printing housings for power electronic components that are used, for example, to control electrical machines. During the printing process, silicon carbide chips are…