Academic World News

Animals are key to restoring the world’s forests

As UN climate talks close in Egypt and biodiversity talks begin in Montreal, attention is on forest restoration as a solution to the twin evils roiling our planet. Forests soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide and simultaneously create habitat for organisms. So far, efforts to help forests bounce back from deforestation have typically focused on increasing one thing—trees—over anything else. But a new report uncovers a powerful, yet largely overlooked, driver of forest recovery: animals.

An app for COVID-19 studies

CoroNotes can be a great help for Covid-19 research since the app can be used to collect urgently needed data on Sars-CoV-2 infections quickly and efficiently. Scientists at the Tübingen AI Center, a joint facility of the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, have developed CoroNotes in cooperation with physicians at the University Hospital Tübingen.

Critical “Starbleed” vulnerability in FPGA chips

FPGA chips which are used, for example, in cloud data centers and mobile phone base stations have a vulnerable feature. Field Programmable Gate Arrays, FPGAs for short, are flexibly programmable computer chips that are considered very secure components in many applications.

A signal like none before

The expectations of the gravitational-wave research community have been fulfilled: gravitational-wave discoveries are now part of their daily work as they have identified in the past observing run, O3, new gravitational-wave candidates about once a week.

Optical fibre with Einstein effect

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen have discovered a new mechanism for guiding light in photonic crystal fibre (PCF). PCF is a hair-thin glass fibre with a regular array of hollow channels running along its length. When helically twisted, this spiralling array of hollow channels acts on light rays in an analogous manner to the bending of light rays when they travel through the gravitationally curved space around a star, as described by the general theory of relativity.