An interdisciplinary group of researchers uses basic research to obtain hard evidence about how people perceive and navigate their urban environments. Fractal and nature-like design demonstrably promotes physical and mental well-being, according to the researchers. They call for an incorporation of this knowledge into urban planning decisions.
A very long ago, our Milky Way had a truly eventful life: between about 13 and 8 billion years ago, it lived hard and fast, merging with other galaxies and consuming a lot of hydrogen to form stars. With the help of a new data set, Maosheng Xiang and Hans-Walter Rix from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg have reconstructed the turbulent teenage years of our home galaxy. To do this, the researchers had to precisely determine the ages of 250,000 Milky Way stars.
In order to better understand (and possibly control) fast chemical reactions, it is necessary to study the behaviour of electrons as precisely as possible – in both space and time. However, up to now, microscopy methods have delivered only either spatially or temporally sharp images. By cleverly combining established techniques of tunnelling microscopy and laser spectroscopy, a team led by Klaus Kern, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, has now overcome these obstacles. Using their atomic quantum microscope, they can make the movement of electrons in individual molecules visible.
A telescope in the French Alps has allowed researchers to peer deep into the past of the universe. For the first time, they were able to observe an extremely distant hydrogen cloud that shadows the cosmic background radiation created shortly after the Big Bang. The shadow is created because the colder water absorbs the warmer background radiation on its way to Earth. This provides information about the temperature of the cosmos just 880 million years after the Big Bang. To measure the early history of the universe, an international team used the Northern Extended Millimetre Array (NOEMA), the most powerful radio telescope in the northern hemisphere.
At the heart of the galaxy NGC 1068 lurks a supermassive black hole, hidden behind a cosmic dust cloud. Using the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), an international team of astronomers has unveiled this supermassive gravity trap. The researchers, including scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for Astronomy and Radio Astronomy, gained new insights into the mechanisms of active galactic nuclei, some of the brightest and most enigmatic objects in the universe. They also confirmed a 30-year-old theory.
Paleoclimate data retrieved from ocean sediment cores dating back 130,000 years show that sustained warming in the Indian Ocean during the Last Interglacial increased convective rainfall above the ocean, but weakened Indian Summer Monsoon rainfall on land.
More than 20 years after the first release of the human genome, scientists at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, have for the first time decoded the highly complex genome of the potato. This technically demanding study lays the biotechnological foundation to accelerate the breeding of more robust varieties - a goal in plant breeding for many years and an important step for global food security.
For the first time, it has been possible to observe the outburst of a nova in very high-energy gamma light and to follow the glow and subsequent fading over a period of one month. The researchers combined the data from the H.E.S.S. observatory with those from the Fermi satellite and gained insights into the processes underlying the emission of gamma rays. The scientists were surprised to find that the nova apparently accelerates particles to the theoretical limit.
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.
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.
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.
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.