Research News
Hitting a Nerve
Glial cells were isolated from a patient's cerebral cortex and in cell culture converted into functional neurons (here: nerve cell with long dendrites).
Photo: Karow et al., Cell Stem Cell 2012One of the major challenges of our time, alongside climate change, is demographic change. Society undergoes changes at many levels: cultural composition, age structure, immigration and emigration, birth and death rates. One significant aspect is the increasing life expectancy and the resulting consequence of growing numbers of older people. This is an issue not only requiring pension and health schemes to adapt to but also research.more
Targeting Sleeping Sickness
Using the world's most powerful X-ray laser, researchers from the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY and their colleagues have identified a potential Achilles' heel in the pathogen causing sleeping sickness. The detailed structural analysis of an enzyme of the pathogen now provides the blueprint for a potential drug. This was the first time...more
The Unknown Enemy
About half of the adult population in Germany carries the cytomegalovirus (CMV) without this infection immediately impacting on their health. In old age, however, infection with CMV can negatively impact on the immune system's defensive forces, as was demonstrated by the work of Prof. Dr Luka Cicin-Sain at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection...more
Europe's Queen of Computers
The high-performance computer JUQUEEN at the Forschungszentrum Jülich ranks fifth in the list of TOP 500 fastest supercomputers in the world, published in November. JUQUEEN is the first European supercomputer to achieve a processing power of more than 5 petaFLOPS; this corresponds to 5 trillion arithmetic operations per second or the performance...more
More Freedom for Science
The "Freedom of Science Act" minimises bureaucracy and strengthens international competitiveness in research. As of 2013, extramural research organisations in Germany will be given more autonomy and independent responsibility as regards their budgeting. After the Bundestag decision from 18 October 2012 and the positive statement from the...more
Light for Refuelling
At the "Solar Fuels" institute of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB), Prof. Dr Roel van de Krol and his team develop new material systems, which transform as efficiently as possible energy from sunlight into hydrogen. Hydrogen is a chemical storage for solar energy and is versatile as regards its application: within a fuel cell, it can...more
Immune Cell Tumours
The most frequent form of adenoid tissue tumours, B-cell lymphomas, is characterised by a certain gene being overly active due to its misplaced position in the genetic material. Antibody producing B-cells propagate in the lymphoid organs' germinal centres. In doing so, they change also their genetic material to be able to combat new pathogens....more
Corrosive: Building 3D Structures
A new etching technique creates three-dimensional micro structures in silicon, which can be used for processing light signals in telecommunication applications. Tailored optical materials control the fast transmission of light signals. Yet it is very laborious to imprint silicon with the required structure, because it has to be regular and precise...more
New Data Highway
A part of a new data highway, the so-called "FAIR Tera Net" has been commissioned at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research GmbH. It connects high-performance computers at various research institutions and universities in Hessen and, in particular, is to provide data transmission for the future accelerator centre FAIR, which is...more
REXUS: Zero Gravity Student Research
Unfortunately, it won't be possible for some time to come for student teams from the Aachen University of Applied Sciences and the Technical University Dresden to be able to fly to the International Space Station. However, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) offers a different option of conducting zero gravity experiments. For this, though, the...more
Stars, Jets and Batteries
Magnetic instabilities play a role in the genesis of black holes, yet they regulate also the rotation speed of collapsing stars and influence the behaviour of cosmic streams of matter, so-called jets. This year, at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, such a magnetic instability – the Tayler instability – was verified for the first time ever...more
North Sea Multiple Socket-Outlet
In September 2012, marine biologists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) have anchored the first data hub in the North Sea 700 metres north of Helgoland. The hub resembles a multiple socket-outlet, providing ports for up to ten measuring devices. The data hub was designed by scientists from the Helmholtz Centre...more
Drilling Deep to Understand Earth
For two months, scientists from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel travelled on the American drilling ship JOIDES Resolution off the west coast of Costa Rica. In this seismically highly active region, they researched the mechanisms triggering earthquakes and volcanism. A few days ago, they returned from their voyage. The drilling...more
Introducing: The new HelmholtzNET
At present, around 3,000 colleagues use HelmholtzNET – particularly the group sections. In technical terms, however, HelmholtzNET was never designed as a collaborative tool and reached its limits some time ago. We frequently received requests for more up-to-date collaborative functions but were usually not able to provide these using the existing...more
Helmholtz international - Dec 12 / Jan 13
On this special page, we report news from the Helmholtz offices in Brussels, Moscow and Beijing several times a year. Specific focus is on cooperation and partnership ventures of the Helmholtz Association in Russia, China and the EU as well as on selected international research policy news.more
