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Science in particular thrives on international co-operation. Often, the best heads in a given research field are located in different countries across the globe, so that increasing numbers of scientists network well beyond national boundaries. The Helmholtz Association likewise supports this trend, for instance, by funding German-Russian and...more

One 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...more

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

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

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