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The well-respected professional journal Science has elected the ten most important scientific breakthroughs of the past year. Three of these included major involvement on part of the Helmholtz Association. The first and foremost is the discovery of the Higgs boson, to which Helmholtz researchers from the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY have...more

With all its components and functions, the human brain continues to baffle science. Even supercomputers can hardly keep up in face of the brain’s data transfer and processing capacities and its low energy consumption. In order to at least technologically approximate this performance and to learn more about how the brain works, how diseases of the...more

Since 2008, Dr Tim Huege and his Helmholtz Young Investigators Group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) develop innovative detectors for the more detailed observation of cosmic radiation. The radiation particles are atomic nuclei hitting the Earth's atmosphere with in part high levels of energy. Although they have already been observed...more

The Helmholtz Association was involved in three of the ten most important scientific breakthroughs in 2012: the discovery of the Higgs boson (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY), the development of a thought-controlled robotic arm (German Aerospace Center) and the first decoding of a biological structure by means of a free-electron laser (DESY).more

As regards the utilisation and evaluation of pesticides, several aspects are currently subject to a controversy: the use of genetically engineered cultivated plants and the prognostic quality of public authority risk assessment for the protection of the environment. Without doubt, the use of genetically engineered cultivated plants that are...more