Press archive

The technicians and engineers of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) announce the successful launch of the REXUS 4 sounding rocket (Rocket-borne EXperiments for University Students). After a three-hour countdown, the two-stage rocket lifted off at 14:30 on Wednesday 22 October 2008 from the Swedish launch site in Esrange near Kiruna.

Student experiments on board REXUS 4 successfully launched

The Helmholtz Zentrum München is to receive, from the programs funding (POF) of the Helmholtz Association, a total of €496 million in grants for its core funding for the 2009 - 2013 period. The Helmholtz Association Senate decided this yesterday, in its meeting in Berlin. In this, they are following the recommendation of the experts, who, in spring, had assessed the scientific quality and excellence of the programs applied for.

New strategic direction of the Helmholtz Zentrum München has proved itself

The Senate of the Helmholtz Association has approved the financial packages for the three Research Fields "Earth and Environment", "Health", and "Aeronautics, Space and Transport" with a core budget of around 800m euros per year in the coming funding period from 2009 to 2013. In so doing, the Senate followed the recommendations made by 169 international experts on the basis of a detailed review process.

Future financial packages approved for three Helmholtz Association Research Fields

The Helmholtz Association will invest around €20 million over the next five years to put together a large-scale, long-term cohort study. The goal of the study will be to illuminate the causes of common health problems like cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and dementia, as well as to identify risk factors and effective methods of prevention. The Helmholtz Association’s Senate reached the decision today.

Helmholtz Association funds cohort study

On 1 November 2008 Professor Dr. Günther Hasinger is to take up his appointment as Scientific Director of Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) at Garching and Greifswald. He succeeds Professor Dr. Alexander M. Bradshaw, who has headed IPP since 1999. The research objective of IPP is to develop a fusion power plant, which, like the sun, derives energy from fusion of atomic nuclei.

New Director at Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics

On 21 October 2008, the first image from the RapidEye satellite constellation, which was launched in late August, was presented in Brandenburg by RapidEye AG, the satellite operator. The image shows the Argentine town of El Bolsón near the Argentine-Chilean border in the Patagonia region. The five identical Earth observation satellites, which are currently undergoing a three-month commissioning phase, are circling the Earth in a 600-kilometre orbit.

RapidEye satellite constellation transmits first images

A large-scale demonstration of inter-vehicle communication will take place on 22 and 23 October 2008. At the Opel proving ground in Dudenhofen near Frankfurt am Main, the new car-to-car (C2C) communication technology is demonstrated in real life. The German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) is one of the parties involved in this project. On both days of the event, demonstrations will be given of the synergy between the separate technical components made by the partners in the CAR 2 CAR Communication Consortium (C2C-CC).

Road test for vehicle-to-vehicle communication

In the future, the bone marrow transfer to patients with leukaemia could be more secure. Experiments with mice have shown already that certain cells of the immune system (regulatory T cells or Tregs) can suppress the dangerous side effects resulting from the treatment. Such cells control aggressive immune cells and, thus, unwanted immune reactions by the graft can be avoided. However, to date, there were no adequate techniques available to securely isolate the regulatory T cells. Now, Dr. Markus Kleinewietfeld, Dr. Kirsten Falk, and Dr. Olaf Rötzschke of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch, Germany and their colleagues of the ‘Fondazione Santa Lucia’ in Rome, Italy have developed a simple method to specifically isolate these cells from human blood.

Donor Cells for Immune Therapy

The Helmholtz Association has taken major first steps towards the build up of a large- prospective cohort study for future epidemiological studies on the causes of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. This new prospective study will be developed jointly by the biomedical research institutions of the Helmholtz Association, in close collaboration with other national research centers and universities. The German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ, Heidelberg) and...

Development of a large prospective cohort for chronic disease epidemiology in Germany

Climate change will have different effects on lakes in warmer and colder regions of the globe. This is the conclusion reached by Japanese and German researchers following studies of very deep caldera lakes in Japan. Scientists from Hokkaido University, the Hokkaido Institute of Environmental Sciences, Kagoshima University and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) compared current measurements with measurements taken 70 years ago.

Impacts of climate change on lakes