Press releases

For 205 days in 2011, Jens Titze, Professor of Electrolyte and Circulatory Research at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and his team strictly controlled the diet for the Mars500 test subjects during their virtual flight to Mars. Sometimes the selected food contained a lot of salt, sometimes very little. The unexpected result of the longest sodium metabolism study to date was that the assumption that the human body would excrete the salt within 24 hours was incorrect. Instead, the human body stores salt for much longer before releasing it – an important discovery for medical research and patient care.

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Information from former times survived centuries on stone and paper. Modern hard disks, DVDs, and magnetic tapes are less stable and lose reliability after a few years already. However, they are used for the storage of data that have been gathered by modern research projects funded by millions of Euros. In the “Alliance for Research Data Storage” established in the beginning of this year, computer scientists of KIT develop strategies to overcome this dilemma in cooperation with colleagues from Cologne and Göttingen.

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In the case of earthquakes, only seconds may remain for a safe escape from buildings. Debris falling down and obstructing the escape routes may even aggravate the situation. A product developed at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) extends the time for saving lifes by reinforcing walls and keeping off the debris. An innovative building material manufacturer now has launched the mature innovation on the market.

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An efficient, robust, and compact wind power plant with a 10 MW superconducting generator is being developed by partners from industry and science within the recently established EU project SUPRAPOWER. Superconduction enables considerable savings of energy and raw materials. Within SUPRAPOWER, researchers at KIT’s Institute for Technical Physics (ITEP) develop a rotating cryostat cooling the superconducting coils down to minus 253°C - a temperature crucial for electric current flow without resistance.

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Tumors grow more rapidly if their genetic material is not sufficiently tagged with methyl groups, as scientists from the German Cancer Research Center have discovered. Such tags in the DNA appear to act as a shield against cancer-promoting influences.

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