Press Releases

Until now, spatial planning has been primarily concerned with cities. It is increasingly becoming clear that the rural regions surrounding built-up areas have an important influence on urban spaces, for example in terms of climate, energy supply, water management and transport planning. The Sustainable & Resilient Urban-Rural Partnerships conference will focus on how cities and rural areas could cooperate on these issues. Experts from the worlds of science and politics will meet with professionals working in the field between the 26th and 27th of November, both online and in Leipzig at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ). The conference will take place under the auspices of Germany’s presidency of the Council of the European Union.

The Rappbode Reservoir in the Harz region is Germany’s largest drinking water reservoir, supplying around one million people with drinking water in areas including the Halle region and the southern part of the state of Saxony-Anhalt. Water temperatures in the reservoir now have the potential to increase significantly due to climate change. If average global warming reaches between 4 and 6 degrees by the year 2100, as the current trend suggests, temperature conditions in the Rappbode Reservoir will become comparable to those in Lake Garda and other lakes south of the Alps. In an article in Science of the Total Environment magazine, a team of researchers led by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) writes that the reservoir’s operators could partially offset the impacts this will have on the drinking water supply - to do so, they would have to change the way the reservoir is managed.

This year, the Christoph Schmelzer Award goes to two young female scientists: The medical physicist Dr. Alina Bendinger from the German Cancer Research Center DKFZ Heidelberg and the engineer Dr. Giorgia Meschini from the biomedical department of the State Polytechnic University in Milan (Politecnico di Milano) receive the prize in recognition of their doctoral theses. With this award, the Association for the Promotion of Tumor Therapy with Heavy Ions e.V. annually honors outstanding master's and doctoral

Hydrogen produced by using solar energy could contribute to a climate neutral energy system of the future. But there are hurdles on the way from laboratory scale to large-scale implementation. A team at HZB has now presented a method to visualise convection in the electrolyte and to reliably simulate it in advance with a multiphysics model. The results can support the design and scaling up of this technology and have been published in the renowned journal Energy and Environmental Science.

In the annual scientific ranking of the most cited researchers (Highly Cited Researchers), five scientists of the UFZ are represented in 2020: Prof. Francois Buscot, Prof. Beate Escher, Prof. Stan W. Harpole, Prof. Ingolf Kühn und Prof. Josef Settele. Among the 6,200 selected scientists worldwide are Prof. Dagmar Haase and Dr. Nadja Kabisch, two scientists who started their scientific careers at the UFZ and continue to be closely connected to the UFZ through a guest contract.

HIRI researchers and partners establish new technology to unravel genetic changes during infection with two different pathogens. Organ and stem cell transplants are proven and frequently used methods in everyday modern clinical practice. However, even when performed regularly in specialised centres, some patients still experience a number of serious complications afterwards. Among other things, infections with fungi and viruses can jeopardise therapeutic success. For example, coinfection with cytomegalovirus, which ...

Millions of Funding for Future Supercomputers at KIT – Researchers All over Germany Can Use KIT’s Vast Computing Capacity

In 2020, twelve scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) have again made it to the top: They are among the leading one percent of the world's highly cited researchers in their respective fields. This means that scientists whose work is cited particularly frequently by their peers are considered to be highly recognized and important in their field. The citation frequency is therefore one of the most important measurements for classifying the influence and performance of individual researchers.

The replacement of lost neurons is a holy grail for neuroscience. A new promising approach is the conversion of glial cells into new neurons. Improving the efficiency of this conversion or reprogramming after brain injury is an important step towards developing reliable regenerative medicine therapies. Researchers at Helmholtz Zentrum München and Ludwig Maximilians University Munich (LMU) have identified a hurdle towards an efficient conversion: the cell metabolism. By expressing...

The Founding Director of the HIRI will take over from Philippe Sansonetti. About Professor Vogel Jörg Vogel spent part of his undergraduate studies in Biochemistry at Imperial College London, UK and graduated from Humboldt University, Germany; where he also went on to pursue his PhD with a thesis on Group II intron splicing. He subsequently carried out postdoctoral research in Sweden and Israel. Between 2004 and 2010 he led an independent junior research group ...