Thirty-four years after scientists at the University of Cologne and Cornell University first conceived it, the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) now rises above the Atacama Desert, near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile’s Parque Astronómico Atacama. FYST will help answer some of the most important questions in astronomy, including how the universe works, the nature of dark energy and dark matter, how galaxies form and evolve and what happened in those mysterious first moments after the Big Bang.

In the age of voice messages and videos, writing is easily forgotten. Yet for millennia, it has been the central medium of our cultural memory: it stores knowledge and tells stories. Simple symbols give rise to entire worlds in the mind—almost like cinema without popcorn. Whether painted or carved in stone, it lasts an astonishingly long time. Without it, we would know little about the past. Even before humans could read, they interpreted signs: they read animal tracks, navigated by the stars, and determined the time of day by the sun’s position. Egyptologist Prof. Ludwig Morenz of the University of Bonn describes the long road to writing in his new book. 

What cognitive frameworks underlie concepts of God in ancient Israel? A new research group at the University of Bonn is investigating this question. It is receiving nearly two million euros in funding from the German Research Foundation. The principal investigator is Prof. Dr. Jan Dietrich from the Faculty of Protestant Theology. Scientists from Bonn are also involved in two other new research groups examining how Chinese technology companies create new dependencies (political science) and how the Earth’s rotation can be measured even more precisely (geodesy).

An international team of researchers from LMU, the University of Zurich, University of Bonn and further partners investigated ash residues from incense burners. The substances they discovered show that Pompeii was part of a global trade network.