After a long unplanned pandemic break, a delegation from the University of Bonn’s Rectorate and International Office visited four partner universities and several research organizations in Japan and formed new cooperation agreements. The goal of the visit was to reinvigorate the University’s existing partnerships and to prepare the ground for further collaborations in research and teaching. Topics of the exchanges were current developments in the German and Japanese higher education and research landscapes as well as university initiatives for more sustainable futures. 

Grants from the European Research Council (ERC) go to outstanding researchers and provide funding worth millions. At the University of Bonn, two people are receiving coveted ERC Consolidator Grants: Prof. Dr. Annaliese Mason from the Institute of Crop Sciences and Resource Conservation (INRES) and Prof. Dr. Dennis Lehmkuhl from the Institute of Philosophy.

The EU regularly exports large quantities of poultry meat to West African countries. These exports have been criticized for harming importing countries in West Africa and exacerbating poverty there. The reason: Cheap imports depress the local price of chicken, making life difficult for local smallholders. Researchers at the Universities of Bonn and Göttingen have now used the example of Ghana to calculate the effects that would result if the country were to significantly increase its import tariffs for poultry meat or even stop imports completely. The result: Prices would indeed rise domestically, but most local households would not benefit. The study has been published in the journal Food Security.

The 2020 UEFA European Football Championship, which was played in 2021, had a very different impact on the infection dynamics of the coronavirus pandemic in different participating countries. The extent to which the rates of infection and death from Covid-19 increased depended primarily on the pandemic situation in the country at the start of the championship. This was concluded by physicists in an analysis of epidemiological data. The study involved the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, as well as the Universities of Bonn and Göttingen and the PUNCH4NFDI consortium in the German national research data infrastructure NFDI. The study was published in Nature Communications. 

Physicists at the University of Bonn have experimentally proven that an important theorem of statistical physics applies to so-called "Bose-Einstein condensates." Their results now make it possible to measure certain properties of the quantum “superparticles” and deduce system characteristics that would otherwise be difficult to observe. The study has now been published in Physical Review Letters.

There are two fundamentally different cell types in the brain, neurons and glial cells. The latter, for example, insulate the "wiring" of nerve cells or guarantee optimal working conditions for them. A new study led by the University of Bonn has now discovered another function in rodents: The results suggest that a certain type of glial cell plays an important role in spatial learning. The German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) was involved in the work. The results have now been published in the journal Nature Communications.

The Cologne/Bonn Academy in Exile (CBA), founded in the summer of 2022 supports researchers from Ukraine, who have fled the war in their country. It additionally supports researchers from Belarus and Russia, who had to flee their countries due to their opposition to the war. The researchers have been invited to continue their scientific work at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn. Considering the potential of Ukraine to become a member of the European Union in the future, the work of the researchers and the academy will focus on the expansion of regional specific knowledge and European integration, as well as their incorporation and that of their research into the European scientific community while preserving national ties.

Three vehicles, including an electric transporter and a small tractor, were destroyed last night in a fire at the University sports facility on Nachtigallenweg. The vehicles had caught fire for as yet unexplained reasons.