Since the beginning of February 2026, the University of Bonn has been home to the new North Rhine-Westphalian Coordination Office for Translation Matters in Higher Education (‘Landeskoordinationsstelle für Übersetzungsangelegenheiten im Hochschulwesen des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen’). It is developing an online platform offering sample translations, translation resources and training sessions, while serving as a central contact point for translation-related questions. The platform is scheduled to launch in late April 2026.

The University of Bonn is hosting a new Emmy Noether Group devoted to AI methods. Junior Professor Marc Rußwurm is developing AI methods for fusing different types of geodata to arrive at a uniform geospatial representation. The German Research Foundation (DFG) will be providing up to 1.4 million euros in funding for the research group over the next six years. The Emmy Noether Program is a framework designed to enable selected postdocs and assistant professors on fixed-term contracts to obtain the qualifications necessary to hold a university professorship.

Thirty-four years after scientists at the 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. 

The Faculty of Medicine Bonn has once again been successful in the Freiraum (“Free Space”) grant program run by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre, a foundation for promoting innovative teaching in higher education. April will see the launch of three new teaching projects designed to improve practical teaching on medical degree programs with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies. The teams from the University of Bonn and University Hospital Bonn are receiving over €1 million in all to turn their ideas into reality.

From computer chips and cloud computing to artificial intelligence, Germany and the rest of Europe want to become less dependent on digital technologies from abroad by driving forward their own innovations. The Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies (CASSIS) at the University of Bonn has now prepared a policy brief, in cooperation with the Vodafone Institute for Society and Communications, Vodafone’s European think tank. The paper tackles the continent’s “digital trade deficit” and shows how hidden trade dependencies on the US and China are raising questions about the effectiveness of current European strategies.