Professor Tobias Ackels, a biologist at the University of Bonn and the University Hospital Bonn, is to be presented with the €60,000 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Early Career Award for 2025 for his discovery that mammals smell faster than they breathe. The news was announced by the Paul Ehrlich Foundation earlier today. Ackels has demonstrated that nerve cells can glean new information from a moving scent up to 40 times a second, thus refuting the previously accepted assumption that our sense of smell is somewhat sluggish. He has also opened a new door to understanding overall brain function and is working toward harnessing this fundamental mechanism to diagnose dementia at an early stage.

Species are continuing to disappear at a staggering rate. What initiatives are needed to reverse this drastic trend? No fewer than 156 leading researchers from 42 countries have contributed to the Nexus Assessment of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). This report, which was signed off by IPBES member states in the Namibian capital Windhoek, reveals a number of possibilities for halting the decline in biodiversity and linking it to other objectives. Its contributors included Assistant Professor Lisa Freudenberger from the Center for Development Research (ZEF) at the University of Bonn, who is a member of its Individuals & Societies and Sustainable Futures Transdisciplinary Research Areas. 

Professor Simon Stellmer,  a member of the Cluster of Excellence ML4Q, receives a ‘Proof of Concept Grant’ from the European Research Council (ERC) for his project „GyroRevolutionPlus“. With the funding of €150,000 for up to 18 months, the physicist will continue to prepare his research results from previous ERC projects for commercial application. This is the second time that Professor Stellmer has been successful in this funding program after having received a grant for his previous project ‘GyroRevolution’ in 2023. The precision instruments he and his team are developing can be used to improve natural disaster early warning systems.

Around 1,500 schoolchildren from six EU countries have been engaged in intensive study of some of the challenges currently facing the world in the company of natural science experts. After completing each module on a different topic, they have been acting as “multipliers,” sharing their knowledge and experiences with their family, friends and classmates. Three schools from Bonn took part.

Code Intelligence, a spin-off from the University of Bonn, has won the AI Award from the de:hub initiative of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK). At the Pitch Night event in Karlsruhe entitled “prompting tomorrow,” the team presented its innovative solutions in the field of IT security to a renowned jury. The award was presented by Federal Minister for Economic Affairs Dr. Robert Habeck. The BMWK's Pitch Night is considered one of the most important digitalisation and networking events in Germany.

The “Bone2Gene” project of researchers from the University of Bonn and University Hospital Bonn has been awarded funding worth €1,000,000 as part of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s GO-Bio initial program. The money is now enabling the team to progress to the feasibility phase and get its product ready for market launch. This is actually the second grant that the project has secured, the first having been used for the conceptual phase and to test the product’s marketability. “Bone2Gene“ is using artificial intelligence (AI) to make genetic bone conditions known as skeletal dysplasia easier to spot and diagnose.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and above all large language models (LLMs), which also form the basis for ChatGPT, are increasingly in demand in hospitals. However, patient data must always be protected. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn have now been able to show that local LLMs can help structure radiological findings in a privacy-safe manner, with all data remaining at the hospital. They compared various LLMs on public reports without data protection and on data-protected reports. Commercial models that require data transfer to external servers showed no advantage over local, data protection-compliant models. The results have now been published in the journal "Radiology".

AI applications like ChatGPT are based on artificial neural networks that, in many respects, imitate the nerve cells in our brains. They are trained with vast quantities of data on high-performance computers, gobbling up massive amounts of energy in the process. Spiking neurons, which are much less energy-intensive, could be one solution to this problem. In the past, however, the normal techniques used to train them only worked with significant limitations. A recent study by the University of Bonn has now presented a possible new answer to this dilemma, potentially paving the way for new AI methods that are much more energy-efficient. The findings have been published in Physical Review Letters.