How do we look at life? At 4:30 pm on October 24, ethicist Professor Christiane Woopen will be discussing this question from a range of angles and discipline-specific perspectives together with the deans of all the faculties at the University of Bonn, an early-career researcher and a student. The event is being held to mark the official opening of the Center for Life Ethics and the associated House for Young Thinkers, both of them founded and led by Professor Woopen herself. Guests will also include Hendrik Wüst, state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), and Katja Dörner, Mayor of Bonn. Anyone who is interested is welcome to watch a livestream of the opening ceremony at https://youtu.be/ugKF793LcrI.

The University of Bonn will be celebrating its International Days from October 19 to 31, which will be dedicated to its international partnerships and the varied activities and services it offers relating to internationality. From high-caliber speakers and roundtables featuring guests from around the world through to the state awards presentation ceremony and a range of artistic performances, there is bound to be something for anyone who might be interested. One of the real highlights will be the Japan Day on October 26.

The University of Bonn is to welcome in the new academic year 2022/2023 with a ceremony in the fully occupied main auditorium of its main building starting at 5 pm on Tuesday, October 18. All members of the University, including students in particular, are warmly invited to attend: The proceedings will be livestreamed online.

In the latest World University Rankings published by the British magazine Times Higher Education (THE), the University of of Bonn has moved up 23 places compared with the previous year and is now ranked 89th among the almost 1,800 educational institutions evaluated worldwide. For the World University Rankings, various indicators are collected in the five areas of research, teaching, citations, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

In fossil leaves, puzzling structures are often visible under the microscope. Researchers at the University of Bonn have now been able to show for the first time that they originate from calcium oxalate crystals. On the one hand, their discovery facilitates the identification of the ancient plant remains. But it also provides answers as to how the ability to form such crystals arose and what function they presumably perform. The results have now been published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

Understanding the brain with artificial intelligence - that is the major research goal of Dominik Bach, who has been Hertz Professor in the Transdisciplinary Research Area "Life and Health" at the University of Bonn as of April this year. At an international symposium centering on his inaugural lecture, he invited several colleagues to discuss their research at the interface between neuroscience, mathematics and computer science.

A new study led by the University of Tasmania – with the participation of the University of Bonn – discovered the oldest marine DNA in deep-sea sediments of the Scotia Sea north of the Antarctic continent. The material could be dated to one million years. Such old material demonstrates that sedimentary DNA can open the pathway to study long-term responses of ocean ecosystems to climate change. This recognition will also help assessing current and future change of marine life around the frozen continent. The study appeared in the journal Nature Communications.

Sixteen universities from North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) have come together to form the Humboldtⁿ sustainability initiative. The initiative’s first interdisciplinary summer school has now been held at the University of Bonn, with support provided by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the state of NRW.