Covid-19, climate change, populism, and not least the Ukraine war make the question of how and whether reconciliation is possible highly topical and relevant. The new Bonner Zentrum für Versöhnungsforschung (Center for Reconciliation Research) at the University of Bonn bundles research on this topic in cooperation with partner organizations. The center’s aim is to analyze reconciliation practices in an interdisciplinary and comparative way looking at different cultural, social and regional contexts. The official opening will take place on June 22 at 6:30 pm in the Festsaal of the University of Bonn. The opening lecture will be given by Prof. Dr. Moshe Zimmermann from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Journalists are invited to attend the event. Registration is requested at vforum@unibonn.de.

NeurotechEU, the European University of Brain and Technology, has invited its members to attend its semi-annual Board of Rectors meeting at Iuliu Hațieganu Medical and Pharmaceutical University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. In May a delegation from the University of Bonn Rectorate attended this meeting of the top governance board of the consortium to which the former is a member, called to inaugurate the second project phase.

Southern Africa has a rich bounty of crop varieties, crop wild relatives, orphan crops and underutilised plant species, collectively known as plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (PGRFA), which have sustained generations of local farmers and rural communities and enabled them to cope with changing environmental conditions. The project "Farmer Resilience and Melon Crop Diversity in southern Africa" (FRAMe) aims at a future-oriented agriculture of crop diversity using melons as an example. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the project with more than 300,000 euros over the next three years.

Water droplets simply roll off - and clean the surface and reduce infestation with fungal spores, for example. But not only plants have the "lotus effect," which Professor Wilhelm Barthlott of the University of Bonn discovered four decades ago. Land living Cyanobacteria (Hassallia byssoidea) also use extreme water repellency to protect themselves from water films and competitors. That's according to a research team led by Barthlott in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science. 

Life and health matter(s): At an exceptional networking event, members of the Transdisciplinary Research Areas "Building Blocks of Matter and Fundamental Interactions" (Matter) and "Life and Health" at the University of Bonn got to know each other and exchanged ideas.

Plesiosaurs, which lived about 210 million years ago, adapted to life underwater in a unique way: their front and hind legs evolved in the course of evolution to form four uniform, wing-like flippers. In her thesis supervised at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the University of Bonn, Dr. Anna Krahl investigated how they used these to move through the water. Partly by using the finite element method, which is widely used in engineering, she was able to show that it was necessary to twist the flippers in order to travel forward. She was able to reconstruct the movement sequence using bones, models and reconstructions of the muscles. She reports her findings in the PeerJ magazine.

Since June 1, there is the 9-Euro-Ticket in Germany, with which one can use the public transport nationwide. Students at the University of Bonn can also benefit from this offer. Until the end of August, the extended area of use (Germany-wide on local public transport) applies to them. In addition, they will be refunded money paid over and above the 9 euros. The General Students' Committee (AStA) and the University administration have agreed on the modalities.

Code Intelligence, which grew out of a startup at the University of Bonn, is receiving $12 million in funding led by Tola Capital. Code Intelligence helps developers by providing a platform to find and fix security vulnerabilities before the product is finished.