Assistant Professor Amelie Schiprowski from the University of Bonn has received the €25,000 German Business Award from the Joachim Herz Foundation for her outstanding work in the field of labor economics. Presented every two years since 2016, the accolade honors researchers who have produced significant interdisciplinary research work.

Together with the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, researchers from the University of Bonn have deciphered the oldest place name sign in the world. An inscription from the time of the emergence of the Egyptian state in the late fourth millennium B.C. from the Wadi el Malik east of Aswan, which is still barely explored archaeologically, bears four hieroglyphs: "Domain of the Horus King Scorpion".

How do laser beams get the right shape? A question that occupies not just some fantasy heroes, but also physicists at the University of Bonn. In the course of their research, three of them have found a solution to the problem that is so practical that it has aroused the interest not only of the scientific community, but now also of industry experts: The start-up project "Midel Photonics" by Dr. David Dung, Dr. Christian Wahl and Frederik Wolf is one of twelve start-ups selected this year for the state-wide "HIGH-TECH.NRW" program.

The University of Bonn and the Japanese National Institutes for the Humanities (NIHU) have signed a cooperation agreement. It defines the terms of cooperation between the two institutions in research and comes into force on December 1, 2020.

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) have the potential to convert into a wide variety of cell types and tissues for drug testing and cell replacement therapies. However, the "recipes" for this conversion are often complicated and difficult to implement. Researchers at the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) at TU Dresden, Harvard University (USA) and the University of Bonn have found a way to systematically extract hundreds of different cells quickly and easily from iPS using transcription factors, including neurons, connective tissue and blood vessel cells. Researchers can use this transcription factor source through the non-profit organization Addgene. The results have now been published in the journal "Nature Biotechnology".

Two Collaborative Research Centers (CRCs) at the University of Bonn—Transregio (TRR) 110 “Symmetries and the Emergence of Structure in Quantum Chromodynamics” and 1060 “The Mathematics of Emergent Effects”—have enjoyed considerable success over the past few years, and the German Research Foundation (DFG) has now agreed to continue funding them for the next three and a half and four years respectively.

The German Research Foundation (DFG) is setting up a new Collaborative Research Center (CRC) at the University of Bonn. CRC 1454 “Metaflammation and Cellular Programming” will focus on the relationship between a western lifestyle and chronic inflammatory illnesses, e.g. how excessive calorie intake and insufficient exercise can increase the likelihood of developing cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative conditions or a metabolic syndrome. The center’s speaker is Professor Eicke Latz.

Over the last 40,000 years, ice sheets thousands of miles apart have been influencing each other through changes in sea level. An international team of researchers with the participation of the University of Bonn compared models of ice sheet changes during the latest ice age cycle with newly available geological records. The study, led by Natalya Gomez of McGill University in Montreal (Canada), shows for the first time that changes in the Antarctic ice sheet in the south during this period were influenced by melting ice sheets in the northern hemisphere. The results have now been published in the journal Nature.