The Center for Development Research (ZEF) at the University of Bonn will receive around eight million Euros in funding over the next eight years from the International Climate Initiative of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection. The new CABES (Capacities on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) project aims to strengthen the interfaces between science, policy and practice in Africa and support networking with the international activities of the World Biodiversity Council (IPBES). Another goal of the project is to train early career scientists as intermediaries. To this end, new Master degree programs are being established in Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The University of Bonn has again recruited high-ranking personalities. Prof. Dr. Carmen Ruiz de Almodóvar and Prof. Dr. Martin Keßler are now taking up so-called Schlegel Professorships, which are financed by excellence funds. The internationally recognized researchers will open up new fields of research at the University of Bonn and provide important impulses in the life sciences and Protestant theology.
Whether nectar-sucking butterflies or blood-sucking mosquitoes - the ingestion of liquid food has long been known for many insects and other arthropods. A research team from Germany and Switzerland, led by the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB) and the University of Bonn, now shows that millipedes also use a sucking pump to ingest liquid food. A sucking pump has thus evolved independently in different groups of organisms over several 100 million years. In the process, astonishingly similar biomechanical solutions for ingesting liquid food have evolved in widely distant animal groups. The study results have now been published in the journal Science Advances.
Residential real estate in major cities is considered to be particularly profitable. However, the returns over the past 150 years have been lower on average than for properties in smaller cities. This is shown in a study by the team of economist Prof. Dr. Moritz Schularick, member of the Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy at the University of Bonn. The study is the first of its kind to provide historical comparisons of long-term total returns on residential portfolios, linking house price data and rental yields. It was published in advance as "ECONtribute Discussion Paper".
How can a customized chemotherapy be found for cancer, for example? Machine learning methods can help with this and also improve patient treatment for other diseases. The start-up project aimed analytics at the University of Bonn has developed a modular analysis system that precisely groups patients on the basis of medical Big Data. The team of Dr. Kevin Baßler, Dr. Patrick Günther and Karsten Waltemathe has now received a coveted EXIST start-up grant of 130,000 euros from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy for one year.
Research across disciplinary boundaries: the Transdisciplinary Research Unit "Life and Health" at the University of Bonn has rewarded some of its members with its bi-annual internal research prize. For their creative and innovative approaches, the project teams, which involve up to three researchers working together receive start-up funding of 50,000 euros each. They come from the disciplines of biology, biotechnology, nutritional sciences and medicine.
The brain has neurons that fire specifically during certain mathematical operations. This is shown by a recent study conducted by the Universities of Tübingen and Bonn. The findings indicate that some of the neurons detected are active exclusively during additions, while others are active during subtractions. They do not care whether the calculation instruction is written down as a word or a symbol. The results have now been published in the journal Current Biology.
Researchers at the University and the University Hospital of Bonn have developed a method that could be used to diagnose atherosclerosis. Using self-learning software, they were able to identify vascular changes in patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD), often at an early stage. Although these early stages do not yet cause symptoms, they are nevertheless already associated with increased mortality. The algorithm used photos from an organ not normally associated with PAD: the eye. The results have now been published in the journal Scientific Reports.