Events & Opportunities

How do pollution and climate change affect health and the associated costs? How do people adapt to their environmental conditions, and what factors are crucial for such adaptability? Julia Mink, new Argelander Professor at the University of Bonn, addresses these and other questions. In the Transdisciplinary Research Area "Individuals, Institutions and Societies", she will work at the interface of environmental and health economics.

If you need to lurk at the bottom of a water body waiting for prey, it is wise to stay motionless without resisting against the buoyant forces of water. To do so you need a kind of diving belt that helps to sink. One large amphibian species Metoposaurus krasiejowensis, that lived more than 200 million years ago, compensated for buoyancy with a heavy shoulder girdle. Researchers from the Universities of Bonn and Opole (Poland) examined the bones of the girdle under a microscope. The compactness in the interclavicle shows a striking resemblance to the pectoral bones of modern manatees. The results are now published in the Journal of Anatomy.

For their outstanding research achievements, mathematicians Prof. Dr. Ana Caraiani and Jun.-Prof. Dr. Vera Traub of the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics (HCM) at the University of Bonn have each received an award from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. The $100,000 New Horizons Prize in Mathematics recognizes Ana Caraiani as an early-career scientists who has already made a significant impact on her field. Vera Traub, junior professor at the Research Institute for Mathematics, receives the $50,000 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize, which is awarded to up to three outstanding women mathematicians who have completed their PhDs within the past two years.

The zebrafish serves as a model organism for researchers around the world: it can be used to study important physiological processes that also take place in a similar form in the human body. It is therefore routinely used in the search for possible active substances against diseases. Researchers at the University of Bonn have now described an innovative way to do this. In this process, the larvae fish are made a bit more "human-like". This humanization could make the search for active pharmaceutical substances much more efficient. The results of the pilot study have been published in the journal Cell Chemical Biology.

If everything is to run smoothly in living cells, the genetic information must be correct. But unfortunately, errors in the DNA accumulate over time due to mutations. Land plants have developed a peculiar correction mode: they do not directly improve the errors in the genome, but rather elaborately in each individual transcript. Researchers at the University of Bonn have transplanted this correction machinery from the moss Physcomitrium patens into human cells. Surprisingly, the corrector started working there too, but according to its own rules. The results have now been published in the journal "Nucleic Acids Research".

Am I over the hill? This question comes up regularly among workers over 50. A common prejudice is that older people’s efficiency and stress-tolerance are continuously decreasing. But mental performance, self-confidence, psychological resilience and well-being can be improved in the 50-plus generation. This is shown in a study by researchers from the Section of Developmental and Educational Psychology at the University of Bonn, which was published online in advance in the European Journal of Ageing. The print version is expected to be released in December.

Prof. Dr. Christian Bayer, an economist at the University of Bonn, has received this year's Hermann Heinrich Gossen Award from the Verein für Socialpolitik (VfS) in recognition of his outstanding and internationally recognized research achievements. The prize is awarded once a year to an economist under the age of 45 from a German-speaking country. It is endowed with 10,000 euros and is intended to promote the internationalization of economics.