Possible bomb disposal operation in Bonn-Poppelsdorf on April 8th, 2024
Research and Study at the University of Excellence in Bonn
The best minds have been able to develop their potential at the University of Excellence in Bonn for over 200 years. Find out more about our strategy in the competition for excellence. Discover our Transdisciplinary Research Areas. Get to know our cross-sectional tasks to improve equal opportunities and sustainability within the scientific community. Welcome to Bonn - welcome to the world.
In what is an intriguing mix of past and future, an international team of researchers, including some from the University of Bonn, has stumbled upon a surprising window to the past in Kourou in French Guiana. In the clay underneath the new launch pad for the forthcoming Ariane 6 launch vehicle, the interdisciplinary team has uncovered a remarkable collection of fossils stretching back 130,000 years. Covering over 270 species in total, including bony fish, sharks and numerous plants, they reflect the kind of climatic conditions that calculations suggest are set to reoccur in the year 2100. The team’s findings have now been published in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.”
The Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung is to present the Heinz Gumin Prize for Mathematics to Don Zagier, who was a director of the Bonn-based Max Planck Institute for Mathematics until 2019 and has strong ties to the University of Bonn. The foundation is thus honoring his pioneering research into number theory and the theory of modular forms. The Gumin Prize is worth €50,000, making it the most generous award for mathematics in Germany.
There can be no analysis without data. In this spirit, researchers from the University of Bonn and the Swiss Federal Institution of Technology (ETH) Zurich have published a database containing over 6,000 agri-environmental policies, thus enabling their peers as well as policymakers and businesses to seek answers to all manner of different questions. The researchers have used two examples to demonstrate how this can be done: how a country’s economic development is linked to its adoption of agri-environmental policies and how such policies impact soil erosion. Their study has now been published in “Nature Food.”
Tiny organisms such as bacteria and fungi help to promote the health and function of plant roots. It is commonly assumed that the composition of these microbes is dependent on the properties of the soil. However, an international team of researchers led by the University of Bonn has now discovered when studying different local varieties of maize that the genetic makeup of the plants also helps to influence which microorganisms cluster around the roots. The results, which have now been published in the prestigious journal Nature Plants, could help to breed future varieties of maize that are better suited to drought and limited nutrients.
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