The Amazon region is a global hotspot of biodiversity and plays a key role in the climate system because of its ability to store large amounts of carbon and its influence on the global water cycle. The rain forest is threatened, however, by climate change as well as by intensified deforestation activities. An international team of researchers that includes scientists from MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, the Faculty of Geosciences, and the Institute of Environmental Physics of the University of Bremen, have investigated how a change in Atlantic circulation would impact the Amazon Rain Forest. Their results were now published in Nature Geoscience journal.

The new Belle II experiment recently made a world-leading measurement of the lifetime of a particular charmed baryon, a particle that is produced and decays very quickly under very high energy levels similar to the universe shortly after the Big Bang. This demonstrates the experiment’s ability to make the extremely precise measurements of the sort needed to discover physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

Black holes: 

The temperature of elementary particles has been observed in the radioactive glow following the collision of two neutron stars and the birth of a black hole. This has, for the first time, made it possible to measure the microscopic, physical properties in these cosmic events. Simultaneously, it reveals how snapshot observations made in an instant represents an object stretched out across time. The discovery was made by astrophysicists from the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen and is published in the international scientific journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics”.

Recently, an innovative collaboration between Prof. Wang Shuming's group at Nanjing University and Assis. Prof. Hu Guangwei's team at Nanyang Technological University has resulted in the publication of a comprehensive review article titled "Ultrafast Metaphotonics" in Ultrafast Science, a partner journal of Science. This article introduces an exciting new interdisciplinary field that combines ultrafast optics and metamaterials, focusing on two pivotal research areas: the generation and modulation of ultrafast optical signals using metamaterials, and the ultrafast control of metamaterial devices.

- Professor Yong-Hoon Kim's team from the School of Electrical Engineering succeeded for the first time in accelerating quantum mechanical electronic structure calculations using a convolutional neural network (CNN) model

- Presenting an AI learning principle of quantum mechanical 3D chemical bonding information, the work is expected to accelerate the computer-assisted designing of next-generation materials and devices

The continuing release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a major driver of global warming and climate change with increased extreme weather events. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have now presented a method for effectively converting carbon dioxide into ethanol, which is then available as a sustainable raw material for chemical applications.