Leopoldina and Stifterverband honor atmospheric researcher Johannes Lelieveld with the 2024 Carl-Friedrich-von-Weizsäcker-Prize
Grant and Award Announcement
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 18-Oct-2025 00:11 ET (18-Oct-2025 04:11 GMT/UTC)
The chemist Johannes Lelieveld uses innovative measurement methods and computer models to examine how chemical and meteorological processes impact Earth’s atmosphere. His research offers vital insights into the atmosphere’s self-cleaning capacity as well as into the influence of different kinds of emissions on climate and human health. The German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Stifterverband are honouring his achievements with the 2024 Carl-Friedrich-von-Weizsäcker-Prize. The prize, endowed with 30,000 euros, is awarded for scientific achievements that deal with important challenges facing society. It is thus the German award for scientists working in the area of science-based policy advice.
This paper proposes GAN-Solar, a novel quality optimization model for short-term solar radiation forecasting. Based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), the model addresses spatial texture degradation and intensity distortion in predictions, significantly improving forecast quality and reliability for high-precision applications.
Researchers conducted a detailed mobile observation survey of methane emissions in the Osaka metropolitan area. Researchers found overlooked sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
George Gamow® award, established by the Russian-American Association of Scientists (RASA-America, Russian-American Science Association) in memory of the outstanding Russian-American physicist, Professor Georgy Antonovich Gamow (1904-1968) and to encourage members of the Russian-speaking scientific diaspora for outstanding achievements recognized by the wider scientific community, for 2024 is awarded to:
Anna Krylov professor of the University of Southern California “For her pioneering contributions to theoretical and computational chemistry, particularly the development of novel electronic structure methods for open-shell and electronically excited species; for her leadership within the theoretical chemistry community; and for her advocacy of scientific integrity and academic freedom”.
Mikhail Yampolsky, professor of the New York University “For his uniquely original contributions as a cultural theorist and commentator, whose work bridges literature, film, philosophy, and social theory; for the breadth and depth of his scholarship, which have reshaped the study of Russian culture and intellectual history; and for his influential critical voice in Russian and international intellectual life” .
Pulsars suggest that ultra–low-frequency gravitational waves are rippling through the cosmos. The signal seen by international pulsar timing array collaborations in 2023 could come from a stochastic gravitational-wave background—the sum of many distant sources—or from a single nearby binary of supermassive black holes. To tell these apart, Hideki Asada, theoretical physicist and Professor at Hirosaki University, and Shun Yamamoto, researcher at the Graduate School of Science and Technology, Hirosaki University, propose a method that exploits beat phenomena between gravitational waves at nearly the same frequency, searching for their imprint in the tiny shifts of pulsars’ radio-pulse arrival times.
Their work has just been published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics JCAP.POSTECH analyzed the contribution of wildfires to changes in fine particulate matter PM2.5 concentrations during drought periods.
Research groups led by Qing-Yuan Meng from the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Xiu-Long Yang from Hebei University recently reported a novel acylation reaction for photocatalytic cleavage of olefin double bonds. Using a metal-free continuous photoredox catalytic strategy, they achieved a tertiary amine-mediated acylation of aromatic olefins via carbon-carbon double bond cleavage under mild conditions, resulting in the synthesis of a series of α-aryl ketones. Through controlled experiments and theoretical calculations, they explored the reaction mechanism, including the cleavage of both the π and σ bonds of the olefins, providing a new strategy for functionalization based on olefin double bond cleavage. This method exhibits excellent functional group compatibility and has potential applications in the synthesis and structural modification of bioactive molecules. These results were published as an open access article in CCS Chemistry, the flagship journal of the Chinese Chemical Society.