Two researchers at the Göttingen Campus have been awarded ERC Starting Grants by the European Research Council (ERC). Ecologist Dr Anggi Hapsari from the University of Göttingen receives funding of around two million euros for her project "SaLtedPeat: Potential impact of sea level rise related salinization on lowland tropical coastal peatlands". Neuroscientist Dr Oliver Barnsted from the European Neuroscience Institute Göttingen (ENI-G) receives funding of around 1.5 million euros for his project “LearnMamBo: Neuronal dynamics of learning and memory in the mammillary body“. Both projects will run for five years.

 

Graphene is an extraordinary material – a sheet of interlocking carbon atoms just one atom thick that is stable and extremely conductive. This makes it useful in a range of areas, such as flexible electronic displays, highly precise sensors, powerful batteries, and efficient solar cells. A new study – led by the University of Göttingen, working together with colleagues from Braunschweig and Bremen in Germany, and Fribourg in Switzerland – now takes graphene’s potential to a whole new level. Researchers have directly observed “Floquet effects” in graphene for the first time. This resolves a long-standing debate: Floquet engineering – a method in which the properties of a material are very precisely altered using pulses of light – also works in metallic and semi-metallic quantum materials such as graphene. The study was published in Nature Physics.

Genetically engineered cell lines used in biomedical research have long been prone to misidentification and unauthorized use, wasting billions of dollars each year and jeopardizing critical scientific discoveries. These problems not only undermine reproducibility of research results, but also put valuable intellectual property at risk.

Now, researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have developed a novel method to embed unique genetic identifiers in engineered cell lines, eliminating identification errors and safeguarding innovations with tamper-proof genomic tags.

Researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo improve the accuracy of land surface models in capturing terrestrial water and energy budgets. Their combined hillslope water dynamic and vegetation model predicts the division of precipitation into soil moisture, evapotranspiration and runoff with improved accuracy. This new approach to land surface modeling is hoped to inform sustainable land and water management.