On location

Cables and conduits, hoses and pipes surround this large apparatus like a cage. The assembly standing in the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics is Wendelstein 7-X, the world’s largest and most state-of-the-art stellarator nuclear fusion installation. Researchers here are attempting to force atomic nuclei to fuse as they would in the sun. They have constructed an annular chamber from metal and graphite plates with a diameter of five-and-a-half meters for this purpose. The chamber will be filled with hydrogen gas that is to be transformed into plasma with a temperature of 50 million degrees. Plasma is known as the “fourth aggregate state,” in which the electrons and nuclei in atoms separate from each other. When the plasma “burns,” the atomic particles collide with great force and can fuse, which releases large quantities of energy that could be used to fuel power plants. That is the long-term goal of this research.

To generate plasma, electromagnetic waves heat up a few milligrams of gas. One of the greatest challenges is keeping the plasma, and thus the fusion reaction, stable over a longer period of time. Wendelstein 7-X is intended to prove that continuous stable operation is possible for 30 minutes. The stellarator uses 50 enormous magnetic coils for this purpose. They are positioned around the plasma chamber and essentially keep the plasma hovering in a magnetic field. To make the coils superconductive, the magnets are cooled to a temperature of -270 degrees Celsius.
Most of the conduits in the image are part of the cooling system. The other technology monitors and controls the plasma inside the chamber. Various measurement devices are located on the thick, protruding pipes. These measure values such as the temperature, pressure, density, and composition of the plasma. In the most recent phase of the experiment, the research team succeeded in heating the plasma to 20 million degrees and maintaining that temperature for eight minutes. Some 1.3 gigajoules of energy were used, and the goal is to increase this amount to 18 gigajoules in the coming years.
 

The Arctic tundra is an extreme habitat. Even in summer, when the sun does not set, temperatures rarely rise above 5 to 10 degrees Celsius. And yet thousands of migratory birds breed in this largely treeless landscape. Ideal conditions for ornithologists to study the influence of light on the courtship behavior and the “internal clock” of birds. Bart Kempenaers from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence chose the surroundings of Utqiaġvik in Alaska’s extreme north for this purpose. The northernmost city in the U.S. emerged out of a winter camp established by the indigenous Iñupiat, which had existed here for centuries. In the language of the Iñupiat, the name means “place where we hunt snowy owls.”

Over several summers, Kempenaers and his team investigated four migratory bird species with different ways of life: sandpipers, pectoral sandpipers, Lapland buntings, and gray phalaropes. The latter is one of the few bird species in which only the males take care of rearing the young. In contrast, male pectoral sandpipers display and fight intensively and almost non-stop in order to mate with as many females as possible throughout the short Arctic summer. The males who produce the most young are the ones who remain vigorous despite hardly sleeping at all. The predominantly monogamous Lapland buntings, on the other hand, maintain a strict 24-hour daily rhythm despite the lack of day-night changes. The “internal clock” seems to be much more flexible than expected, depending on social and environmental factors.
Even though the scientists have solid ground under their feet and look out over the frozen polar sea, most of the tundra is swampy in the polar summer. And so the researchers spend most of their time standing in water at temperatures just above freezing, sometimes up to their thighs. The special boots keep them reliably warm and dry – and some of the team wonder why their winter shoes can’t do the same for them back home.
 

Humanity’s origins lie in Africa. From there, Homo sapiens spread all over the world: from Europe and Asia to Australia and the islands of the Pacific. During this period of unprecedented hominin migration, the Americas were the last continental landmasses to be occupied in the Late Pleistocene. Around 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, humans migrated from Asia to the Americas through an ice-free land corridor in the Bering Strait region and expanded southwards from there. At that time, the Americas were home to many large mammals, including elephants, rhinoceroses, and horses, but also giant ground sloths – more than six meters long and several tons in weight. Together they are known as the North American megafauna. However, at the end of the Late Pleistocene, around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, most of these animals became extinct at the same time as humans spread throughout the continents. Is this a mere coincidence or could these events be linked? Are humans partly responsible for the extinction of the megafauna? Or, in the case of the sloths, maybe even the primary cause? Perhaps they hunted these large, very slow-moving animals to extinction?

Óscar Solis Torres from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology is investigating these questions. He is exploring tropical caves on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, where some of the earliest known traces of human presence on the American continents have been found. Solis Torres is looking for evidence of human presence and the remains of megafauna – in this case in the Sac Actun cave system on the northeastern coast of Yucatan. The challenge: the stalactite caves of the Sistema Sac Actun have been under water for around 9000 years. With 347 kilometers discovered to date, Sac Actun is one of the largest underwater cave systems in the world. It is also one of the most important sites of underwater archaeology.
 

Modern societies are shaped by globalization. Yet the further this progresses, the deeper the rifts within society seem to become. Why is that? How do people who live in the same city, even the same village, become alienated from one another? What dictates who belongs and who is an outsider? The project “Alpine Histories of Global Change,” based at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, is tackling these questions using the example of four villages in the German-speaking alpine region. The researchers are working in Austria, Italy (Alto Adige / South Tirol), Germany, and Switzerland. On the one hand, the regions they are studying are characterized by long traditions of cross-border exchange. On the other hand, they are also centers of historically anchored, widespread support for antiliberal, right-wing movements.

One of these places is Obermillstatt in the Carinthian Nockberge mountains. The rural village, with a current population of just under 600, is located above Lake Millstatt on an old Roman trade route – the village has a tourist tradition stretching back to the late 19th century. Outsiders, such as political leaders in the cities, tend to regard people who live in the countryside as old-fashioned and traditionalist. In the villages, meanwhile, there is huge distrust of politics, and official information is viewed with skepticism. This historically entrenched divide between town and country was revealed to the researchers during the Coronavirus pandemic as well. Conspiracy theories quickly caught on in the villages, and resistance to orders from “the ones at the top” was seen as necessary and legitimate. Here, the inhabitants of the mountain villages see themselves as proud, independent advocates of “common sense,” which they consciously understand as a counterpart to the scientifically based findings of the liberal elites in the cities.
 

At around 4,000 metres below the surface, the Arctic Ocean is far less deep than Jules Verne once imagined. And yet it is an enigmatic realm: cold, dark, covered with ice, hardly any organic material on the seabed as a breeding ground for microorganisms. Can life truly thrive here, in such extreme conditions?

Notable pockets of life in the deep sea are so-called black smokers: formed where tectonic plates converge, these underwater volcanoes give rise to hydrothermal vents. Here, very hot, oxygen-free water emerges, in which large quantities of iron, manganese, copper as well as sulphur compounds, hydrogen and methane are dissolved. As this heated water mingles with the surrounding frigid, oxygen-rich lake water, minerals precipitate, giving rise to grey-black "smoke" columns – hence  the name "black smoker”. Remarkably diverse biotopes can evolve around these smokers, accommodating species exclusive to this environment. Bacteria use sulphur and hydrogen as an energy source and thus form the basis of a species-rich food chain: tubeworms, crabs, mussels and evencertain fish.

For a long time, researchers were convinced that there were neither volcanoes nor hydrothermal vents in the Arctic Ocean. Yet in the early 2000s, they were first discovered: situated on the Gakkel Ridge, an underwater mountain range extending from Greenland to Siberia. The black smoker Enceladus, seen here, is located in the Aurora Vent Field at the westernmost tip of the Gakkel Ridge. During an expedition aboard the research vessel Polarstern, a team from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology undertook an in-depth exploration of the Sulfurimonas bacteria genus in this locale. One newly discovered species carries clues in its genome as to what the ecological connection between this highly specialized habitat and the open ocean might look like.
 

The late Gothic Palazzo Chiaramonte in Palermo, also called Lo Steri (Fortress Palace), has a checkered history. Today, it is one of Palermo’s tourist attractions, but in the 17th and 18th  centuries, the Steri was the center of the Inquisition court and its dark prisons. People of various religions and backgrounds were imprisoned here. The walls of the cells are covered with drawings – multiple layers of them in some cases. Depictions of religious scenes are accompanied by maps and inscriptions in many languages, including Italian, Sicilian, Hebrew, Latin, and English.

The picture shows Christ’s descent into the underworld, iconography that is still very significant today, especially in the Eastern Orthodox Church. During the time between his death on the cross and his resurrection on Easter night, Christ descends into the realm of the dead. There he redeems the souls of the righteous – personified here by the patriarchs of the Old Testament – from the jaws of Leviathan, the biblical monster that devours sinners. A small gate on the left side of the drawing symbolizes the entrance to the dungeons. The inscription below corresponds to the one written on the gate to Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, usually translated as “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” However, Christ gives believers hope for redemption.

Housed at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Art History Institute, Florence), the project Graffiti Art in Prison is an international partnership led by the Università degli Studi di Palermo to explore both historical and contemporary graffiti and murals. It delves into places of captivity, deprivation, and censorship – prisons, concentration camps, psychiatric clinics – and the creative reactions to these environments: material, physical,  psychological, political, social, religious, spatial, and temporal.
 

The question of “what holds the world together in its inmost folds” was already on the mind of Goethe’s Faust all those years ago. Some considerable time has passed since then, nevertheless, the forces that hold the world together at the molecular level are still the subject of research today. Scientists at the Fritz Haber Institute (FHI) in Berlin, for example, are interested in the forces that act between atoms in molecules.

Each molecule has its own typical vibration spectrum – a fingerprint, as it were, that can be determined with the help of laser-like infrared radiation. The method of choice for generating such intense infrared radiation with adjustable wavelengths is a free-electron laser (FEL): in a vacuum, electrons are first accelerated to nearly the speed of light. These high-energy electrons then pass through very strong magnetic fields in what is known as an undulator. The undulator sets the electrons in wave-like motion. This causes the electrons to emit photons – in a concentrated, intense beam. In principle, free-electron lasers can generate electromagnetic radiation of almost any wavelength, although this often involves radiation in the X-ray range, which has the shortest possible wavelength. For the experiments at FHI, meanwhile, long-wave radiation in the infrared range is required and generated.

Here, electronics engineer Marco De Pas checks the connections of the electromagnets used to deflect the electron beam on its way between the accelerator and the undulator. The scene is reminiscent of a stage on which a percussionist stands behind their instruments. There, as here, everything has to be coordinated very precisely to achieve the right outcome.
 

Its shape resembles that of a diamond, and it is indeed something of a scientific treasure: Ryugu, an asteroid roughly one kilometer in size that rounds the Sun once every 475 days, passing through Earth’s orbit in the process. But don’t worry, the cosmic rock doesn’t pose any danger to us. It has been the subject of research for some years now – and has already received visitors. The Japanese space agency sent the Hayabusa 2 probe to the celestial body in 2014. After taking soil samples, the scout flew back and dropped off its precious cargo near the Australian town of Woomera in December 2020.

Five grams from the “Dragon Palace,” which is what “Ryugu” means in Japanese, ended up in various labs on earth and were subjected to a thorough analysis. The material exhibits a loose, granular structure and shows obvious signs of prolonged reaction with water. Amino acids and other complex organic molecules were also found.

But where did Ryugu come from? Although it travels quite close to the sun, it probably originates from further afield. This is, at least, what studies conducted by the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research show. According to them, the Dragon Palace was born at the furthest edge of the solar system. The parent bodies of carbon-rich asteroids – including Ryugu – were formed there more than  4.5 billion years ago. As the gas and ice giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune grew and got nearer, the play of forces whirled it on a turbulent journey voyage the Sun.
 

Anyone wishing to listen in on the music of the universe needs fine instruments – instruments such as those installed in LIGO. On September 14th, 2015, the twin detectors of the U.S. Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected gravitational waves. It was a world first – and scientist in Ruthe, Germany celebrated. Because in this small village hear Hannover, another trap for such ripples in space-time (which were first predicted by Albert Einstein) exists. At GEO600, researchers – including those from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics – investigate new detection techniques that will then be used in other, larger detectors around the world.

All such instruments are based on the principle of interferometry. This involves splitting laser light into two beams, which are then directed at right angles away from each other along two long arms. At their ends, they are reflected back again by mirrors and finally recombine and overlap with each other. From the resulting interference pattern, scientists can tell whether or not a gravitational wave has passed through the equipment. Such measurements are extremely challenging, and, as a result, the interior of GEO600 resembles a clean room in a virology laboratory. All personnel are required to wear protective goggles and specialized overalls, as a single speck of dust would compromise the sensitive measurements.

The laser beams run through two 600-meter stainless steel tubes that form a sophisticated vacuum system. The optical table in front of the three researchers generates “squeezed light.” This is one of the tricks the scientists employ to increase the sensitivity of a gravitational-wave detector. It mutes noise caused by quantum effects in the laser light by a factor of 2! With that, the GEO600 has set a new world record.
 

Perfume ban in the workplace - isn't that going a bit too far? Well, in order to study the sense of smell of insects,  even stranger precautions are necessary. Because some of them have such an extremely fine "nose" that they can even detect individual molecules of an odorant in the air. Bill Hansson and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology want to understand the evolution of the sense of smell. One of their favorite subjects is the tobacco hawkmoth Manduca sexta. The butterfly captures smells with its large, very movable antennae. With their help, the moths find their mates, nectar sources, and the plants on which the females lay eggs with absolute precision.

How do they do it? Do the animals have to learn this behaviour? Which structures in the brain are involved, and how? To find out, the researchers have a state-of-the-art wind tunnel at their disposal. The facility generates up to 800 liters of fully air-conditioned air per second, the temperature can be regulated in the range of 15 to 30°C, the humidity from 20 to 90 percent. The air is always freshly drawn in and conditioned. Lighting is provided by a luminous ceiling made of LEDs, which can simulate day and night light.

Tobacco hawkmoths are predominantly nocturnal, so the experiment shown here takes place in red light, which the animals cannot see. The moth starts from a transport dish, at the other end of the tunnel a tobacco plant is positioned. Its natural scents or odorants placed there are carried by the wind coming in behind the plant in the direction of the butterfly, whose behaviour can now be closely observed and recorded.
 

At this kindergarten in a community center in Bamako, the capital of Mali, children usually romp and play. But today, the focus is all about a sense of rhythm, informal learning and also cultural stereotypes.

Rainer Polak and Nori Jacoby from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics have rented the premises to research traditional dance and music in West Africa. They’ve engaged several groups of local professional artists. A drum ensemble with three musicians, two singers and several dancers  are involved. All elements of this live session are recorded via multimedia. Video cameras capture the performance from several perspectives, the membranes of all the drums have been fitted with sensors to directly pick up their mechanical vibrations. One of the dancers wears a motion capture suit incorporating seventeen sensors, each of which is simultaneously recording her movements’ acceleration, rotation and magnetic field data. This allows the movement of the dancer in the room to be precisely calculated and, for instance, correlated with the rhythms played by the instrumentalists.

The researchers from the Institute in Frankfurt regularly collect such and other data in Mali and Bolivia – and for comparison, also in Germany, Bulgaria, the U.S., Great Britain and Uruguay. They’ve discovered that people from different cultures perceive identical rhythms differently. Do Africans have more “rhythm in their blood” than Europeans? Probably not. The decisive factor is the person’s cultural familiarity with the rhythm in question – in other words, whether they’ve unconsciously become familiarized with it in their customary social environment.
 

It may look like a construction site, but it’s actually the test facility for a very special kind of observatory. Quite fittingly, the constellation of Orion – with its three characteristic stars forming the belt – can be seen in the sky above, providing a symbolic reference to the cosmos. The tank erected for these tests on the grounds of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics measures 11 meters across and six meters high, contains 550 metric tons of water – and is used to simulate a lake. But what does all of this have to do with astrophysics?

In the middle of the Chilean Andes, researchers are planning a facility known as the Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory (SWGO). One day, this facility will operate around the clock to observe high-energy radiation from the depths of the universe and measure it using an indirect method. The technique takes advantage of a phenomenon in which cosmic gamma photons produce veritable showers of particles in the atmosphere, which can be detected from the blue light they subsequently produce in water. One concept for the observatory envisages using a natural lake, from which water could be extracted, then purified on-site and used to fill balloons. These balloons would then be fitted with internal detectors and suspended in the lake.

The scientists want to use the tank in Heidelberg to test whether this idea actually works. The scaffolding allows them to literally submerge test balloons inside the tank. As part of this experiment, they are testing various balloon materials with regard to both their stability and their optical properties. In addition, a water-circulation and -filtration plant can set the artificial lake in gentle motion – creating the perfect simulation for a new window into outer space.
 

The KHI (Kunsthistorisches Institut) in Florence is one of the oldest research institutes dedicated to the history of art and architecture in Italy. Founded by a group of scholars as a private initiative in 1897, it has been part of the Max Planck Society since 2002 since which time its research profile has been expanded. How would one set about renovating the premises of such a prestigious Institute without curtailing its research activities? When the KHI was confronted with this challenge back in 2010, the suggestion was made to move the Photothek to the Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai for the duration of the works. The palace is located in the center of Florence between the Duomo and the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata, close to the Academy, the University and the KHI. This enabled the spatial integrity of important areas of the Kunsthistorisches Institut to be ensured during the time of the relocation.

The Renaissance-style Palazzo Grifoni was commissioned by Ugolino Grifoni and built in the 16th century and was later refurbished in 1890 when it was acquired by the Budini Gattai family. The, In 2010,  the Photothek was built into the reception rooms in the Piano nobile using a room-within-a-room concept , thus preserving the original structure of the listed historic halls. Every square inch was exploited to allow the approximately  620,000 photographs to remain freely accessible to researchers on open shelves, while also housing archival materials, the photo library, work desks, and a lecture hall.
 

Hiking, walking, learning a lot about flowers, grasses and trees as well as simultaneously being part of a scientific project – all of this is possible with the free Flora Incognita app. Easy-to-use, it quickly identifies thousands of wild plants. As a joint development of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena and the Technical University in Ilmenau, the underlying algorithm was first trained with several million images of plants. Now, it learns new data every time it is used.

So why not download the Flora Incognita app, take a photo, and find out what plants are currently in bloom all around you? And not only that, the app can do so much more. Is this plant poisonous? Is it rare or common? Is it a protected species? Flora Incognita offers users quick, on-site access to a great deal of knowledge about unfamiliar plants. At the same time, scientists obtain new data and facts about plant diversity. When do certain species flower, and where? How much do plants from a single species differ from each other? How does the composition of plant species change at a particular location? With this Citizen Science project, anyone can help to investigate biodiversity and how it is changing, for example through climate change or agriculture. And with a little help of artificial intelligence, a wildflower meadow – here in the Bavarian Alps –becomes a research location.

floraincognita.com

Quarks, leptons, photons, gluons – the world of physics features a bewildering diversity of particles – a veritable “particle zoo”. What’s more, some of these minuscule building blocks of matter occur in several different forms. One of the most abundant particles in the universe, the neutrino, exists in three types that are constantly transforming into one another in a phenomenon known as oscillation. This has wide-ranging consequences. For a long time, it was assumed that neutrinos had no mass – in other words, that they weighed nothing at all. But with absolutely no mass, oscillation between the three types of neutrino would quite simply be impossible.

Now, in order to measure the tiny mass of a neutrino, scientists have developed a very precise weighing scale. Dubbed KATRIN, this scale is located at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and consists of a high-precision spectrometer and an extremely strong tritium source. When this heavy variant of hydrogen undergoes radioactive decay, one electron and one neutrino are emitted. The energy released in this process is divided between the two particles – and the neutrino carries off at least as much energy as corresponds to its mass. Accordingly, the spectrometer data allows the scientists to draw conclusions about the “weight” of the neutrino.

The team led by Susanne Mertens from the Max Planck Institute for Physics is part of this international experiment. In 2019, the researchers calculated the mass of a neutrino for the very first time. The result: its mass is less than an electron volt. This is the world’s most accurate specification for the mass of a neutrino to date. However, the KATRIN scientists are certain that far greater precision can be achieved.
 

The big double “00” is misleading. That sign on a door in the hotel corridor traditionally means “restroom”. But the inhabitants of this dwelling certainly aren’t likely to get much rest. They’re glad instead to have found such a comfortable and safe home for their new family. These blue tits have moved into a “Smart Nest Box” in Westerholz, a mixed woodland region in southern Germany. This state-of-the-art nest box was designed by the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology. The blue tit chicks have hatched and want to be fed – quite a job for their parents! With the aid of the Smart Nest Box, ornithologists can track exactly which birds enter and exit the nest and at what time. An RFID data logger system records the presence and identity of the parents, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The birds carry tiny implanted transponders, allowing them to be individually identified. Coupled with a clock and two infrared light barriers, the system compiles an accurate activity profile for each of the breeding birds.

While blue tit pairs usually jointly rear their young, both partners may engage in additional sexual interactions. In recent years, it has become clear that this is far more common in blue tits than previously thought. What is the evolutionary advantage of rearing such “illegitimate” offspring? Thanks to the Smart Nest Box, the researchers have discovered that these chicks hatch earlier and are stronger than their half-siblings. In addition, nests containing only chicks from a cuckolded partner are rare, and in some of these cases, the social partner was found to be infertile. “Extramarital” copulation may, therefore, represent a kind of insurance against a social partner's infertility.

They are called Antu, Kueyen, Melipal and Yepun - in the language of the indigenous Mapuche people, these are the names of the Sun, the Moon, the Southern Cross and Venus. These four telescopes form the heart of the most modern observatory in the world, at an elevation of 2635 meters on the Cerro Paranal in the middle of the Atacama Desert in Chile. From here, the astronomers probe the depths of the universe with the main mirrors, each with a diameter of 8.2 m, and the four movable 1.8 m auxiliary telescopes. This Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory can be connected to an interferometer that produces images of the sky with an angular resolution of thousandths of an arc second. This level of precision would enable the two headlights of a car on the moon to be distinguishable from one another.

However, the telescope is only as good as its instruments. Max Planck scientists have helped to invent some of these, such as the Gravity and Matisse interferometers, the Spifi spectrograph and the Sphere planet hunter. Recently, researchers under the direction of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics succeeded in getting a clearer view into the heart of the Milky Way with their high-tech optics. There they were able to see that a star does not orbit the central black hole along a closed path, but rather describes an open curve in the form of a rosette. Albert Einstein predicted this effect more than a hundred years ago.

Up, down, backwards, forwards, upside down, the right way up – with seven independently controllable swivel joints, a twelve-meter linear axis and a cabin that can rotate 360 degrees while being maneuvered in six different directions, the CyberMotion Simulator (CMS) in Tuebingen offers an almost infinite range of possibilities for motion simulation. Although you wouldn‘t be blamed for thinking it, the purpose of this worldwide unique instrument is not to serve the development of the latest attraction at the Oktoberfest in Munich. Instead, the research team led by Heinrich Bülthoff at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics is using it to investigate the complex interactions between vision and balance in the human brain.

Constructed on the basis of an industrial robot arm, the CMS can move test subjects in almost every position imaginable. The person in the cabin can be guided passively along predefined tracks or control the motion themselves using a steering wheel or joystick. Even real helicopter flights can be simulated. The large, high-resolution display on the interior wall of the cabin provides the appropriate virtual reality scenario.

Or just the opposite! The scientists are particularly interested in the possibility of individually stimulating each of the sensory organs responsible for spatial orientation. In this way, they can for example investigate what causes the dizziness that not seldom occurs when people are moving in virtual spaces, for example when playing computer games that require VR glasses. This is also highly significant for the development of autonomous vehicles. By the time that passengers will have developed enough trust in the self-driving car to occupy themselves with completely different activities during the journey, their physical self-awareness will not coincide with the information delivered by the eyes to the cerebral cortex in the brain. And quite a few people react to this with nausea.

Tropical rainforests are home to about two thirds of all known animal and plant species. It is beyond debate that they are essential for the climate of the entire Earth. However, the fact that they can also tell us a great deal about the cultural aspects of past times has been largely ignored – until now.

The giant, centuries-old tropical trees are living time capsules for those who know how to interpret them. During their lifespans, they absorb carbon from the air as well as water and minerals from the soil, incorporating them into their wood. Researchers at the Max Planck Institutes for the Science of Human History, Developmental Biology, and Biogeochemistry combine modern analytical methods such as dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analysis, and gene analysis to reconstruct changes in the growth conditions of trees. In this image, a relevant sample is being taken from a several hundred-year-old Brazil nut tree in the Tefé National Park in Brazil.

The researchers’ studies also make it possible to understand the effects of human activities on the forest ecosystem. Contrary to popular opinion, the peoples of the rain forest have been cultivating this region from 10,000 years ago. Far-reaching events such as wars and colonialism have left their marks on the tree archive just as deeply as the industrial extraction of rubber and precious woods for worldwide consumption have.

Just reaching the space port is an odyssey. It will take you about 24 hours to get from Munich to Baikonur – in the middle of nowhere, some 200 kilometers east of the North Aral Sea. Close to the city, with a population of 60000, a handful of decent hotels and some good restaurants, the Cosmodrome has been launching rockets since 1957 – first Soviet, now Russian. Over the years, many a dream has literally gone up in smoke here, but many have also come true. July 13, 2019, is a case in point. At 2.31 p.m. Central European Summer Time, a three-stage Proton-M rocket thundered into the flawless blue sky above the 43 °C hot Kazakh steppe. Watching from the ground: scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. Stowed in the rocket’s nose: eRosita.

This X-ray telescope, developed and constructed by a consortium of German research facilities headed by the Institute in Garching, Germany, flew piggyback with the Russian space observatory Spektr-RG to its observation location at a distance of one-and-a-half million kilometers from Earth. Out there, way beyond and behind the Moon, the probe from Earth will scan the entire firmament over the next four years to produce the first complete map in the mid X-ray range.

It was a nail-biting wait for the watching scientists; due to technical issues with the rocket, the launch had to be postponed three times. In the end, the launch on July 13 was exemplary. eRosita survived the lift-off unscathed and then set course for its destination as planned. There was a slight delay in commissioning the observatory, but since October 13, all seven modules of the X-ray telescope have been observing the sky simultaneously, its custom-made CCD cameras operating flawlessly. The first composite images show the neighbor of our Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud, as well as two interacting clusters of galaxies at a distance of about 800 million light years away. The astronomers are jubilant – their long journey to the steppe at the end of the world was worth its while.

West Africa, Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, not far from the border to Liberia: the camp of the Max Planck researchers is sited in the middle of the Taï National Park rain forest, a 12-hour drive from the port city of Abidjan and three hours along a dirt road from the nearest village. For several years now, a team of scientists headed by Christophe Boesch has been observing three neighboring chimpanzee groups with a total of around 100 animals.

These animals are so used to the presence of humans that they practically take no notice of them – as if the researchers are merely a part of the surroundings. Achieving this takes many years of the scientists carefully and gradually approaching the primates. The actual research can begin only when, even in the presence of people, each chimpanzee behaves as it normally would when alone.

The scientists follow the chimp groups everywhere they roam and observe their day-to-day life, making sure, however, that they behave in a completely neutral way in the animals’ presence: they don’t feed them, don’t eat in their presence, don’t play with the young chimps – even when the latter are curious and seek out the humans’ company. And the researchers never come into physical contact with the animals. This last point is crucial for the health of the primates: even a seemingly harmless cold can wipe out an entire chimpanzee family. Consequently, there are strict rules of behavior and hygiene measures: every person who enters the camp must be vaccinated against numerous diseases; in addition, he or she must initially spend five days in quarantine in the camp’s outsta- tion. Anyone who shows even the slightest symptoms of an infection is forbidden from entering the forest in the vicinity of the apes. On site, each observer must maintain a distance of at least seven meters from the animals – and always wear a protective mask, which can become quite uncomfortable at 95 percent humidity and temperatures that often exceed 30 degrees Celsius.

The International Space Station ( ISS ) orbits the Earth around 16 times a day from an altitude of approximately 400 kilometers; each orbit takes a good 90 minutes. The ISS, which is about the size of a soccer field and has been manned continually since November 2000, is constantly being converted and expanded – also in the services of science. On August 15, 2018, during an outboard mission that took almost eight hours, the two Russian cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev and Oleg Artemyev installed the antenna for the Icarus system on the outside of the ISS. Now all the Icarus components on board are complete and a test phase of  several months can begin.

Icarus (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) – a joint project involving the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, the Russian space agency Roskosmos, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Space Administration – is intended to provide a new, improved understanding of animal migration worldwide. Even small animals such as songbirds can be fitted with the Icarus transmitters without altering their behavior. Although they weigh less than five grams, these so-called tags not only record the animal’s location but also collect data on acceleration, ambient temperature, and orientation relative to the Earth‘s magnetic field. When the ISS passes overhead, the tags send the recorded data to the space station.

The space antenna can simultaneously record data on many hundreds of animals – in other words, whole flocks. The goal is to find out more about the lives of animals on Earth: the conditions in which they live and their migratory routes. Even more than a hundred years after the first birds were ringed for scientific purposes, surprisingly little is known about this in detail. The findings will not only serve the purposes of behavioral research and species protection, but will also facilitate research about the spread of infectious diseases, the effects of ecological phenomena such as climate change and ultimately, could even be used to predict natural disasters.

Most of the vast expanse of space is extremely cold and empty. Nevertheless, chemical reactions take place there, too. These result in the formation of ions (electrically charged particles), small and large molecules, and interstellar dust. The dust clouds, in turn, give rise to stars and planets. The chemistry of interstellar space is therefore one of the most active research fields in astronomy.

With the new Cryogenic Storage Ring (CSR), scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics are bringing space into their lab. However, the level of technical complexity it requires is almost as extreme as the conditions in space: the temperature in the inner vacuum system of the CSR is just a few degrees above absolute zero, or minus 273 degrees Celsius; the pressure of less than10^-14 millibar is one hundred trillion times lower than normal air pressure. It is thus possible to keep even highly reactive, multiply charged molecular ions on the 35-meter circuit of the storage ring for several minutes – or sometimes even hours. As they circle at high speed, covering distances that correspond to many times the distance between the Earth and the moon, the ions cool down to temperatures that resemble those in interstellar clouds.

The ion beams are steered and focused by electric fields. The scientists can use these fields to bring about a reaction between the stored ions and electrons or neutral atoms, or to investigate them with laser beams. In this way, low-energy collisions, which are typical for the conditions in interstellar space, can be examined under controlled conditions in the laboratory.

Similar to a person who wears several layers of clothing to protect themselves against the cold, the cryogenic region of the storage ring has a number of shielding layers to insulate it against the ambient heat. Cooling down the apparatus takes more than three weeks – as does heating it up again after several months in measurement mode. The photo shows the storage ring when it was still open four months before it was cooled down for the first time.

Scholars immersed in contemplative silence and surrounded by books – for centuries, they were the personification of science. But can libraries still function as central “research locations” when the digital age has seen most sources made available online? Researchers worldwide would answer this question with a clear “yes.” The printed book is still the preferred publication medium in many areas of knowledge, while libraries can be seen as well-equipped labs without which no research would be possible. It therefore comes as no surprise that guest scientists often have to plan their stays at the Max Planck Institutes according to the capacities available for library use.

However, the quality of a library is not judged solely by its collections, as valuable as these may be. It is the accessibility of the knowledge that matters. This is the responsibility of the librarians: they comb all the available sources for new, relevant publications, prepare data in keeping with modern technological standards, and also assist researchers during the publication process. This naturally applies not only to the printed word but also to other media such as images, audio and video material.

The 120-year-old library of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, shown here, is one of the world’s most renowned libraries of art history. It provides access to around 300,000 monographs, 50,000 volumes of serial publications and more than 1,000 specialized journals. Approximately 7,000 new acquisitions are added each year. The library naturally also contains laptops, computer terminals and electronic media – even though they are not visible in this picture. Along with its print media, the library provides access to 2,500 e-journals and around 100,000 e-books on fine arts and related subjects.

At 5100 meters above sea level the air is thin and dry as a bone – properties that astronomers greatly appreciate. Up here, observations are much less impeded by the dense aerial ocean of the Earth's atmosphere with its otherwise substantial water content. In a way, this wasteland therefore brings the researchers a lot closer to the stars. That’s why they have built an antenna on the Chajnantor plateau in the Chilean Andes that goes by the name of Atacama Pathfinder Experiment, or APEX for short. The 12-meter dish detects millimeter and submillimeter-range radiation at the boundary between infrared light and radio waves.
Astronomers and technicians are currently upgrading the telescope: At the heart of the high-tech machine will be a camera with around 25,000 pixels that is intended to facilitate surveys of the heavens with unrivalled resolution. 25,000 pixels may seem to be quite few – compared to a camera in a smartphone, for example. However, these detectors have to operate at a temperature of minus 272.85 degrees, which is just above absolute zero. The field of view of the camera is half the apparent size of the full moon.
Talking about the Moon: the deployment range of APEX extends far beyond our solar system. The telescope primarily explores cooler regions, especially molecular clouds in interstellar space. In these cosmic nurseries, new stars are born out of gas and dust; these stellar embryos are mostly invisible in optical light, but APEX offers an excellent way to study the physical and chemical properties of the clouds. The furthest and therefore youngest galaxies are also in focus, as their light has been stretched due to the expansion of the universe and displaced to the submillimeter or millimeter range of the spectrum.
The APEX partners are the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), the Swedish Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which operates the telescope on behalf of the consortium. Continued cooperation until the end of 2022 was recently agreed. This means that the dish on the Chilean high plateau will continue to deliver deep insights into the cold cosmos in the coming years.

A modern metropolis in India: many different ethnic groups come together every day. A wide variety of languages can be heard, and very often, people who have no common language have to communicate with each other. People involuntarily resort to gesticulation, and their counterparts usually have no trouble understanding what is meant. But gestures can also be defined terms in a language of its own – the sign language of the deaf. Things get particularly interesting when sign language – here in its Indian form, of course – and spontaneous gestures are used in parallel and in combination. This is precisely what Annelies Kusters from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and her team are studying in the streets of Mumbai.

Kusters is interested in both the potential and the limitations of gesture-based communication. Being deaf herself, she makes it a point to involve deaf people into her research work. They can contribute greatly to these studies because they are very skilled in the creative use of gestures – both conventionalised and spontaneous– in conversations with hearing as well as with other deaf persons.

The researchers observe and document the experiences of both hearing and deaf participants in conversations combining oral, gestural and written communication. And they also study what role the various surroundings play. It makes a difference, of course, whether a conversation takes place at the market, in a loud street, or in a quiet environment. Here, two researchers from Kusters’ team watch a deaf businessman using facial expressions and gestures to negotiate with a hearing shop owner.

Dusty, windy, desolate – “an end one would rather not see” is how Argentinian author Mempo Giardinelli describes the Patagonian mesetas. Yet Gerd Gleixner and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry specifically chose the region for one of their research expeditions: its vast, grassy, high plateaus of volcanic origin offer conditions that are hard to find anywhere else in the world.

The steep slopes of the Andes mean that the clouds arriving on westerly winds from the Pacific release their rain on the Chilean side of the mountain range. But the clouds carried over from the east also pass over the flat plateaus, the only significant rainfall in the region occurs near the mountains. These exceptional geographical circumstances of the mesetas make it possible to take soil and sediment samples over thousands of miles along a north-south route that always has identical precipitation conditions, thus affording a unique opportunity to investigate the effect of temperature on the soil’s carbon exchange rate isolated from the influence of rainfall.

Gleixner’s research group is particularly interested in how ecosystems react to climate change. By identifying resistant biomolecules and using them as biomarkers, the researchers are able to exploit the soil and sea sediments in the Argentinian mesetas as a climate archive. Gleixner’s team is reconstructing climatic events from the past 10,000 to 20,000 years in order to determine the capacity of organisms and ecosystems to adapt to future climatic changes.

For the scientists, the old refrigerator in the middle of this image, which someone disposed of in the grassy expanse of the plateaus, symbolized the need to find parameters that can help cool our planet’s climate systems down again.

When, on a clear night, you gaze at twinkling stars, glimmering planets or the cloudy band of the Milky Way, you are actually seeing only half the story – or, to be more precise, a tiny fraction of it. With the telescopes available to us, using all of the possible ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, we can observe only a mere one percent of the universe. The rest remains hidden, spread between dark energy and dark matter.The latter makes up over 20 percent of the cosmos. And it is this mysterious substance that is the focus of scientists involved in the CRESST Experiment. Behind this simple sounding name is a complex experiment, the “Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers.”

The site of the unusual campaign is the deep underground laboratory under the Gran Sasso mountain range in Italy’s Abruzzo region. Fully shielded by 1,400 meters of rock, the researchers here – from the Max Planck Institute for Physics, among others – have installed a special device whose job is to detect particles of dark matter. According to theory, these particles barely react with their environment. They can easily penetrate the various layers of lead, copper and polyethylene that shield CRESST from background radiation.

The detector can comprise up to 33 individual modules, each containing a 300-gram crystal made of calcium tungstate; the photo shows researchers who are in the process of fitting the measuring device with these. When a particle enters, it generates warmth. In addition, light results, which is then held in the enclosure and captured by a silicon wafer that also warms up in the process. To allow the thermometer to sense these inconceivably minimal temperature increases, CRESST works close to absolute zero at minus 273.15 degrees Celsius.

CRESST-III has been running since summer 2016 with 13 modules and heightened sensitivity. Yet dark matter is living up to its name: to date, there are no convincing findings that unequivocally prove its existence.

Sunshine, water, blue skies and a castle in the background – many people associate carefree vacation days with the lakes in and around Plön in the north of Germany. The scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology have also certainly not lost sight of the beauty of the landscape though their focus lies on one of the lakes’ inhabitants and its genes. The three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) feels very much at home along the shorelines of Great Plön Lake. And right here, in the middle of the natural nesting grounds of the small fish, are the open water research labs of the Institute.

In six large cages, the sticklebacks - bred in a lab and released into the lake in the spring - are able to claim territories in natural environments, build nests, and reproduce while at the same time being exposed to the parasites that are found there. What makes these fish special is that the specific, individual combination of immune genes of every single animal is known. This enables the researchers to observe which sticklebacks, in the never-ending competition with the parasites, are the most resilient and - as father and mother are determined for every single egg with the help of molecular genetic methods throughout the entire breeding season - how many progeny each fish has.

The most resistant fish pass on their immunocompetence to their numerous offspring. It appears that female sticklebacks prefer mating partners whose immune genes best complement their own - and which through their healthy coloration, prove that they possess the necessary genotypes against the currently prevalent parasites. The mother’s choice of partner thus has a direct advantage for her young.

Which male is worth considering for mating is identified by the females not only through coloration, but also by the odor of the potential partner, because odor is determined – as with humans by the way – by the composition of the immune genes.

The water on the shores of the island of Panarea in Southern Italy may not boil, but it fizzes. There – right next to Stromboli, Europe‘s most active volcano – large volumes of carbon dioxide flow from the sea bed directly into the water. And this is precisely what makes the area very interesting for researchers from a wide range of disciplines. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is one of the most important greenhouse gases. Since the early days of industrialization, the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere has increased continuously, particularly as a result of the intensive use of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas.

Reducing the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere thus plays an important role in all attempts to halt or decelerate climate warming. One of the solutions under discussion is a technical one: With carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS), the aim is to capture the CO₂ from the air and store it in underground sites. Areas underneath the seabed might also be used to store carbon dioxide. This is already happening in some regions of Europe, for example on the Norwegian coast.

But what happens if the carbon dioxide escapes from such storage sites? How would the high concentrations of CO₂ affect the surrounding marine ecosystems and organisms? These are precisely the questions that the scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology are investigating in the sea off Panarea. Here, they can directly compare areas of the sea with strong carbon dioxide release and areas without degassing.

When it comes to music, tastes obviously differ. But why do people actually play and listen to music? Why do they still go to concerts when they have long been able to listen to everything on sound storage or digital media? What does a music experience consist of? The right place to look for the answers to these questions is the ArtLab of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. Thanks to its special technical equipment, the Institute’s multifunctional event room is a concert hall and a laboratory rolled into one. Sounds, facial expressions, gestures, interpretations and various physiological data of the artists and, up to 46 listeners can be synchronously recorded and evaluated.

In May 2016, the vocal ensemble Cut Circle visited the Institute. The American octet and its conductor Jesse Rodin were available to the researchers in the ArtLab for three days. While the singers performed a very wide range of pieces from their vast repertoire of early music, comprehensive data, like EEG, ECG, respiratory rate, and the artists’ movement patterns was tracked.

At the final concert, however, it was the audience that was the focus of the research. While the concert goers listened to the performance, adhesive electrodes on their fingers measured their skin conductivity and an armband took their pulse. At the same time, self-reported information about the reception and assessment of the performance was recorded on tablets. Incidentally, the evening program, which was entitled “My Fair Lady,” referred to the strong veneration of the Virgin Mary in the 15th and 16th centuries, a phenomenon that is also reflected in the music of the period.

No – right in the middle is the place to be! Because both the global climate and local weather events are extremely dependent on the formation of clouds. Located just under the peak of the Zugspitze mountain, and very often cloaked in dense cloud, the Schneefernerhaus provides the perfect conditions for scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization to study clouds from a direct and immediate perspective. Operating as a hotel until the early 1990s, the Schneefernerhaus is now Germany’s highest environmental research station. Here, the researchers from Göttingen want to measure how, in the turbulent flows of a cloud, tiny droplets of water collide with one another before combining to form larger droplets and, ultimately, rain. Because it is precisely this phase of droplet formation that is very difficult to reproduce in laboratory conditions or to numerically simulate.

After four years of preparatory work, 6.5 tons of equipment were brought from Göttingen to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, at the foot of the Alps, and installed on the tower terrace of the Schneefernerhaus, using a special heavy-load helicopter. The heart of the measurement apparatus is the “seesaw,” which basically allows a sled to “ride along” in the main flow of a passing cloud. Four high-speed cameras photograph the cloud particles, which are illuminated with a powerful laser. This makes it possible to track the path of a single droplet over a relatively long interval of time.

In the high-pressure wind tunnel in the Göttingen-based laboratory, the scientists can generate models of virtually any type of turbulent flows, while their work on the Zugspitze allows them to precisely observe natural turbulences. The combination of these approaches will help to unlock the secret of clouds – for a better understanding of these nebulous beauties that are so important for the climate.

Its tip appears to reach all the way up to the stars. It may not be quite that tall, but the Amazonian Tall Tower Observatory, known as ATTO, is nonetheless a project of superlatives: 15,000 individual components, 24,000 screws and bolts, a total weight of 142 tons on a ground area of a mere 3 by 3 meters, all pretensioned using a total of 26 kilometers of steel cable. And at 323 meters, ATTO is taller than the Eiffel Tower. The structure, located 150 kilome- ters northeast of Manau in the middle of virtually impenetrable Amazonian rainforest, was erected in just one year.

However, it’s not only its height that makes ATTO so special; a crucial factor is the ecosystem that surrounds the tower: Like its counterpart, ZOTTO, the 304 -meter-tall measurement tower in the Siberian taiga, ATTO is far removed from the influence of civilization. Scientists can therefore expect it to be provided with largely unadulter- ated data on climate events in the atmosphere above the Earth’s largest uninterrupted expanse of forest.

Although all of the measurement equipment has not yet been installed in the tower, it will soon provide a con- stant stream of data about greenhouse gases, aerosol particles, cloud properties, boundary-layer processes and the transport of air masses. The researchers are particularly interested in the interaction between the rainforest and the masses of air streaming above it. After all, the Amazon region is of global importance for the climate, and too little is currently known about the role the rainforest plays in the formation of aerosol particles and thus cloud formation.

The Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena are partners in the joint German-Brazilian ATTO project. The measurement data recorded by ATTO flows into current models for forecasting climate development and will also soon help politicians develop environmental policy regulations and global climate goals.

Even on cloudy days, the sun shines in the greenhouse of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology: 520 high-pressure lamps with assimilation sodium vapor bulbs ensure that the plants have sufficient light and that the spectral distribution is right for photosynthesis. To simulate uniform irradiation, the lamps move back and forth automatically on tracks. The air conditioning is also computer controlled: temperatures remain at summer levels – but not too high – all year round.

Half of the 474-square-meter cultivation floor is usually sown with coyote tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata), a species of wild tobacco and the institute’s most important model plant. Along with rapeseed and pea plants and poplars, the greenhouse also boasts some more exotic inhabitants: pest-resistant bananas, noni trees and carnivorous pitcher plants. The latter are the main focus of interest for researcher Ayufu Yilamujiang. He studies the exact composition of the digestive fluid with which the plant digests the trapped insects.

Carnivorous plants grow in low-nutrient soils and obtain additional nutrition from their animal prey, mainly insects. To this end, they have developed special trapping and digestive mechanisms. In the case of the pitcher plant, sweet nectar lures the insects to the edge of the pitcher, which is basically formed from reshaped leaves. The animals slip off the edge of the pitcher and fall into the digestive fluid. The pitcher plants also find the occasional prey in the greenhouse, as parasites or beneficial organisms used to combat these – ichneumon wasps, for instance – occasionally fall victim to them. For experiments carried out under controlled conditions, the scientists feed the pitcher plants with fruit flies.

Around 7,000 languages are currently spoken worldwide. Quite a number of them are at severe risk of dying out though, as they are spoken by only a small number of people and are no longer being passed on to future generations. Scientists therefore anticipate that a third, at most – but perhaps only one-tenth – of the languages spoken today will still exist by the end of the 21st century. The significance people attach to their own language depends heavily on social and economic circumstances. Particularly under threat are the languages of population groups with a low social reputation. Even worse, with each language that disappears, cultural and intellectual identity is also being lost.

In order to at least document languages and dialects under threat and preserve them for posterity – and for future researchers – the DOBES Program was launched in 2000. As part of this project, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics are conducting research in many parts of the world. In northern Namibia, for example, they are focusing on the Khoisan language ǂAkhoe Haiǀǀom, which contains many click sounds. In standard orthography, these are represented by the symbols !, ǀ, ǀǀ and ǂ.

In preparation for a workshop on minority languages in southern Africa, one of the project’s local staff members, teacher Mariane Kheimses, interviewed Abakup ǀǀGamǀǀgaeb about his thoughts regarding his mother tongue. The members of the community couldn’t imagine allowing just a single representative to speak for everyone at the workshop. Instead, a series of video interviews was shown at the event, enabling all opinions to be represented.

The backdrop is the stuff of a Hollywood film. At any moment, James Bond could ski around the corner to again save the world from some villain or other. In reality, the people who normally spend their time up here – at an altitude of 2,550 meters – have utterly peaceful intentions. In keeping with the spacey ambience, their attention is directed, not at the breathtaking beauty of the French Alps, but at the farthest reaches of the icy-cold universe. Astronomers use the radio antennas on the Plateau de Bure to study interstellar molecules and cosmic dust, observe the birthplaces of stars, travel to distant galaxies or catch sight of black holes at the edge of space and time.

With currently eleven antennas, each measuring 15 meters in diameter, the IRAM observatory is already one of the best and most sensitive radio telescopes in the world. Another "dish" is under construction, and the track systems on which the telescopes can be positioned up to 1.6 kilometers apart are being further extended. The 45-million-euro project is called NOEMA: NOrthern Extended Millimeter Array. The facility opens up a new window on space - the sky can be surveyed with ten times greater sensitivity and four times better spatial resolution than before.

To achieve all of this, the scientists direct all of the antennas at an astronomical object and then superimpose the millimeter waves received by all eleven telescopes. This will allow them to perceive details even from one ten-thousandth of the angle at which the full moon appears in Earth’s firmament, guaranteeing deep insights into the cosmic machinery.

Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique (IRAM)

The life of an avatar is dependent on technology, including even the very act of its birth. For the virtual figure to look true to life and move realistically in its computer world, its creators need to have detailed information about the body of the real-life model, as well as about its movement. This is precisely the data that the first four-dimensional full-body scanner provides. This device was developed by Michael J. Black, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, together with American company 3dMD.

With 22 stereo cameras and 22 color cameras taking 60 images per second, the scanner captures a person in various positions and activities that Javier Romero, a scientist at the institute, demonstrates here. For the scan, red and blue squares are printed on Nick Schill, a professional model, and then illuminated with a quickly pulsating spot pattern. The two patterns help the researchers reconstruct the three-dimensional surface of the body and the skin naturally. Not only can this method be used to create true-to-life figures for computer games and films, but it also offers interesting perspectives for research in psychology and medicine. In this way, it will soon be possible to use the realistic avatars in conducting perception experiments on body awareness – for instance to prevent eating disorders.

Galapagos – the name has a magical ring to it, and not just for biologists. A unique flora and fauna developed on this group of islands located some 1,000 kilometers off the coast of Ecuador. When Charles Darwin reached the archipelago in 1835, it was, besides the finches, above all the sub-species of giant tortoises, each specifically adapted to the ecological conditions of their individual island, that inspired his thoughts on the origin of species. But even then, many sub-species were already extinct: their ability to go for very long periods without food and water made the tortoises ideal provisions for seafarers. Today, there are still ten sub-species living on six of the islands. They are endangered primarily by non-native species, such as rats and goats, and human encroachment on their habitat.

The portly animals, which can weigh up to 300 kilograms, feed on shrubs, leaves and grasses, depending on the kind of vegetation available on their home island. Some tortoises undertake long voyages between the lowlands and the higher areas on the volcanic slopes, which are lush with vegetation even in the dry season; others spend the whole year in the lowlands, which can sometimes be very dry.

To learn more about these migrations, scientists working with Stephen Blake from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology attach GPS loggers and ultramodern 3-D accelerometers to the shells of some of the tortoises. This allows them to precisely track the animals over long periods and compare their observations with climate and vegetation data. Their findings were surprising: it is primarily adult males that walk up to ten kilometers in search of fresh, succulent food. But the researchers are still puzzled as to why the giant tortoises, which can go for months without eating, undertake these strenuous journeys.

Someone did quite a job tidying up here. Even the curtains are all pushed neatly to the same side. The blue of the individual image elements harmonizes almost too well. But wait: Couldn’t they have also set the chair backs at the same level? And why are the number signs on the booths so mixed up? Where are we, anyway? In a deserted call center? At a polling station? Is science being done here when no one is looking? Let’s reveal the secret: The image shows the oldest lab for experimental economic research in Europe, the BonnEconLab. Scientists have been studying human economic behavior here since as long ago as 1984. To date, nearly 30,000 people have participated in their experiments. The Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods also regularly uses the lab.

Research subjects with a penchant for experiment can earn money by “playing” the test games at the BonnEconLab. Whether as market participants, as bidders in an auction, or in negotiations: the test subjects continually make more or less successful decisions. Their success, on which the final reward for the individual participants depends, is influenced to a substantial degree by the decisions of their fellow players. Chance also plays a role – just like in real life.

Experimental economics was long a controversial subject within the field of economics. With game theory came the first economic experiments in the 1960s. But people were slow to realize that experimental findings must be used more and more as a basis for economic research. Today, experimentation is a recognized research method in economics – and German researchers were at the forefront right from the start.

… is not at all where the researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics want to be. The issue at hand is nothing less than one of the pillars of our modern world view, the general theory of relativity. In 1915, Albert Einstein formulated, among other things, the theory that the accelerated movement of masses causes disturbances that move through space at the speed of light. He called these disturbances gravitational waves. The Earth, for instance, creates a bulge in space-time on its annual orbit around the Sun, emitting gravitational waves in the process. Given the enormous number of planets and binary stars, space must be utterly teeming with these waves. In most cases, however, the cosmic ripples are too weak to be detected with terrestrial detectors. Fortunately, there are far stronger tremors in the universe: the dance or collision of neutron stars and black holes, or the explosion of a massive sun into a supernova.

Such violent events are what scientists around the world have been waiting for – and finally with success. On September 14, 2015, the detectors of the Advanced LIGO observatory caught gravitational waves for the first time. The facility in the U.S. is equipped with technology developed by Max Planck researchers in Hannover. Near the capital of Lower Saxony, the GEO600 detector stretches out its two 600-meter-long arms. The evacuated stainless steel tubes measure 60 centimeters in diameter and are corrugated to increase their stability.

They house the second-longest laser beam interferometer in Europe. The measuring principle is based on the fact that gravitational waves alternately compress and stretch space. If they speed through GEO600, they will also change the paths of the laser beam that runs through the two perpendicularly arranged tubes. This extremely tiny length difference on the order of 10^-19 meters causes the light waves in the detector to fall out of step. A signal appears. Alarm! This tiny difference in length, in the range of 10^-19 meters, throws the light waves in the detector out of sync. A signal appears, alarm! In practice, however, GEO600 itself has not yet picked up any waves coming from space. The system is not big enough for that. Here, the scientists are working on constantly increasing the sensitivity of all components and thus equipping bigger systems like LIGO with ever better technology.
 

The gaping, terrifying jaws of hell in Rome’s Via Gregoriana: in Federico Zuccari’s day, the entryway led directly into the garden of the palazzo that the famous painter commissioned on Pincian Hill for himself and his family in the late 16th century. Long closed to the public, the gate now serves as a portal to paradise for art historians and all who are interested in art history. Rising behind lofty heritage-protected walls and barely visible from the street, a compact yet finely wrought new building is home to a library containing almost 300,000 volumes and the photographic collection of the Bibliotheca Hertziana.

Bequeathed to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the early 20th century by patron Henriette Hertz, the Bibliotheca Hertziana has already celebrated its centennial as Max Planck Institute for Art History. In addition to the Palazzo Zuccari, the centerpiece of the institute, the current premises also include the neighboring Palazzo Stroganoff and the Villino Stroganoff on the opposite side of the street. Following the opening of the spectacular new library building designed by Spanish architect Juan Navarro Baldeweg after more than ten years in construction, the institute library is once again open to the public and to researchers from around the globe.

Five levels of tiered galleries are grouped around a trapezoidal inner courtyard, providing scholars with light-flooded working areas. In addition, the windows offer a generous view over the Eternal City: art historians thus have the object of their research directly before their eyes. A truly paradisiacal garden for academic pursuits.

Earth is subjected to continuous bombardment. At any point in time, somewhere in the depths of the universe, a star explodes or a black hole ejects gigantic gas clouds from the core of a distant galaxy. These aggressive events are heralded by gamma rays, which travel straight through the universe and eventually impact on the Earth’s atmosphere. But this is the end of the line – fortunately for all life, as the energy dose would be lethal in the long term. However, the gamma light doesn’t vanish completely into thin air – a lucky break for astronomers, who can then use it to investigate the cosmic messengers. The radiation leaves its traces in a cascade of particles high above the ground. In the process, a large number of elementary particles are created, which generate Cherenkov radiation – blue flashes that last only one billionth of a second and can’t be seen with the naked eye.

In order to record this celestial light, researchers built the four H.E.S.S. telescopes in the Khomas Highland in Namibia several years ago – and they are now converting this quartet into a quintet. H.E.S.S. II is the name of the new dish, which our picture shows bathed in moonlight as it stretches upward like a steel pyramid into the night sky. With a diameter of 28 meters, it roughly corresponds to the area of two tennis courts. And this giant weighs in at no fewer than 580 tons; its camera eye alone weighs three tons. The five scouts of the High Energy Stereoscopic System record the blue flashes with all the tricks of the astronomical observation trade. Securing the evidence in the data then leads to the scene of the crime, as it were: to the source of the radiation. Thus, the astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, which played an important role in the development and design of H.E.S.S. II as well as coordinating the installation work, also play the role of detectives. Their efforts will soon enable us to better understand the cosmic particle catapults, such as supernovae and black holes.

White caps above and below – it goes without saying that these are part of our image of the blue planet. But for how much longer? In the case of the North Pole, at least, whose cover consists entirely of sea ice, this is an essential question. After all, nowhere in the world is climate change as visible as it is in the Arctic. Never before, since reliable records have been available, was the September minimum – the expansion of the Arctic Sea ice at the end of the summer – as low as it was in 2012.

The Arctic ice is not only an indicator of climate change, but also an important factor in the climate system: the smaller the ice areas become in the Arctic summer, the less sunlight is reflected and the more is absorbed by the ice-free ocean. In winter, the ice insulates the relatively warm water from the much colder air; without this “cap,” the ocean would release gigantic volumes of heat into the atmosphere. The ice cover is therefore extremely important for the temperatures at the North Pole.

Dirk Notz from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg would like to explain the role of the sea ice, its complex internal structure, and thus also the conditions necessary for its formation and stability. To this end, he and his team measure, among other things, the thickness of the ice on the ice floes and its composition of pockets of freshwater ice, brine and gas. All of the data is included in complex numerical simulations.

The most important discovery to date: Contrary to what was originally feared, there doesn’t appear to be any tipping point in the climate system, after which it would be impossible to prevent the complete loss of the Arctic ice cap. According to the model calculations, the state of the sea ice is closely related to the prevailing climate conditions at all times. This also means that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at the current rate, then by the end of the century, the Arctic will be completely free of ice in September at the latest.

What makes humans human? How and when did we become what we are today? How did our ancestors live? These questions are of great interest to a lot of people. The scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology use different methods to investigate them systematically. One of these methods involves extracting DNA from human fossils. Using a new procedure, Svante Pääbo and his team can isolate and sequence ancient genetic material from just a few grams of bone powder, allowing them to compare the genomes of different prehistoric humans with one another and with people living today.

However, the first challenge consists in finding usable remains of prehistoric humans: bones normally decay in less than one hundred years; only under very special conditions are they able to survive for millennia. Important discovery sites include caves, such as the Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, shown here. Discovered accidentally by workers in 2001, the cave was examined archaeologically by a research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The excavations yielded human fossils that are around 40,000 years old, making them among the oldest remains of anatomically modern man found outside of Africa.

Genetic analysis revealed that the early modern human from the Tianyuan Cave and the ancestors of many present-day Asians and Native Americans share a common origin. On the other hand, their ancestral line had already diverged from that of the predecessors of present-day Europeans. Moreover, the DNA is not the only material that brought interesting facts to light: chemical analysis of the bone collagen from a lower jaw reveals that the Tianyuan people regularly ate freshwater fish. In other words, fish was on the menu long before the time indicated by archaeological finds of fishing implements.

The setting in which researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry study which substances plants exchange with their environment is artificial, yet still as natural as possible. Nina Knothe, who works at the Mainz-based institute, is preparing such an experiment at the Max Planck Society’s sub-institute in Manaus, right in middle of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. Here, she is checking the lighting conditions in a cuvette covered with an airtight film. Without artificial lighting, the plants that will later be placed in the vessel won’t get enough light. Tubes supply the plant with ambient air and discharge the gaseous metabolic products of the test subject. The second cuvette serves the researchers as a reference.

This experiment helps the scientists to learn more about the natural material cycle, as few other places in the world can match the low pollution level of the air in the Amazon rainforest. When they know more about the natural material cycle between the geosphere, the biosphere and the atmosphere, they will be better able to understand how humans interfere in this interplay.

It's a superlative superbrain and goes by a name that is even a little showy: SuperMuc. "Muc" is short for Munich, which isn´t entirely correct. The 100+ ton computer is actually located at the gates of the Bavarian state capital - in a 500 square meter hall at the Leibniz Rechenzentrum, the computer centre named for the German mathematician, at the Bavarian Academy of Science's campus in Garching - which nevertheless is a separate municipality (of scientists). SuperMuc runs at three petaflops, i.e. three million billion floating point operations per second. If we humans wanted to keep up with it, three billion adults on the planet would have to simultaneously carry out a million computations in the blink of an eye.

It is obvious that the facility, which was dedicated in mid-July, is in the Champions League for computers and number four in the world standings. So it makes sense that SuperMuc is much coveted by scientists, like researcher Stefanie Walch at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. She is interested in the comic maternity ward - molecular clouds in which new stars are born. Within them are also a lot of heavy weights that heat up the clouds, blow the gas apart and thereby reduce the birth rate.

With a cool head, Stefanie Walch has written algorithms for what is the largest simulation of a molecular cloud’s lifecycle to date. However, the computer is going to run pretty hot during calculations of such violent nature events. So that it doesn’t overheat, 40-degree water flows through its bowels. That would be a feverish temperature for humans, but SuperMuc can tolerate 70 or 80 degrees without problem. A superlative superbrain indeed. Copyright: Axel Griesch

For four decades now, a white dish has been the defining feature of the landscape surrounding Effelsberg in the Eifel region. This is where, on May 12, 1971, the 100-meter telescope of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy was unveiled. Since then, the fully steerable radio antenna - for many years the largest of its kind - has impressed the world with its sheer dimensions.

But this precision instrument also has an impressive scientific track record: it has served two generations of astronomers, who have scoured space in the long-wave spectral range and published thousands of articles and essays. The antenna gained fame in the 1970s for its 408-megahertz survey of the radio sky. In addition, to date, researchers have found new molecules and spectral lines in interstellar space, discovered the most distant source of water - 11 billion light-years away - and proved for the first time the existence of giant ordered magnetic field structures in other galaxies, as well as the relativistic effect of geodetic precession outside the solar system and in strong gravitational fields.

Despite its age, the telescope is not yet even remotely a candidate for the scrap heap: thanks to good care, regular modernization and enormous advances in digital electronics, it is better today than ever before.

Around 3,000 physicists from 38 countries have taken on a challenge worthy of a titan. At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, they form the team working on the ATLAS experiment to investigate the fundamental building blocks of matter and how they react with each other. The best known target of their search is the Higgs boson. This elementary particle must exist if the Higgs mechanism is correct. The mechanism is part of the Standard Model of elementary particles and explains how matter obtains its mass.

To track down the Higgs particle and thus prove that the Higgs mechanism exists, a gigantic experimental apparatus is needed: the LHC accelerator ring, which generates the energy needed for the massive particles, has a circumference of 27 kilometers. And ATLAS, one of four experiments at the LHC, measures an impressive 45 meters long and 25 meters high, and weighs 7,000 tons - as much as the Eiffel Tower. The team’s efforts have already been worthwhile, not least because the ATLAS collaboration has now found initial indications that the Higgs boson exists.

The photo shows the cap of ATLAS’ inner detector while it was still under construction. It is now no longer possible to access the detector. In addition, the tubes with the beams of colliding particles now run through the center of the circular facility.

The Dolphin Gull Larus scoresbii lives on the coasts of South America and on the Falkland Islands. The animals breed in colonies that nest near sea lions or other sea birds, such as penguins and cormorants. Dolphin Gulls build their nests in protected areas between boulders or tufts of grass. The clutch contains one to three eggs from which, after nearly four weeks, the chicks hatch.

Dolphin Gulls do not feed from the sea, but from the coasts, on such delicacies as sea lion excrement, cormorant vomit, marine invertebrates, mussels and insects. In their search for food, they also regularly comb through washed-up algae. Scientists working with Petra Quillfeldt at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology are studying the food strategies of these birds. They are investigating whether the individual animals specialize in certain food sources. To follow the birds over a longer time period, they are tagged with a small data logger that uses GPS to capture their position for the coming days, and that stores acceleration data for behavioral analyses. Stable isotopes are used to differentiate the food sources.

To capture the birds, the researchers set a wire basket trap on the nest. The seagull watches and, as soon as the researcher leaves, will try to occupy its nest again. The reader for the data dangles from the researcher’s neck, and the data is read out via a radio link.

To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a sofa is a sofa is a sofa is a sofa. However, this example in the library of the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy in Munich has connotations that extend beyond the Wikipedia definition of "a piece of upholstered furniture suitable for sitting or reclining". The designer objet dating from the late 1960s came to prominence thanks to the persistent myth that Jürgen Habermas had sat on it, steeped in thought. Starting in 1971, he joined Carl Friedrich Weizsäcker as Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Living Conditions in the Scientific and Technical World in Starnberg. Nine years later, upon Weizsäcker’s retirement, the institute was renamed the Max Planck Institute for Social Sciences and relocated to Munich. The sofa and Habermas moved with it.

Soon after, however, the sofa acquired a new owner with the arrival of Franz Emanuel Weinert. Habermas took his leave, and Weinert remained, becoming the Founding Director of the new Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research. This also no longer exists: in 2006, it was merged with the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig.

Only the sofa still remains. Perhaps because it is "tainted with odium", as Emeritus Wolfgang Prinz put it, without so much as a hint of disrespect. "Institutes come and go, but the sofa survives", says sociologist Gertrud Nunner-Winkler with a smile. For well over 30 years, her career and that of the sofa have progressed in parallel, as both made the transition from Starnberg to Munich. Whose seat of learning is it now? Library users like to sit on the sofa as they leaf through books and journals. It’s a very comfortable place indeed to seek out information.

Two men, one word: On February 26, 1948, Otto Hahn (right, standing) and Lower Saxony’s Minister of Cultural Affairs Adolf Grimme seal the foundation of the Max Planck Society. High-caliber scientists, including several Nobel laureates, attended the event. The gathering took place in the fellowship house of the dismantled Aerodynamic Research Institute in Göttingen. Such were the modest beginnings of the successor organization of the tradition-rich Kaiser Wilhelm Society.

The rustic rooms, however, still serve as a venue for gatherings today: the place where venerable men came together at simple wooden tables more than 60 years ago to open a new chapter in Germany’s research history is the place where the staff of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization gather today to enjoy their lunch together.

The stereotype of the isolated researcher - that doesn’t apply here at all: Peter van der Veer and Reza Masoudi Nejad, both from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, are studying the religious diversity of India. Their approach involves plunging themselves into the tumult, as here in the streets of Mumbai. Thousands of Shiite Muslims from the Dawudi Bohra community crowd into the Bhindi Bazaar to catch a glimpse of their spiritual leader. This faith originated in Fatimid Egypt in the 11th century. Despite the long tradition, the faithful registered to attend a sermon by His Holiness via e-mail.