Viewpoint
Vaccines, medicines, food, fashion: different industries are keen to make use of genetic resources and the cultural heritage of Indigenous peoples. But who owns such assets, who can make use of them, and at what price? Despite the agreements in place and a UN conference in Cali, all this remains unclear. Giving an overview of the regulatory landscape legal expert Pedro Henrique D. Batista knows which approaches are needed today.
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If you want to carry out research in Marburg, you literally have to climb mountains. It is not for nothing that the site on which the university and various research facilities are located is called “Campus Lahnberge.” And so, if you want to cycle to the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, you might get a little out of breath. But not Katharina Höfer – for her, it’s routine.
Marine microorganisms play an instrumental role in Earth’s elemental cycles: among other things, they help to maintain the ocean’s role as a climate buffer. Katrin Knittel and her team at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen study bacterial communities on the ocean floor in one of the planet’s most inhospitable regions: the Arctic.
Recycling efforts have focused primarily on paper, glass, and plastic. But CO2 can be recycled, for example, into methane, the main ingredient in natural gas. A team at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg has developed a process which enables the methanation of CO2 on an industrial scale. The process could help decrease the use of fossil raw materials.
Excessive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer and nitrogen compounds from fossil fuels pollute the soil, air, and water in different ways. But how do these substances affect our climate? An international team led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena has taken stock of the various climate effects of nitrogen compounds.
Researchers Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg are creating virtual spaces to observe burglars in action. This helps to make residential areas safer and also solves a long-standing problem in criminology.
Whether making a medical diagnosis, searching for materials for the energy revolution, or predicting protein structures, artificial intelligence algorithms are an effective tool in many scientific fields today. But are they useful in physics, where the goal is to understand the fundamental processes of nature? Mario Krenn and Florian Marquardt are already assisted by AI at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, where they are getting a feel for what the algorithms can and cannot (yet) do.
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Max Planck researchers collaborate with partners in more than 120 countries. Some of them have kindly agreed to write about their personal experiences and observations for our website. Dietmar Germerott from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen spent 11 weeks at the Esrange Space Center balloon and rocket base in northern Sweden, where he watched over the Sunrise III mission. Here, he recounts his experiences from the launch of the balloon-borne solar observatory.
