MaxPlanckResearch 4/2025

Do facts still count for anything in a society plagued by populism and crises and accelerated by new media? Olaf Kramer outlines the different positions taken by politicians, society, and scholars in this polarized debate and explains why science needs to communicate differently in the current climate.

Luisa Pallares almost became a lawyer. But she ultimately decided to pursue a career in biology. This enabled her to deal with fundamental questions of evolution and genetics. Since 2022, she has been a research group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society in Tübingen.

Which environments help us stay relaxed, productive, and healthy? That is what Simone Kühn and her team at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin are investigating as part of a relatively new field of research: environmental neuroscience. They measure stress responses, test cognitive performance, scan brains, and interview study participants. Their aim is to understand how our surroundings influence us.

Long before the first outward symptoms appear, mental illnesses often become apparent through subtle changes in the body. However, the clues that lurk hidden in medical examination data cannot be detected with conventional analyses. That is why Nikolaos Koutsouleris at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich is turning to artificial intelligence. Together with an international research team, he is developing a digital model of the human brain. The hope is that it will help identify mental illnesses earlier and treat them in a more targeted way.

Wind turbines can steal wind from each other. The airflow directly behind a wind turbine is turbulent and contains less energy. This is currently accounted for in the planning of wind farms, but new insights such as those from Claudia Brunner’s team at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen could help to further minimize losses. The work of Brunner’s team builds on the origins of fluid dynamics research in Göttingen that led to the founding of the Institute 100 years ago.

Rich colors, extremely sharp pictures, lower energy consumption: organic light-emitting diodes have set new standards in mobile devices and high-end TVs. However, the technology is not perfect. Blue OLEDs are particularly problematic. Paul Blom, director at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, and research group leader, Gert-Jan Wetzelaer, are leading a team that is investigating improvements to this technology. Their goal: highly efficient, printable OLEDs.

Max Planck researchers collaborate with partners in more than 120 different countries. In this article, they write about their personal experiences and impressions. Nathalie Feiner of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön has traveled to the Mediterranean to study the wall lizards found on many islands of the Tuscan archipelago over a two-month period. This reptile-loving biologist cannot be deterred from her quest for unexplored populations – not even by a swarm of jellyfish.