Max Planck Institutes and Experts

The competition of plants and soil microorganisms for important nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus is a key determinant of the amount of carbon that can be stored in land ecosystems. Combining new laboratory experiments and improved numerical ecosystem models generates new insights into the intricate effects of this nutrient limitation for the future development of land carbon storage. This research contributes to a better understanding of the effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission of climate.

During the Quaternary, changes in atmospheric CO₂ concentrations led to major climate changes such as glacial/interglacial cycles. Our studies indicate that the combination of a decrease in ocean overturning through an increased stratification in the Antarctic zone of the Southern Ocean and increased organic carbon export through iron fertilization in the sub-Antarctic zone of the Southern Ocean can explain much of the G/IG's atmospheric CO₂ changes during the last 800,000 years and the entire Quaternary.

A key principle for the rational design of cell factories is the stoichiometric coupling of growth and product synthesis, which makes production of the desired compound obligatory for growth. Using mathematical models and new computational algorithms, researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Magdeburg showed that coupling of growth and production is feasible under appropriate genetic interventions for almost all metabolites in five major production organisms. These results are of fundamental importance for rational metabolic engineering in biotechnology.

From 1998 to 2012, the Earth’s surface warmed more slowly than expected. Many climate scientists explained that this slowdown was caused by the oceans, which drew heat downward, away from the surface. The authors of a new study question this view: variations in the energy radiated from the surface to space could also have caused the slowdown. Furthermore, the amount of energy required to cause a slowdown is smaller than previously thought. It is in fact considerably smaller than the observational uncertainty, which suggests that the true origin of the recent slowdown may never be discovered.

Every musical instrument has its own sound with a frequency spectrum that is determined by the shape of the instrument. In analogy to that, every metal has its characteristic frequency spectrum reflecting the properties of its electrons. Our investigation of the quantum sound of electrons in the metal PdRhO2 shows that electrons move quickly in the crystallographic planes whereas they hardly move perpendicular to the planes. The quantum music sounds slightly differently than expected and will help understand the particular hydrodynamic transport properties of electrons in these metals.