Max Planck Institutes and Experts

To understand better the methods of visual communication of new scientific discoveries in the seventeenth century, this project focusses on the Dutch microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. With a team of experts on visual culture, early modern microscopy, and modern photomicrography, we investigated the earliest surviving microscopic specimens made by Leeuwenhoek himself through one of his hand-made microscopes. We compared the results to his original letters and drawings, resulting into new insights into the epistemological value of drawings in the seventeenth-century microscopy.

The brain is he most poorly understood organ within the human body. It is permanently in action, for example, it processes visual inputs and then rapidly decides how to interact with our environment. To achieve this, the brain consumes about 20 percent of the total energy demand of the body, and about 50 percent more than the heart. Our research team has developed a miniaturized magnetic resonance sensor (NMR) that can measure nerve activity and blood regulation with much higher spatial and temporal resolution than conventional systems.

It is impossible to provide timely estimates of human migration flows after natural disasters by only using traditional data from statistical authorities. Facebook offers new opportunities as a complementary source of information. Emilio Zagheni and his collaborators traced relocation after Hurricane Maria 2017 from Puerto Rico to the US mainland and found return migration, too.

In the laboratories of the Department of Archaeogenetics, we have examined for the first time the genetic material of people who lived about 3,600–2,800 years ago (during the Bronze to Iron Age transition) in Ashkelon, one of the most important cities of the Philistines. Analysis showed that a European gene component arrived in Ashkelon in the early Iron Age. This suggests that the Philistines' ancestors migrated from southern Europe across the Mediterranean and that the marked cultural change in Ashkelon and other cities in the region at this time was linked to the migration of people.

The search for a „final theory“ was a leitmotif of physics in the 20th Century. The Max Planck Research Group „Historical Epistemology of the Final Theory Program“, headed by Alexander Blum, studies and assesses this century-long search, using the methods of historical epistemology. Here it presents the (failed) attempts of the later Werner Heisenberg at constructing such a final theory.