Max Planck Institutes and Experts

So far Denisovans were only known from a small collection of fossil fragments from Denisova Cave in Siberia. Together with researchers from China Jean-Jacques Hublin from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology describes a 160,000-year-old hominin mandible from Xiahe in China. Using ancient protein analysis the researchers found that the mandible’s owner belonged to a population that occupied the Tibetan Plateau in the Middle Pleistocene and that was closely related to the Denisovans from Siberia.

More and more people are becoming unhoused and dependent on state support. My research addresses the need to include basic human rights in the development of a tailor-made aid system. Ethnographic research with those affected shows that fundamental rights to privacy and intimacy are linked to tenancy-protected housing and can therefore not be fully enjoyed by people without such housing. This knowledge about the life of unhoused people can be used to ensure respect for fundamental rights and to enhance the effectiveness of the aid system.

The role of magnetic fields in the formation of stars has been a hot topic among astrophysicists for decades. Now Juan Diego Soler of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) has shown that magnetic fields can favour and advance the compression of interstellar matter – a prerequisite for the formation of stars. This conclusion is based on the finding that in star forming regions the interstellar matter, depending on its density, is sometimes oriented parallel to, sometimes rather perpendicular to, the magnetic field lines.

The Information Field Theory Group at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics has released a new version of the NIFTy software for scientific imaging. NIFTy5 generates an optimal imaging algorithm from the complex probability model of a measured signal. Such algorithms have already proven themselves in a number of astronomical applications and can now be used in other areas as well.

At the current epoch, approximately a half of the baryonic matter budget of the Universe is contributed by the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium. Being extremely tenuous and highly ionised, this matter is very difficult to observe and stays only poorly studied. Researchers at MPA have shown how it can be explored using X-ray line emission from heavier elements as a tracer. Due to scattering of the cosmic X-ray background, emission of this matter in resonant lines can be boosted strongly and become accessible for the upcoming X-ray missions