A research team of pharmacists at the University of Bonn has discovered two families of active substances that can block the replication of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The drug candidates are able to switch off the the key enzyme of the virus, the so-called main protease. The study is based on laboratory experiments. Extensive clinical trials are still required for their further development as therapeutic drugs. The results have now been published in the journal "Angewandte Chemie".

"Everyone’s unique" is a popular maxim. All people are equal, but there are of course individual differences. This was no different with dinosaurs. A study by researchers at the University of Bonn and the Dinosaur Museum Frick in Switzerland has now revealed that the variability of Plateosaurus trossingensis was much greater than previously assumed. The paleontologists examined a total of 14 complete skulls of this species, eight of which they described for the first time. The results have now been published in the scientific journal "Acta Palaeontologica Polonica".

Making a decision involves risks and uncertainties - as everyone experiences in their everyday lives. In pandemic times, however, the complexity of decisions and the many uncertainties that come together from different areas become all too apparent. A team of economists, epidemiologists, mathematicians and financial experts has now joined forces at the University of Bonn to bring their individual models together and calculate uncertainties. The goal: Making decisions based on a wider range of information. The Transdisciplinary Research Unit "Mathematics, Modelling and Simulation of Complex Systems" at the University of Bonn is funding the project with nearly 100,000 euros over two years. The results may be relevant for policy advice.

Together with the University of Bonn, UNESCO has established the UNESCO Chair in Human-Water Systems. It will be held by the geographer Prof. Dr. Mariele Evers. This means that Germany is now home to 14 UNESCO Chairs that contribute to the implementation of the Global Sustainability Agenda.

Even in the world of the smallest particles with their own special rules, things cannot proceed infinitely fast. Physicists at the University of Bonn have now shown what the speed limit is for complex quantum operations. The study also involved scientists from MIT, the universities of Hamburg, Cologne and Padua, and the Jülich Research Center. The results are important for the realization of quantum computers, among other things. They are published in the prestigious journal Physical Review X, and covered by the Physics Magazine of the American Physical Society.

Can standard wireless computer networks (WLAN) be used to track burglars more effectively? Researchers at the University of Bonn, together with colleagues at the Osnabrück Police Department and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), believe it is possible. Their plan is to use routers to identify unauthorized intruders and trigger an alarm. The project, dubbed “WACHMANN,” will bring roughly 560,000 euros in funding to the University of Bonn as part of the “Research for Civil Security” program by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Prolonged anesthesia, also known as medically induced coma, is a life-saving procedure carried out across the globe on millions of patients in intensive medical care units every year. But following prolonged anesthesia--which takes the brain to a state of deep unconsciousness beyond short-term anesthesia for surgical procedures--it is common for family members to report that after hospital discharge their loved ones were not quite the same. A study by researchers at Columbia University and the University of Bonn now supports reports of neuro-cognitive changes after medically induced comas, a procedure that has been relied upon in treating COVID-19 patients during the pandemic. The study has been published in the journal PNAS.

Every behavior of an animal is based on the interaction of many nerve cells in the brain, which form a close-meshed web called a neuronal network. However, what happens in the neuronal networks during particular behaviors is not easy for researchers to study - they have to describe the sequences of recurring postures and link them directly to the neuronal processes. Researchers at the University of Bonn have now presented a new method that is expected to improve this. DeepLabStream is the name of the system that uses artificial intelligence to estimate the posture and behavioral expressions of mice in real time and can respond to them immediately. Light beams are used to label and even influence specific neuronal populations in the brain in order to determine the causality between the neuronal networks and the observed behavior. The study has been published in the journal "Communications Biology".