The University of Bonn held its second International Staff Week in May. The focus this time around: “New Approaches to Services for Students and Staff at Universities.” This included an investigation into the various new approaches universities are using to provide services to different target audiences and the challenges confronting administrative staff in an increasingly complex and digitalized environment.
The region with the greatest marine biodiversity on our planet is known as the Coral Triangle or Indo-Australian Archipelago. However, the detailed evolutionary history of this biodiversity hotspot is poorly understood. An international research team has reconstructed how biodiversity has developed over the past 40 million years. The University of Bonn is involved in the study, which has now been published in the journal Nature.
With 1,896 participating graduates of the 2023/2024 academic year, the University of Excellence Bonn will once again bid farewell to a record number of Bachelor's and Master's graduates on Saturday, July 6, 2024, with a large celebration in the Hofgarten. Over 70 nations will be represented, with families and friends expected in large numbers to celebrate the handing out of certificates. This makes it probably the largest central graduation ceremony at a university in Germany.
Leaving some weeds between crops can help to combat pests on agricultural land, according to a new study carried out by the University of Bonn. This step has particularly positive effects in combination with other measures: the cultivation of different types of crops and planting strips of wildflowers. The results have now been published in the Journal of Pest Science.
Some of the country’s leading centers for robotics have joined forces and set up a consortium to develop the new Robotics Institute Germany (RIG), which is set to become its first port of call for the robotics industry. The consortium’s coordinator Professor Angela Schoellig from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and RIG speaker Professor Tamim Asfour from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) unveiled the concept for AI-based robotics at the AI-Based Robotics conference in Berlin entitled. Launching on July 1, 2024, the project is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with €20 million over the next four years, and the University of Bonn is heavily involved.
In a study with 991 adults, scientists at DZNE show that the most common forms of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) as well as the neurological diseases amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) can be recognised by blood testing. Their procedure is not yet ready for routine medical use, but in the long term it could facilitate disease diagnosis and advance the development of new therapies already now. The findings published in the journal Nature Medicine are based on the measurement of certain proteinsin the blood, which serve as biomarkers. The study also involved the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and other research institutions in Germany and Spain.
Researchers at the University of Bonn have developed software that can simulate the growth of field crops. To do this, they fed thousands of photos from field experiments into a learning algorithm. This enabled the algorithm to learn how to visualize the future development of cultivated plants based on a single initial image. Using the images created during this process, parameters such as leaf area or yield can be estimated accurately. The results have been published in the journal Plant Methods.
The 2024 edition of the Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Rankings, which highlight the impact that universities are having on each of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), has recognized the University of Bonn’s strong commitment to sustainability in several categories. The University has even secured first place in Germany for SDG 11—Sustainable Cities and Communities.