With the Halloween outlook poor this year—canceled for many—more people have started thinking about how this scary holiday got started in the first place. A former student of Celtic Studies at the University of Bonn, today Dr. Michael Klevenhaus is Director of the German Center for Gaelic Language & Culture, or “Acadamaidh na Gàidhlig sa' Ghearmailt” in Bonn. Thus University Communications sought out Dr. Klevenhaus for an interview to find out about the origins and history of the holiday.

Those who are more patient earn and save more on average. Institutions and campaigns such as World Savings Day encourage this from an early age. Researchers of the Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy of the Universities of Bonn and Cologne have evaluated data on patient behavior from 76 countries.

The University of Bonn’s election assembly tonight appointed Rector Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Michael Hoch for a further four-year office term starting in April 2021.

Soil has the capacity to bind large quantities of carbon in the long term. An international team of researchers, including from the University of Bonn, is now advocating effective use of this potential. Experts estimate that this could reduce the increase of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a third. At the same time, agricultural yields in many regions would also increase significantly. In a recent publication they present a strategy to achieve these goals. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

The International Conference on Digital Technologies for Sustainable Crop Production (DigiCrop2020), which is running from November 1-10, 2020 fully online and free of charge, is the new flagship conference of the German Cluster of Excellence “PhenoRob – Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production” at the University of Bonn. The topic of the innovative conference could not have been any more pressing: Climate change is impacting crop production and at the same time we need to substantially increase the production of biomass within the next decades. How to do this in a sustainable manner is a challenge that not only the over 100 members of “PhenoRob” are working on but also the 50 presenters and six keynote speakers at DigiCrop.

Wearing of masks compulsory

According to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH), the University of Bonn is one of the most popular German universities among visiting international researchers. Together with Berlin, Munich, Göttingen and Bremen, Bonn ranks among the top institutions. This is the result of the Humboldt ranking published today.

20 years after opening in a former nurses' residence on the grounds of the University Hospital in Venusberg, the Museum for the History of Anesthesia has closed its physical location and reopened virtually. The museum's founder, Professor Horst Stoeckel, created the museum after retiring and has now helped digitalize and establish it as a virtual museum. The virtual museum can now be found at this new location: https://www.anaesthesia-museum.uni-bonn.de/