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/

Should I or shouldn't I? The activity of individual nerve cells in the brain tells us how confident we are in our decisions. This is shown by a recent study by researchers at the University of Bonn. The result is unexpected - the researchers were actually on the trail of a completely different evaluation mechanism. The results are published in the journal Current Biology.

About a year ago, researchers found fossil specimens of beetles in an amber deposit in Myanmar, thereby describing a new beetle family that lived about 99 million years ago. However, the scientists had not been able to fully describe the morphology of the insects in the amber sample, which is why the beetles were subsequently given the mysterious name Mysteriomorphidae. An international research team led by the University of Bonn and Palacky University (Czech Republic) has now examined four newly found specimens of the Mysteriomorphidae using computer tomography and has been able to reconstruct them. The results allow to draw conclusions about the evolution of the species during the Cretaceous period. The study has been published in the journal "Scientific Reports".

Unemployed persons whose appointment with the responsible caseworker at the employment office is canceled unexpectedly remain unemployed for an average of twelve days longer. This is what Bonn economist Amelie Schiprowski established in a study by the Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn.

The astrophysicist Prof. Dr. Reinhard Genzel, a graduate of the University of Bonn, receives this year's Nobel Prize in Physics together with two other researchers. The Nobel Committee thus honors his contribution to the discovery of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.