The University of Bonn has some excellent news to report, with two new cluster initiatives given the green light to apply for funding as part of the Excellence Initiative of the German government and federal states. The German Research Foundation and the German Council of Science and Humanities made the announcement earlier today. The two new cluster initiatives are thus among the 41 chosen from the 143 draft proposals in all from across the country that were evaluated. In 2019, the University of Bonn secured an already impressive six clusters, more than any other university in Germany. All of these clusters are applying to maintain their status, putting the University in with a chance of hosting eight Clusters of Excellence.

Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves surprised by the results. Whether they are good or bad news for the fight against global heating remains to be seen. The study is being published in the journal “Nature Climate Change.”

Zebrafish are smaller than your little finger, with a brain no more than half the size of a pinhead. Yet these animals possess an efficient navigation system that enables them to find their way back to spots in the water where the temperature suits them. This has been revealed in a recent study by the University of Bonn and University Hospital Bonn together with the Technical University of Munich (TUM), whose findings have been published in the journal “Current Biology.”

Prof. Dr. Alexander Blanke from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Ecology at the University of Bonn has been awarded a Proof of Concept Grant (PoC) by the European Research Council (ERC). This program provides financial support of 150,000 euros over a maximum period of 18 months to help researchers transfer their ideas from previous ERC projects involving outstanding basic research to commercial applications. These grants thus specifically promote the transfer of knowledge and scientific spin-offs or “sciencepreneurship.”

Angioedema is a rare but potentially life-threatening adverse reaction to ACE inhibitors. In a joint analysis of eight European study collectives, researchers from the University Hospital Bonn (UKB), the University of Bonn and the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices (BfArM) for the first time conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) with more than 1,000 affected individuals. They identified a total of three risk loci in the genome. These included a new locus that had not previously been associated with the risk of ACE inhibitor-induced angioedema. The results of the study have now been published in the "Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology".

Today, the German eROSITA consortium released the data for its share of the first all-sky survey by the soft X-ray imaging telescope flying aboard the Spectrum-RG (SRG) satellite. With about 900,000 distinct sources, the first eROSITA All-Sky Survey (eRASS1) catalogue has yielded the largest X-ray catalogue ever published. Along with the data, the consortium released today more than 40 scientific papers describing new results ranging from studies of the habitability of planets to the discovery of the largest cosmic structures. Based on just the first six months of observations, eROSITA has already detected more sources than had previously been known in the 60-year history of X-ray astronomy. Now available to the worldwide science community, the data will revolutionize our knowledge of the high-energy Universe.

An estimated five to ten percent of blindness worldwide is due to the rare inflammatory eye disease uveitis. Intermediate uveitis is often associated with a chronic course of the disease and the need for immunosuppressive therapy. Intermediate uveitis primarily causes inflammation of the vitreous body, but blood flow to the retina can also be restricted. Researchers at the Eye Clinic of the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn have tested optical coherence tomography angiography as a new imaging monitoring method. The blood flow in the retinal vessels is associated with the severity of inflammation and allows conclusions to be drawn about the future course of the disease. Accordingly, this method could be used to monitor the disease and identify patients at risk of a future worsening of the disease. The results have now been published in Nature Scientific Reports.

Arab, Ottoman and Turkish caricatures and cartoons from the late and post-Ottoman context are the subject of a research project led by Prof. Dr Anna Kollatz, Islamic Studies scholar and Arabist at Heidelberg University. The aim is to develop a new approach to the society, culture and politics of an age between the world wars characterised by great upheavals. Another question is whether cartoons were not only the results of discourses “from the middle of society” but were themselves drivers of changes. The project is going ahead in cooperation with Dr Veruschka Wagner from the University of Bonn. The Volkswagen Foundation has allocated 80,000 euros to fund it for a period of 18 months.