Our bodies, windows or plastic bottles – all of them are made up of different molecules. The big difference however: while the molecules in the human body or other living organisms are in constant exchange with their surroundings, artificially produced material is not. This in turn directly affects their ability to break down after being used.
Art history or biology? During his school days, Johannes Gescher couöd have chosen either one. Eventually though, the biology studies won out, and the young student moved from his birthplace of Fulda to the university town Freiburg. Once there he was captivated by the world of microorganisms almost immediately: “Even during my undergraduate degree, I saw that my future was in microbiology,” Gescher says today.
The vanadium-dependent nitrogenase is an enzyme that catalyses two important processes: On the one hand it converts atmospheric nitrogen (N2) to ammonia, on the other hand it reduces carbon monoxide (CO) to hydrocarbons. Today, both reactions are run on a big scale by chemical catalyses to produce ammonia and fuels for industry. In additon, ammonia is used as synthetic fertilizer to ensure the food production for at least half of the world’s population.
Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is the ubiquitous energy currency of all living organisms. Without it there would be no metabolic processes or growth possible – for animal cells as well as plant cells. Headed by the University Bonn an international team of researchers was able to visualise the ATP distribution and utilisation during stressful phases in living plant seedlings.
In 1997 the IBM-computer “Deep Blue” defeated former world chess champion Garry Kasparov. In 2011 the IBM-computer software “Watson” beat its human counterpart during a US- game show. By now the former pioneer of artificial intelligence broadened his abilities even further and is being used by companies worldwide. Especially the healthcare sector and the insurance industry appreciate the unprecedented potential of “Watson” to collect, analyse, and interpret mostly unstructured information and be able to make predictions based on them.
Normally, dowels are made from highly robust and resistant plastics such as nylon. The Baden-Württemberg-based construction company Fischer relies on a polymer that is partly based on castor oil as a raw material. The oil is extracted from the seeds of the castor oil plant Ricinus communis, which belongs to the spurge plant genus.
Until now, converting organic waste into fuel has not been economically viable. Excessively high temperatures and too much energy were required. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) managed to significantly reduce the temperature and energy requirements for an integral step of the chemical process by using a novel catalyst concept: they confined the reaction to small spaces inside zeolite crystals.
In line with the increasing demand the production of wood pellets also increased dramatically over the last ten years.
What do Antarctica and space have in common? Nothing can grow there. Except, that is exactly the goal of a new long-term experiment as part of the EDEN-ISS project. The EDEN-ISS project aims to develop plant cultivation technologies that can be used for safe food production in space in so-called closed-loop systems or closed greenhouses.
Wild Emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum) is the wild form of nearly all the domesticated wheat in the world, including both durum (pasta) and bread wheat. Wild emmer is too low-yielding to be of use to farmers today but it contains several attractive characteristics that could be used by plant breeders.