11-11-2009

Ascenion GmbH has acquired shares in Photonion GmbH, a start-up company founded by scientists from the Helmholtz Zentrum München together with two mid-sized companies, Airsense Analytics GmbH, Schwerin, Germany, and Tofwerk AG, Thun, Switzerland. Photonion’s mission is to develop and ...

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22-10-2009

Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity with almost no resistance, and engineers are simply crazy about them. Physicists around the world are working hard to explain this physical phenomenon. Yet, to this day, nobody knows exactly why some materials suddenly become ...

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Magnetic monopoles detected in a real magnet

09-09-2009

Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB) have, in cooperation with colleagues from Dresden (Germany), St. Andrews (UK), La Plata (Argentina) and Oxford (UK), for the first time observed magnetic monopoles and how they emerge in a real material. Magnetic ...

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08-09-2009

The long-term effects of pesticides on living organisms in rivers and on water quality can now be assessed more easily. Researchers from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) have developed a tool that can estimate the harmful effect of pesticides, such as those flushed into ...

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Researchers disprove theory that natural coal deposits are the source of environmental pollution

02-09-2009

Contaminants from natural coal deposits in the Gulf of Alaska are not easily bioavailable, unlike the crude oil from the Exxon Valdez tanker catastrophe. This clearly disproves the theory that natural coal deposits were the cause of observed environmental damage. PAH pollutants were blamed ...

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Clear the ring for PETRA III

21-04-2009

DESY's new synchrotron radiation source PETRA III accelerated its first beam. The positron bunches were injected and stored in the 2.3-kilometre accelerator for the first time. During future user operation, up to 960 particle bunches containing up to 10 billions of positrons - antiparticles ...

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15-04-2009

Research and industry are increasingly exploiting the potential of aptamers. As well as their application in research, medical diagnosis and treatment, aptamers are also interesting as a basis for biosensors for use in environmental analysis because their characteristics enable them to ...

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Researchers use optical lattices as a construction kit

09-12-2008

The investigation of complex materials such as high-temperature superconductors is problematic because of the presence of disorder and many competing interactions in real crystalline materials. "This makes it difficult to identify the role of specific interactions and, in particular, to ...

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International group addresses lack of consensus on test procedures

11-09-2008

A team of materials scientists and toxicologists announced the formation of a new international research alliance to establish protocols for reproducible toxicological testing of nanomaterials in both cultured cells and animals. The International Alliance for NanoEHS Harmonization (IANH) was ...

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Still too much uncertainty in today's climate models

11-03-2008

Interactions between the stratospheric ozone chemistry and atmospheric air flow lead to significant changes of airflow patterns from the ground up to the stratosphere. This is the result of climate simulations, which have just been published in the journal "Geophysical Research Letters" ...

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