Good news for the University of Münster: The German Research Foundation has approved a new Collaborative Research Centre. The interdisciplinary project "Law and Literature", which is coordinated by the Departments of Philology and Law, will receive approximately nine million euros and will start on July 1.

At Münster University there are various offers and funding programmes that support postdocs on their way to becoming professors.

Refugees who are more willing to take risks, are more likely to return favours and are convinced that they have their own lives under control integrate more quickly into society. This is shown by a study by scientists from Münster University, Saarland University and the German Institute for Economic Research. The study was published in the journal "Collabra: Psychology".

As the only terrestrial planet, the Earth has a large amount of water and a relatively large moon. Both are essential for life to develop on Earth. Planetologists from Münster University have now been able to show for the first time that water came to Earth with the formation of the Moon. The results are published in the journal "Nature Astronomy".

At first glance, medieval research and artificial intelligence seem to be a contradiction in terms. After all, historical studies and the like were long seen as being subjects greatly removed from the world of IT. However, methods such as machine learning on the part of computer programmes, which learn new things and correct themselves, open up new opportunities for historians doing research.

The name speaks for itself: The "Body & Brain Institute Münster" (BBIM) is not supposed to investigate diseases and their development singularly, but from the point of view of the interaction between brain and body. The joint large-scale project of the University of Münster and the Universitätsklinikum Münster (UKM) has now been recommended for funding by the German Council of Science and Humanities.

Bermuda in the western Atlantic Ocean is a special terrain because it is located on the top of a 4,570 meter high extinct volcano. An international research team has now investigated the rock under Bermuda for the first time in detail geochemically. The geologists discovered a previously unknown region of the Earth's mantle. The study was published in the "Nature" journal.

The University of Münster is setting up a new Research Training Group to be funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The PhD programme, conducted in English and entitled “Chemical Biology of Ion Channels (Chembion)” will run for four and a half years in the initial funding period and will be receiving around four million euros from the German Research Foundation.

Experimental milestone: Researchers at Münster University have developed a chip containing a network of artificial neurons that works with light and can imitate the behaviour of neurons and their synapses. Such an optical neurosynaptic network is able to “learn” information and use this as a basis for computing and recognizing patterns. The study is published in “Nature”.

Chemist Prof. Frank Glorius has been awarded the Gay-Lussac Humboldt Prize for his outstanding research and his close links to France in his work.The French Ministry of Higher Education and Research awards the prize to excellent German researchers, who are seen as examples of special collaboration between the two countries. Once a year, two researchers are chosen who each receive 60,000 euros.

Prof. Armido Studer, an organic chemist at Münster University, has been named winner of the “Pedler Award” from the british Royal Society of Chemistry. He has won the award for outstanding contributions towards the development of novel radical-based methodologies. In addition to a medal and prize money of 2,000 British pounds, Armido Studer is invited to give lectures at various universities in the UK.

Researchers at the Cells-in-Motion Cluster of Excellence University have discovered that curvatures of cell membranes trigger a self-organising system. As a result, cells can move in the same direction over a longer distance, forming search patterns. The study has been published in the journal “Nature Physics”.

The universe is almost 14 billion years old. For some radioactive nuclei, this time is short: they take many times longer to decay. An international research team led by physicist Prof. Christian Weinheimer at Münster University has now observed a half-life more than a trillion times longer than the age of the universe. The study was published in "Nature".

Around three years ago, researchers on an Antarctic expedition, including Münster University palaeobotanist Dr. Benjamin Bomfleur, made an incredible discovery in northern Victoria Land. They found the 200 million-year-old footprint of an extinct reptile. The researchers have now published their findings from the hand-sized footprint in the journal “Polar Research”.

Prof. Bernd Schlipphak has been the ombudsman for junior researchers in the Education and Social Science Faculty at the University of Münster since 2015 and, as such, has an open ear not only for PhD students and post-docs in Faculty 06, but also for their supervisors.