#University of Würzburg

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Researchers create stable superconductor enhanced by magnetism

An international team including researchers from the University of Würzburg has succeeded in creating a special state of superconductivity. This discovery could advance the development of quantum computers. The results are published in Nature Physics. Superconductors are materials that can conduct electricity without electrical resistance—making them the ideal base material for electronic components in MRI machines, magnetic levitation trains and even particle accelerators. However, conventional superconductors are easily disturbed by magnetism. An international group of researchers has now succeeded in building a hybrid device consisting of a stable proximitized-superconductor enhanced by magnetism and whose function can be specifically controlled. They combined the superconductor with a special semiconductor material known as a topological insulator. "Topological insulators are materials that conduct electricity on their surface but not inside. This is due to their unique topological structure, i.e., the special arrangement of the electrons," explains Professor Charles Gould, a physicist at the Institute for Topological Insulators at the University of Würzburg (JMU). "The exciting thing is that we can equip topological insulators with magnetic atoms so that they can be controlled by a magnet."

Read more.

#Materials Science #Science #Superconductivity #Superconductors #Topological insulators #University of Würzburg #Magnetism

[reportwire]

Protein spheres protect the genome of cancer cells

Protein spheres protect the genome of cancer cells

Newswise — MYC genes and their proteins play a central role in the emergence and development of almost all cancers. They drive the uncontrolled growth and altered metabolism of tumour cells. And they help tumours hide from the immune system. MYC proteins also show an activity that was previously unknown – and which is now opening new doors for cancer research: They form hollow spheres that…

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#All Journal News #Cancer #Cell Biology #Genetics #Nature (journal) #Newswise #protein activity;Cancer Genomics;Metabolism #University of Würzburg

[thatshowthingstarted]

Round Book from 1590, Bruges,

A gift to Prince Bishop Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn (1545-1617) covering five theological tracts.

Leather binding, Diameter 27 cm, 

University of Forsberg in Würzburg, Germany.

#art #design #history #style #book #round book #circular #bruges #1590 #leather #germany #forsberg university #renaissance #theology

[valkyries-things]

THERESIA SEIBAL // DANCER

“She was a German Sinti dancer, singer, WW2 survivor and activist. In 1941, the Gestapo forced her to sign an authorisation form agreeing to be sterilised. She knew she wouldn’t be able to get pregnant after the procedure and decided to get pregnant. She was successful and was pregnant with twins. The Nazis allowed Theresia to continue with the pregnancy, under the condition that the twins were given to the University of Würzburg for research purposes following their birth. The younger twin, Rolanda, died as a result of the medical experiments.”

#female history #war history #romani history

[apilgrimpassingby]

Witch Trial Fact Sheet

(Not every individual claim has a source, but the links included will source everything said here - a lot of them have a lot of relevant stuff, so if I linked for everything it would be putting in the same links again and again).

The witch trials were a relatively small-scale affair - modern historians give a range of 30,000 to 50,000 deaths between 1560 and 1660, the witch-hunting century or 30,000-60,000 between 1430 and 1780. That sounds massive - but it's over a century (so 300-600 a year) in a Europe with a population of 100 million (if you're wondering about population growth, it was much lower in the pre-industrial world - about 10% a century, with the demographic disaster that was the Thirty Years War negating much of that). So in any given year, the percentage of the population being accused of witchcraft was ... 0.0003% to 0.0006%.

It's even starker when you consider that the trials were very unevenly spaced geographically. Of those 30,000-60,000 people killed for witchcraft, 25,000 to 30,000 of them were in the Holy Roman Empire.

Witch hunting was not a solely or even mostly Catholic phenomenon. The biggest, most famous witch trials - Trier, Fulda, Basque Country, Würzburg, Bamberg, North Berwick, Torsåker and Salem. All of them were experiencing the Reformation, while the places with the fewest witch trials were thoroughly Catholic Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy. And the Spanish Inquisition killed only two witches.

It was not exclusively women who were killed for witchcraft; around 10-15% of people killed for witchcraft were men.

Similarly, witch trials were not simply (and I personally don't think primarily) about religious misogyny. The witch trials of Iceland and the Baltic countries were about enforcing Christianity on areas that were still largely pagan - and in an age when men accessed learning and political power far more and more easily than women, it's no coincidence that these witch trials mostly targeted men. In many cases, it was about searching for a culprit for the miseries of the Thirty Years War (remember that the Holy Roman Empire killed more people for witchcraft than everywhere else in Europe combined?) and the Little Ice Age. In many of the German trials, it was about enforcing Catholic or Protestant orthodoxy. My own country's (England's) bloodiest witch trials were in the midst of the English Civil War.

Witch trials were not a medieval phenomenon - large witch trials only began in 1430 and the "witch-hunting century" was 1560 to 1660, and the middle ages are generally agreed to have ended between 1450 and 1500.

Not everyone believed in witchcraft even at the time; both the Malleus Maleficarum and Daemonolgie devoted their opening sections to arguing that witchcraft existed - why would they have done this unless there were numerous, vocal or well-established people saying it didn't? And take the Malleus' word for it; "some curates of souls and preachers of the Word of God feel no shame at claiming and affirming in their sermons to the congregation that sorceresses do not exist." And we even have De Praestigiis Daemonum (1563) and The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) making the case for the unreality of magic.

The Malleus Maleficarum was not an official Catholic manual at any time; when Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger submitted it to the University of Cologne theology faculty for approval, they rejected it for promoting torture and teaching erroneous theology. Its use was almost entirely by secular courts.

Burning was not universal - in Britain and the American colonies, witches were hanged. As Daemonologie says, "[the execution of witches] is commonly used by fire, but that is an indifferent thing to be used in every country, according to the law and custom thereof."

Midwives were not more likely to be accused - in fact, they were more likely to be accusers.

Even at the height of the witch trials, some occult practices were widely accepted. In the words of Daemonologie "... diverse Christian princes and magistrates, severe punishers of witches, will not only oversee magicians to live within their dominions, but even sometimes delight to see them prove some of their practices." No less a figure than Thomas Aquinas approved of astrology and had some sympathy for alchemy and divination, and there was a sharp line drawn between "natural magic" such as astrology that called upon powers inherent in creation and was therefore morally neutral and the immoral "unnatural magic" of witches, drawing on the devil.

If you've enjoyed this, you can listen to a performance of Daemonologie, complete with definitions of obsolete and Scottish dialect words, here. (If you're wondering how a treatise can be performed, the book is framed as the dialogue of two characters).

#history #witchcraft #witch trials

[pargolettasworld]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3McY3zbdzs

Elam Rotem was born in Israel in 1984.  He is an early music scholar, has degrees from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and the University of Würzburg.  He is an expert in the music of Salamone de Rossi, the 17th-century Mantuan court composer who also composed madrigal-like settings of Psalms and Jewish prayers.

This piece is not by Salamone de Rossi.  This is by Elam Rotem.  He really groks how Rossi’s music works -- this group, the Profeti della Quinta, is the group that he has conducted in singing Rossi’s works in the synagogues where Italian Jews prayed at the time.  They also sing Rotem’s original compositions, in the style of Rossi, like this setting of . . . well one of King David’s lamentations.  David lost many people who were dear to him, and he lamented for several of them at different times.

I love listening to Rossi, because I love hearing well-composed pieces that are both thoroughly Jewish and thoroughly of the time and place where they were composed.  This is also why I love listening to Louis Lewandowski, Debbie Friedman, and Gershom Sizomu.  This piece . . . it’s certainly well-composed, and it’s not quite of the time in which it was composed, but it’s the next best thing.  It’s like if Rossi had had a contemporary, a colleague with whom he could have shared ideas and maybe had a friendly rivalry.

Leon of Modena would have gone absolutely nuts.

#jewish music

[bpod-bpod]

Local Knowledge

To filter out waste and defend us from infection, hundreds of small glands, the lymph nodes, form a protective network around the body. Connected to each other and other tissues by the lymphatic system, they keep tabs on organ health thanks to dendritic cells, travelling immune cells that carry pathogens or products of their activity up to the lymph nodes. Information also comes from unconventional T cells (UTCs), white blood cells so called because they recognise unusual components of pathogens, such as lipids or small molecules. Researchers recently found that UTCs (pictured in a lymph node, in green) continuously migrate from tissues to their local nodes, forming distinct populations in nodes connected to different organs, like the lungs and gut. This local organisation helps the immune system to mount an appropriate response in the right location, and could inspire more effective vaccine strategies, that boost immunity where most needed.

Written by Emmanuelle Briolat

Image by Konrad Knoepper, University of Wuerzburg, Germany

Würzburg Institute of Systems Immunology, Max Planck Research Group at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

Image copyright held by the original authors

Research published in Immunity, August 2022

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#science #biomedicine #immunology #immune system #t cells #lymph nodes #infection #immunofluorescence

[transgenderer]

In 1879, Vassili von Anrep, of the University of Würzburg, devised an experiment to demonstrate the analgesic properties of the newly discovered alkaloid. He prepared two separate jars, one containing a cocaine-salt solution, with the other containing merely saltwater. He then submerged a frog's legs into the two jars, one leg in the treatment and one in the control solution, and proceeded to stimulate the legs in several different ways. The leg that had been immersed in the cocaine solution reacted very differently from the leg that had been immersed in saltwater.

[bopinion]

Amazing Numbers

20.000.000.000.000.000

According to a study by the University of Würzburg, the earth is populated by an estimated 20 quadrillion ants. They thus have a biomass similar to that of all wild birds and mammals combined - twelve megatons of carbon.

5.000

That's how many different hats have been documented from the late Queen Elizabeth II. The British hat industry is now likely to have a sales problem. Unless Charles III decides to hide his ears.

9

Is the mathematical result of the degree-square sum of any geometric shape. Huh? Okay: a circle has 360 degrees: 3+6+0=0. A semicircle has 180 degrees: 1+8+0=9. A quarter circle has 90 degrees: 9+0=9. An eighth circle has 45 degrees: 4+5=9. And so on. Works also with all other shapes. Like with the square, which angles have 90 degrees: 9+0=9. Or the Pentagon: it's angles have 108 degrees, so 1+0+8=9. Or the decagon, you never heard about: 144 degrees, 1+4+4=9. (Thanks, Sofien Kaabar on cantorsparadise.com)

6.000.000

That's how many beech trees have to grow for 80 years to absorb the CO2 that is produced annually in Germany alone in the production of ammonia: six million tons.

i

Yes, this is a number. An imaginary number to be precise. The definition of an imaginary number is that its square result is a negative one. What? How can the result of a multiplication become negative? See...

1.000.000.000

A billion microbes live on every single square centimeter of human skin. Don't scratch now!

Hundred

The word "hundred" comes from the ancient nordic word "hundrath". That means actually 120. And not 100.

411

That's how many days a 59-year-old Briton was positive, that is, sick with an active coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 infection. That's when "Long COVID" takes on a spooky alternative meaning. It's not over!

Ten duotrigintillions

This is a 1 with 100 zeros. Better known as googol. The inspiration for the name of an internet search engine to indicate that it is capable of indexing a very large number of internet pages.

42

is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

#numbers #funny #amazing #42 #the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy #googol #google #long covid #hundred #microbes #imaginary numbers #beech tree #ammonia #geometry #queen elizabeth ii #ants #wow

[beardedmrbean]

When China relaxed its zero-COVID policy at the start of December, international observers warned there would be mass outbreaksin the Chinese population, which, it was estimated, lacks sufficient herd immunity or vaccine protection.

One statistical model published by healthdata.org predicts that 300,000 people could die from COVID-19 infections by April 2023 and 1.6 million people could die by the end of the year.

"Infections are steeply on the rise and hospitals are overwhelmed. It's quite [certain] that the situation is spiraling out of control, at least in Beijing and other big cities," said Björn Alpermann, a sinologist at the University of Würzburg in Germany.

COVID wave in China 'thermonuclear bad'

On December 19, a prominent epidemiologist, Eric Feigl-Ding, tweeted that the situation was "thermonuclear bad."

Feigl-Ding predicted "over 60% of China's and 10% of the Earth's population likely infected over the next 90 days. Deaths likely in the millions — plural."

In scenes reminiscent of the early months of the pandemic in 2020, Feigl-Ding posted a video of what looks like an overcrowded hospital, with patients lying close next to each other on the floor.

Other reports suggest morgues and crematoriums are overloaded, with backlogs running into the thousands. "The reports that crematoriums are working 24/7 are deeply disturbing," said Alpermann.

How accurate are the statistics?

It's not known how many people are currently infected with COVID-19 in China or the number of those who have recently died from the disease.

Oliver Radtke who lives in Beijing and is the chief representative of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, an independent political foundation affiliated with Germany's Greens, said it was impossible to know how severe the current COVID wave was by reading the official statistics.

"Judging strictly from personal evidence, scrolling through WeChat [social media] and having conversations with colleagues and friends, I reckon about one third in the city is sick, one third is taking care of the sick and one third simply doesn't dare to venture out," Radtke told DW.

Alpermann said the Chinese government had more or less admitted that its statistics were artificially low when it said that it would only count COVID deaths that had happened due to lung failure. That's Alpermann's personal assessment, but it suggests that those statistics tell only a partial truth.

The lack of accurate statistics about the current COVID situation in China makes predictions about deaths and illness difficult.

"There are so many moving parts in models, so there's a lot of guess work. The subvariant [of omicron, BF.7] circulating in China now isn't well studied, and we don't know how fast people will get boosters this winter," Alpermann said.

Booster campaign to target elderly

So, how are Chinese health authorities responding to the situation? Radtke said authorities had placed responsibility on individuals to keep safe.

"The official slogan these days is 'everybody is responsible for the prevention and control of the pandemic,'" he said.

But the Chinese National Health Commission (NHC) has initiated a large vaccination and booster campaign, especially for the elder and other high-risk groups.

Many health experts outside China have been critical about the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines from Sinovac and Sinopharm compared to mRNA vaccines, such as the BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna jabs — and the NHC is only administering vaccines made in China.

However, reports suggest they may include new nasal spray vaccines in the booster program. The hope is that the new vaccine types will reduce COVID transmission as well as the risk of severe COVID-19 symptoms.

"Worries about grandparents and older parents are high. Especially regarding family members in the countryside and [remote] provinces, where Intensive Care Unit beds are rare or non-existent," said Radtke.

What caused the latest COVID outbreak in China?

Experts say that the current infection and death rates in China may be because the country has a lower level of population immunity than that in other countries. 

"The Chinese government boasted they won a victory against COVID with their zero-COVID strategy. For some time it looked that way in 2021, but with omicron the picture completely changed," said Alpermann.

China has pursued a zero-COVID policy since the pandemic began.

During zero-COVID, the government implemented mass testing, imposed strict lockdowns and quarantined those people with COVID-19 in special facilities.

Now that it has relaxed its lockdown rules, the population has been going out but with very little natural exposure to infection, especially the more contagious variants, such as omicron — because they were locked in for all that time. In any case, that is the theory you hear from health experts outside China.

Rates of booster vaccine uptake are estimated to be low in China, especially among older people who have a higher risk of developing severe symptoms — only about one-third of over-80s and two-thirds of over 60s have received their first booster shot, according to official data.

"In retrospect, it now looks like the Chinese government did not use the time during zero-COVID to their own advantage to get vaccination rates as high as they should have been. They did not import more advanced mRNA vaccines or approve mRNA vaccines created in China," Alpermann said.

The first of three waves

Speaking at a conference in Beijing on December 17, Zunyou Wu, a chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said that the current outbreak would peak this winter and run in three waves for about three months.

The modelling mentioned at the start of this article puts the potential death rate as high as 1.6 million people by the end of 2023. But that depends on whether COVID transmission can or will be contained with new lockdowns and by the success of vaccination programs.

"I am worried about what happens once the current wave reaches the lesser-developed parts of the country, especially in the western hinterland," said Radtke.

Whatever the exact figures, Chinese health authorities appear to be struggling to keep up with the spread of the disease, and that continues to cause concern outside of the country as well.

#nunyas news #What caused the latest COVID outbreak in China? #are you really so dense that you think people don't know the answer to that already

[materialsscienceandengineering]

A new milestone for light-driven electronics

An international team of scientists collaborating within the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat has achieved a breakthrough in quantum research—the first detection of excitons (electrically neutral quasiparticles) in a topological insulator.

This discovery paves the way for a new generation of light-driven computer chips and quantum technologies. It was enabled thanks to smart material design in Würzburg, the birthplace of topological insulators. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

New toolbox for solid state physics

In their search for novel materials for future quantum technologies, one area that scientists from the Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat—Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter—at the two universities in Würzburg and Dresden are concentrating on is topological insulators, which enable the lossless conduction of electrical current and robust information storage. The first experimental realization of this materials class took place in Würzburg in 2007, prompting a worldwide research boom in solid-state physics that continues to this day.

Read more.

#Materials Science #Science #Electronics #Light #Optics #Excitons #Quasiparticles #Physics #Topological insulators #University of Würzburg

[reportwire]

Gene activity in a test tube

Gene activity in a test tube

Newswise — Pathological processes are usually characterised by altered gene activity in the cells affected. So, gaining an accurate picture of gene activity can provide the key to the development of new, targeted therapies. Whether these therapies then work as we would want them to can also be verified by looking at genes and the processes they initiate. It is no wonder that research is focused…

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#All Journal News #Cell Biology #Genetics #Newswise #University of Würzburg

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Neutrino factories in deep outer space Highly energetic and difficult to detect, neutrinos travel billions of light years before reaching our planet. Although it is known that these elementary particles come from the depths of our Universe, their precise origin is still unknown. An international research team, led by the University of Würzburg and the University of Geneva (UNIGE), is shedding light on one aspect of this mystery: neutrinos are thought to be born in blazars, galactic nuclei fed by supermassive black holes. These results are published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. The Earth’s atmosphere is continuously bombarded by cosmic rays. These consist of electrically charged particles of energies up to 1020 electron volts. That is a million times more than the energy achieved in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. The extremely energetic particles come from deep outer space, they have travelled billions of light years. Where do they originate, what shoots them through the Universe with such tremendous force? These questions are among the greatest challenges of astrophysics for over a century. Cosmic rays’ birthplaces produce neutrinos. Neutrinos are neutral particles difficult to detect. They have almost no mass and hardly interact with matter. They race through the Universe and can travel through galaxies, planets and the human body almost without a trace. “Astrophysical neutrinos are produced exclusively in processes involving cosmic ray acceleration,” explains astrophysics Professor Sara Buson from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany. This is precisely what makes these neutrinos unique messengers paving the way to pinpoint cosmic ray sources. A step forward in a controversial debate Despite the vast amount of data which astrophysicists have collected, the association of high-energy neutrinos with the astrophysical sources that originate them has been an unsolved problem for years. Sara Buson has always considered it a major challenge. It was in 2017 that the researcher and collaborators first brought a blazar (TXS 0506+056) into the discussion as a putative neutrino source in the journal Science. Blazars are active galactic nuclei powered by supermassive black holes that emit much more radiation than their entire galaxy. The publication sparked a scientific debate about whether there truly is a connection between blazars and high-energy neutrinos. Following this first encouraging step, in June 2021 Prof. Buson’s group began an ambitious multi-messenger research project with the support of the European Research Council. This involves analysing various signals (“messengers”, e.g. neutrinos) from the Universe. The main goal is to shed light into the origin of astrophysical neutrinos, possibly establishing blazars as the first source of extragalactic high-energy neutrinos with high certainty. The project is now showing its first success: In the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, Sara Buson, along with her group, the former postdoc Raniere de Menezes (JMU) and with Andrea Tramacere from the University of Geneva, reports that blazars can be confidently associated with astrophysical neutrinos at an unprecedented degree of certainty. Revealing the role of blazars Andrea Tramacere is one of the experts in numerical modelling of acceleration processes and radiation mechanisms acting in relativistic jets - outflows of accelerated matter, approaching the speed of the light - in particular blazar jets. “The accretion process and the rotation of the black hole lead to the formation of relativistic jets, where particles are accelerated and emit radiation up to energies of a thousand billion of that of visible light! The discovery of the connection between these objects and the cosmic rays may be the ‘Rosetta stone’ of high-energy astrophysics!” To arrive at these results, the research team utilized neutrino data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica - the most sensitive neutrino detector currently in operation - and BZCat, one of the most accurate catalogues of blazars. “With this data, we had to prove that the blazars whose directional positions coincided with those of the neutrinos were not there by chance.” To do this, the UNIGE researcher developed a software capable of estimating how much the distributions of these objects in the sky look like the same. “After rolling the dice several times, we discovered that the random association can only exceed that of the real data once in a million trials! This is strong evidence that our associations are correct.” Despite this success, the research team believes that this first sample of objects is only the ‘tip of the iceberg’. This work has enabled them to gather “new observational evidence”, which is the most important ingredient for building more realistic models of astrophysical accelerators. “What we need to do now is to understand what the main difference is between objects that emit neutrinos and those that do not. This will help us to understand the extent to which the environment and the accelerator ‘talk’ to each other. We will then be able to rule out some models, improve the predictive power of others and, finally, add more pieces to the eternal puzzle of cosmic ray acceleration!” IMAGE....Beginning a Journey Across the Universe: The Discovery of Extragalactic Neutrino Factories CREDIT © Benjamin Amend

#space #science #Astronomy #physics #news

[grunt-to-zoologia-i-foldery]

kilimanjaro mysteries

Rare Video Footage Captures Incredibly Elusive Creatures On Mount Kilimanjaro published: August 15, 2019/// Two examples of the animal species filmed at Kilimanjaro: an Abbott's duiker and a black serval. Department of Zoology III / University of Würzburg).

[bpod-bpod]

Drawing Channels

As experimental setups have advanced over time, from 2D cell cultures in dishes to larger 3D structures that mimic the body’s environments, networks of vessels have become essential to get materials to growing cells at the heart of the models. A new study creates this vascular network with a scaffold first drawn with melt electrowriting – a form of microscopic 3D printing – which is submerged in the precursor of a gel. The scaffold swells, and fuses together where elements make contact, to create a predefined network of channels throughout the structure. These vessels (pictured, with a complete layer of functional cells lining the inside of the vessel) can transport essential molecules to cells growing anywhere in the device, helping to both create a viable testing platform for experiments and improve prospects of growing healthy tissues for regenerative medicine.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Video from work by Matthias Ryma and colleagues

University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Advanced Materials, May 2022

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#science #biomedicine #3d printing #electrowriting #hydrogels #psychodelic #regenerative medicine #cell culture #lab models #3D lab model #blood vessels #lymphatic vessels

[resistantbees]

#smallcell #resistantbees #Varroaresistance #scientificresearch #advantagesofsmallcells