news 2017

Acute psychosocial stress leads to increased empathy and prosocial behavior. An international team of researchers led by Claus Lamm from the University of Vienna investigated the effects of stress on neural mechanisms and tested the relationship between empathy and prosocial behavior in a new experiment.

In order for a fuel cell to work, it needs an oxidising agent. TU Wien has now found a way to explain why oxygen does not always enter fuel cells effectively, rendering them unusable. Fuel cells use a simple chemical reaction, such as the combination of oxygen and hydrogen to form water, to generate electricity.

Ravens have impressive cognitive skills when interacting with conspecifics - comparable to many primates, whose social intelligence has been related to their life in groups. An international collaboration of researchers led by Thomas Bugnyar, Professor at the Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, could uncover for the first time the group dynamics of non-breeding ravens.

Since a couple of decades, metal-containing drugs have been successfully used to fight against certain types of cancer. The lack of knowledge about the underlying molecular mechanisms slows down the search for new and more efficient chemotherapeutic agents. An international team of scientists, led by Leticia González from the University of Vienna and Jacinto Sá from the Uppsala University, have developed a protocol that is able to detect how metal-based drugs interact with DNA.

For the first time ever, researchers at TU Graz and the Medical University of Graz have managed to functionally characterise the three-dimensional interaction between red-light receptors and enzymatic effectors. The results, with implications for optogenetics, have been published in Science Advances.

A group of scientists from TU Wien and ETH Zurich have succeeded in their attempts to generate ultrashort terahertz light pulses.

Neurotransmitter transporters are some of the most popular transport proteins in research as they play a major role in the processing of signals in the brain. A joint study by TU Wien and the Medical University of Vienna has now successfully demonstrated for the first time the structural impact of membrane lipids on medically relevant serotonin transporters.