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Smart heating saves bees from cold death Up to a third of bee colonies worldwide die over the winter, often due to excessively low temperatures. In cooperation with the Swiss École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the team of the Artificial Life Lab at the University of Graz has developed a high-tech honeycomb that can monitor the animals during the cold season and regulate the heat supply in the hive.

Studies & Further Education Carinthia University of Applied Sciences and the Medical University of Vienna have launched a cooperation project to address the sustainable interlinking of basic university research and applied brain research. Seven doctoral positions will be publicised for this purpose with research starting in the winter semester 2023/24.

Bioacoustic research on voice production reveals similarities between toothed whales and humans Voice production in toothed whales - which also include dolphins - follows a similar physical mechanism as in humans. This is the result of a recent study: Biophysicist and voice researcher Christian Herbst from the Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna comments on the results of this work in the renowned journal Science and emphasizes how important combined research approaches are in order to understand the acoustic world around us.

Molecular biology phylogenetic tree provides new insights into cartilaginous fish evolution Cartilaginous fish have changed much more in the course of evolution than previously assumed. Evidence for this thesis was provided by molecular biological data on fossil remains of Protospinax annectans , an already highly evolved shark from the late Jurassic.

When proteins are produced in the pharmaceutical industry, they are often initially misfolded and have to be rearranged. At TU Wien, this is being studied in detail in a new CD laboratory . Certain proteins are among the most important products of the pharmaceutical industry - such as insulin or interferons, which are used to treat diabetes, cancer or viral diseases.

A new genus of fungi and a previously unknown species of fungi have been named by Innsbruck mycologists after their place of discovery, Tyrol. Ursula Peintner and Martin Kirchmair from the Institute of Microbiology at the University of Innsbruck have named their new discoveries "Tyroliella" and "Penicillium tirolense".

Medicine & Science In stem cell transplants, which are used for the treatment of leukaemia, the patient's haematopoietic system is eliminated and replaced by haematopoietic cells from donors. Even though the amount of complications occurring in this process is steadily decreasing due to medical progress, the exact mechanisms for the restoration of the immune system in these patients have not yet been conclusively clarified.

A brain's own GPS helps us navigate by detecting the movements of fellow humans around us . Grid cells not only help us navigate our own paths in a complex environment, but also help us analyze the movements of other people, as scientists from the University of Vienna have now shown for the first time.

Medicine & Science Christoph Bock's team at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of MedUni Vienna established a catalog of DNA methylation across 580 animal species. These data ena-bled a detailed dissection of the evolution of epigenetic regulation and the epigenome.

Researchers at the University of Vienna and ETH Zurich cultivate "missing link" microorganism How did the complex living things on earth come into being? This is one of the great unanswered questions in biology. A collaboration between the research groups of Christa Schleper at the University of Vienna and Martin Pilhofer at ETH Zurich has brought the answer one step closer.

A long-necked dinosaur from northern Germany was a so-called nest fledger Europasaurus was a long-necked, herbivorous dinosaur on four legs. The dinosaur lived in the late Jurassic period about 154 million years ago on a small island in what is now northern Germany. Researchers from the Universities of Vienna and Greifswald have now examined fossil skull remains of Europasaurus using computer tomography.

Leukemic cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (L-CTCL) is a rare type of skin cancer that presents varied clinical features and symptoms. In a recently published study by the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and the Medical Universities of Vienna and Graz, the researchers managed to integrate the genomic data from affected patients with pharmacologic studies.

Scientists have discovered for the first time a bacterium in Lake Gossenköllesee in Tyrol that uses two different mechanisms to obtain energy from light. This could be an adaptation to the very pronounced change of seasons in the Alps. The change of seasons is clearly noticeable in the Alps. Moderate temperatures with a high exposure to light in summer give way to months with great cold and only little sunlight in winter.

New study shows how babies order visual perceptual impressions While adults sort visual impressions at lightning speed, babies have to learn this first. This ability is important for finding their way in everyday life. Until now, it was unclear whether visual perception in the brains of babies is fundamentally different from that of adults before language acquisition.

Monoamines are neurotransmitters in the central and peripheral nervous systems and they also transmit signals between cells and the brain. This transmission is followed by their reuptake into the cells by means of transporters. While the specific monoamine transporters have already been well studied, not enough is known about the organic cation transporters, which are high-capacity monoamine transporters.

Biologists rewrite "family history" of fungi You can't choose kinship. This also applies to a special group of fungi that could not be more different: Whether they grow in native forests, live in the guts of insects or are found in trees in the Amazon. Until now, they were not considered to be related to each other because of their different appearance and their dissimilar life strategies.

In a recent study, researchers from Joanna Loizou's group from CeMM, the Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Medical University of Vienna investigated the POL? enzyme and the role it plays in DNA repair. Inhibiting POL? represents a new approach for developing specific therapies, in particular for patients with BRCA1 mutations.

The autonomic nervous system is known as the control centre for involuntary bodily processes such as the beating of our hearts and our breathing. The fact that this part of the nervous system also has the ability to spontaneously restore muscle function following a nerve injury was discovered by a research group at MedUni Vienna's Department of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery as part of their study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

In an animal model, a study, led by EPFL Lausanne with the participation of MedUni Vienna's Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, has identified a class of neurons that provides the crucial impetus for restoring walking ability after spinal cord injuries resulting in paralysis. This study was recently published in the leading journal "Nature".

Various conditions such as postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis can lead to an alteration in maternal behaviour and disrupt the mother-child bonding process. A research team led by Daniela Pollak from MedUni Vienna's Center for Physiology and Pharmacology has conducted a study in which they were able to identify the neuronal circuits in the brain that are activated during the learning of maternal behaviour.