Humboldt Kosmos
Mobility is not an end in itself. International conferences provide an opportunity for young researchers to showcase their achievements, and stopovers at elite universities have become de rigueur for a successful career. However, the real benefits are to be gained from spending an extended period of time in another place and from working together face to face: telephones, the Internet and video conferences are simply not an alternative forcommunicating in the real world.
To what extent do emotions influence behaviour in different cultures? Psychologist Dominik Güss has searched four continents for the emotional blueprints of behaviour.
A bee’s brain is about ten thousand times smaller than that of a human being and still accomplishes amazing things. The Australian bee researcher Adrian Dyer investigates how bees learn complex tasks and can even recognise human faces. The processes going on in the bee’s brain could become the model for computer systems for facial recognition, at airports for example.
The esteem in which we hold internationality often results in a paradox. On the one hand, a researcher’s origins are considered irrelevant when it comes to research. On the other hand, there is thought to be a correlation between the international composition of a research institute and its quality.
Germany is a belated truffle nation which only discovered a taste for these fine mushrooms in the 18th century. But the truffle is now experiencing a renaissance, not least as a result of changing climatic conditions: a brief foray into a thousand years in the chequered cultural history of the truffle in Germany.
On 11 May 2010, five top academics were officially awarded the title of Alexander von Humboldt Professors. Federal Research Minister Annette Schavan and the President of the Humboldt Foundation Helmut Schwarz conferred the awards during a gala ceremony in Berlin.
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