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Installation at the Institute for Physical High Technology
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Light-tools for the future
Captain Kirk and his team on the spaceship Enterprise step boldly into a ray of light that transports them in a matter of seconds to a far off planet. They've been beamed. The researchers at the Institute for Molecular Biotechnology in Jena have been working on just such a device, but are still light-years away from what people on television can appear to do. They bundle together concentrated laser of light and bring them to an exact pin-point using a kind of tweezers. With the light-tweezers, microscopically small objects are held, worked on and shifted. In the future, medical doctors can also use this light-technique for operations. With the tweezers, an illness-related gene can be cut out from the chromosome without damaging the cell structure.
Watching the weather
If researchers start talking about quantum transition, then something really sensational has happened. It was at the Institute for Physical High Technology where the smallest high speed micro spectrometre in the world was developed. That sparked a massive quantum transition sensation. The spectrometre, which looks like a small black box, analyzes the color composition of light into its tiniest components. It is used in satellites to monitor the weather or analyse environmental pollution. Since the creation of this invention, the researchers at the institute are now involved in international space programs.
Ancient jungles and the search for carbon
They are looking for the lost carbon. They think it's near Jena in a forest called "Naturpark Hainich". The forest looks like a five-hundred-year-old European jungle. The conditions are ideal for finding gas. The biomass of old trees and the ancient forest floor stores carbon longer than normal. At the various measuring stations, the researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry examine wood and plant samples. Several times daily they climb the tower at their station and analyze the gas CO_, which the trees take in and eventually exhale above the forest. The results of these tests are eagerly awaited by the US and Japan's environmental ministers. Both countries have signed Kyoto - a protocol for reducing the world's CO_ emissions. Although neither of them have ratified it which would legally bind them, Japan is considering it if they would be granted "carbon-sink" credits. That would mean recognising forests as a means of absorbing carbon from the air, but so little is known about the process, especially once a tree dies. But the geo-chemists in Jena are hot on the trail of the "missing carbon".
Why do German have a sweet tooth?
Germans are sweet people. On average, each person in Germany eats approximately 33 kilograms of sugar a year. The recent statistic is a surprising leap from that of a hundred years ago when Germans only ate around 13 kilograms. How is it that consumption has more than doubled? What do people smear on the jam at breakfast and eat chocolate for lunch? Even more puzzling is why people in England eat more sugar than people in Germany? These are the sorts of economics questions that the researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Research into Economic Systems are trying to figure out. The answers to most of the many sweet questions are based on the historical development of populations. But these researchers are not only interested in the historical development of sugar consumption. Their aim is to figure out the psychological explanations of it. The most curious of all about the research results is the food industry. It would love to know when and why consumer behaviour rises and when the saturation point is reached.
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