A quantum lab for everyone

A virtual laboratory allows, for the first time, to actively engage with topical quantum physics. The novel learning environment was developed at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna in collaboration with university ...

Why do humans possess a twisted birth canal?

The relatively narrow human birth canal presumably evolved as a "compromise" between its abilities for parturition, support of the inner organs, and upright walking. But not only the size of the birth canal, also its complex, ...

A new dimension in magnetism and superconductivity is launched

An international team of scientists from Austria and Germany has launched a new paradigm in magnetism and superconductivity, putting effects of curvature, topology, and 3D geometry into the spotlight of next-decade research. ...

Clever cockatoos bend hooks into straight wire to fish for food

In the early 2000s the New Caledonian crow Betty in Oxford shocked the world when she spontaneously bent a hook into a straight piece of wire while trying to retrieve a small out-off-reach basket with a handle from a vertical ...

Is the past (and future) there when nobody looks?

In 1961, the Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner proposed what is now known as the 'Wigner's friend' thought experiment as an extension of the notorious Schroedinger's cat experiment. In the latter, a ...

The threat of centaur solar system objects for the Earth

Astrophysicists Mattia Galiazzo and Rudolf Dvorak from the University of Vienna, in collaboration with Elizabeth A. Silber (Brown University, U.S.) investigated the long-term path development of centaurs, solar system minor ...

Toward super-fast motion of vortices in superconductors

An international team of scientists from Austria, Germany, and Ukraine has found a new superconducting system in which magnetic flux quanta can move at velocities of 10 to 15 km/s. This opens access to investigations of the ...

Reconstructing evolutionary history

Biologist Angela Hancock's current ERC funded project brings the Cape Verde Islands to the Max F. Perutz Laboratories (MFPL): Research with the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana helps her reconstruct the evolutionary history ...

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