The sensory mechanisms that allow birds to perceive the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field for the purpose of navigation are only now beginning to be understood. One of the two leading hypotheses is founded on magnetically sensitive photochemical reactions in the retina. It is thought that transient photo-induced radical pairs in cryptochrome, a blue-light photoreceptor protein, act as the primary magnetic sensor.
his project is concerned with fundamental problems arising at the interface of quantum field theory, knot theory, and the theory of random matrices. The main aim of the project is to understand two of the most profound phenomena in physics and mathematics, namely quantization and categorification, and to establish an explicit and rigorous framework where they come into play in an interrelated fashion. The project and its aims focus on the following areas:
Open angle glaucoma (OAG) is the second leading cause of world blindness. Treatments involving topically applied pressure-reducing medications or surgery targeting ocular drainage channels are effective, although significant complications exist.
Stars like our Sun and planets like our Earth form in dense regions within interstellar molecular clouds, called pre-stellar cores (PSCs). PSCs provide the initial conditions in the process of star and planet formation, but large uncertainties exist concerning basic astrophysical processes and parameters, such as surface chemistry, the cosmic-ray ionization rate, the H2 ortho-to-para ratio, the abundance of atomic Oxygen and "metals". In current models, these parameters/processes are typically fixed to some "canonical" values and variations across PSCs are neglected.
Protests in ‘new’ democracies about ‘stolen elections’, demonstrations in ‘old’ democracies against austerity measures, occupied squares all over the world against inequality and for better governance. Some argue that tentious politics gains importance and party politics declines. Is that so and why would that be? Why is it that some individuals engage in politics while others remain apathetic? Why is it that some citizens take the electoral route, while others engage in tentious politics? The truth is that we do not really know. Should we bother? I think we should.
The ability to handle individual cells and operate on them safely and efficiently is increasingly important in a number of fields such as biotechnology, pharmacology, agriculture, oncology, genetics, neuroscience and embryology. In our ERC-AdG project, we have already demonstrated a micromanipulation system that enables a user to touch, manipulate and assemble individual algae cells and polystyrene beads, almost as naturally as we handle objects in our macroscopic world.
The disappearance of the earliest human culture, the Oldowan, and its substitution by a new technology 1.6 million years ago, the Acheulean, is one of the main topics in modern Paleoanthropology. However, little is known about the biological and cultural evolutionary mechanisms underlying this process. Traditionally, it has been assumed that this major cultural change was ignited by the emergence of a new human species, Homo ergaster/ erectus, and that there was a steady technological evolution during the Oldowan that eventually led to the emergence of the Acheulean handaxes.
We propose to investigate the enzymes responsible for DNA replication and repair in micromanipulation experiments with a resolution of a single base. The detailed mechanism by which DNA is synthesized base after base and the coordination of the enzymes involved in this process are not fully understood. We shall develop new magnetic tweezers using lithographic techniques associated with evanescent field detection to address these issues.
To identify the causal mechanisms leading to disease emergence, endemic maintenance and epidemic expansion, epidemiologists would benefit tremendously from a full characterization of pathogen spread in space and time. The extensive sequencing efforts for the ongoing swine-origin H1N1 influenza A epidemic testify that analyses of pathogen genetic data are becoming increasingly important source of information in epidemiology. The new era of metagenomics promises to harvest such data in unprecedented quantities with remarkable rapidity.
The proposed research would utilise various geochemical proxies (oxygen, carbon, and trace elements) in cave calcite deposits (stalagmites) to develop extraordinarily high-resolution North Atlantic hurricane activity records for the past five hundred years, extending existing historical datasets by hundreds of years.
