The international Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN) has improved the upper limit of the neutrino mass almost by the factor of 2 and made it on the cover of the Physical Review Letters. Based on a purely kinematic method, KATRIN has narrowed down the absolute mass of neutrinos to less than 1.1 electron-volt (eV) at 90% confidence within only four weeks. After 1000 days of data taking, an even higher sensitivity of 0.2 eV will be reached. YIN speaker Kathrin Valerius coordinates the analysis activities at KIT. Overall 20 institutions from 7 countries are part of the KATRIN collaboration.

The business journal CAPITAL chose YIN speaker Kathrin Valerius as one of Germany’s “Young Elite 2019” in the category science and society. Each year the honors go to the top 40 under 40 from economy, politics, science, and society. All these young talents have the potential to influence and shape the future of Germany. On November 21st, they came together at the “Young Elite Summit” in Berlin to exchange ideas beyond their usual sphere of action and set new impulses for society. Among the honorees from the previous years who spoke at the summit was Nora Szech, professor for political economy at KIT (pictured left).

„HoloMed“ unterstützt Chirurgen im Operationssaal: Das intelligente System erstellt anhand von Aufnahmen der Computertomografie und Magnetresonanztomografie ein Modell tiefliegender Körperstrukturen. Über eine Augmented Reality-Brille zeigt HoloMed dem Arzt Führungskanal und Zielbereich der chirurgischen Instrumente präzise an. Bei der Entwicklung haben sich Björn Hein, Franziska Mathis-Ullrich und Christian Kunz auf die Punktion am Gehirn fokusiert. Mit dem Innovationspreis NEO fördert die TechnologieRegion Karlsruhe GmbH jedes Jahr zukunftsweisende Technologien.

Wirkstoffkonzentrationen im Körper zeitnah messen und anpassen - Frank Biedermann und sein Team stellen im Fachmagazin Chemical Science ein einfaches und preiswertes Verfahren für den Alzheimer-Wirkstoff Memantin vor. Dabei dient ein Molekül als synthetischer Rezeptorfarbstoff und „versteckt“ sich in einem zweiten, tonnenförmigen Molekül. Verdrängt der nachzuweisende Wirkstoff den Farbstoff, ist dieser außerhalb der Tonne im Blutserum in medizinisch relevanten Konzentrationen nachzuweisen. Das Verfahren lässt sich auf weitere Wirkstoffe und Farbstoffe übertragen.

Offering full reproducibility and open source code, software contributions can be more beneficial to the scientific community than classical publications. However, they do not count towards impact metrics like the H-index. To instigate a change, software contributions could become acceptable as a full-value conference submission to be included in the proceedings after an additional independent review. In the blog Better Scientific Software, Hartwig Anzt argues that a community-based assessment would reduce the workload of the independent reviewer and ensure a very high quality.

When being announced 2019 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Stanley Whittingham was at the conference Advanced Lithium Batteries for Automobile Applications at the Helmholtz Institute Ulm. With him were about 380 scientists from 30 nations – among them 3 YIN members specializing in battery research: Dominic Bresser, Julia Maibach, and Roswitha Zeis. Whittingham developed the first functional lithium battery. He shares the honors for developing lithium-ion batteries with John Goodenough, who made them more powerful, and Akira Yoshino, who opened the way for commercial viability.