Latest Tübingen Stories

You’re driving from work to pick up your kids at school. The drive is familiar; you’ve done it almost every day for years. But how do you know in which direction the school is from your home? Landmarks? The sun? Animal instinct?  Now, a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, yields an alternative answer that surprised even its authors, Julia Frankenstein, Betty J. Mohler, Heinrich H. Bülthoff, and Tobias Meilinger,...

Max Planck researchers have uncovered an ingenious evolutionary trick: a signaling chain is allocated several functions, enabling optimal adaptation to environmental conditionsDramatic scenes are played out under Ralf Sommer's microscope: his research object, the roundworm Pristionchus pacificus, bites another worm, tears open a hole in its side and devours the oozing contents. The squirming victim does not stand a chance in this duel: Caenorhabditis elegans may be a close relative of...

By Dahm, Ralf Few remember the man who discovered the "molecule of life" three- quarters of a century before Watson and Crick revealed its structure On February 26, 1869, in the old university town of Tubingen in southwest Germany, the young Swiss doctor Friedrich Miescher, who had settled there only a few months earlier, completed a letter to his uncle in which he described a momentous discovery. He had found a substance that he was certain resided in the cell nucleus and which...