With the advent of the Corona pandemic, social distancing has become the order of the day. At the same time, the lockdown is very stressful for many people. A team of researchers from Vienna and Zurich is investigating how stress relates to social behaviour and how the latter develops. This is the first project to establish a link between behavioural economics and social affective neuroscience. Continue reading “Does stress make us more helpful?”
Moving pictures and music are an ideal and/or lethal combination if you want to win over the minds and hearts of people. In Nazi propaganda these tools were orchestrated almost to perfection. But how exactly did film music support the Nazi ideology and what was the contribution of “Wien-Film”, the Vienna film company which was one of three production venues between 1938 and 1945? Continue reading “Wien-Film as an ideological music lab”
Agencies set up by the European Union play an important role in the Union’s border policy. A Viennese research team is investigating for the first time how the central border management agency Frontex cooperates with other EU agencies and which fundamental rights issues this raises in cooperation with the member states. Continue reading “Dilemma for Europe’s border management”
Fungi play an important role in the forest ecosystem, for instance as wood-decaying agents. Biotechnology specialist Daniel Kracher is investigating how exactly these processes work. In his host city of Manchester, the Schrödinger Fellow enjoyed the extremely open research culture and reciprocated by sharing samples of traditional Austrian cuisine. Continue reading “Sachertorte in Manchester”
With its new alpha+ Foundation, the Austrian Science Fund FWF intends to encourage individuals and organizations with a non-profit orientation to support top researchers. In an interview, the chairpersons of the Foundation, Artemis Vakianis and Georg Winckler, talk about the growing value of private commitment, about answers to some of the major questions of society and the increasing significance of basic research.
Continue reading “Together for the future”
The virologist Christoph Steininger is involved in several EU-wide research projects on the coronavirus. In an FWF-funded project on the clinically highly relevant CMV virus, his research group has just achieved a scientific breakthrough. Both research areas show how important purely curiosity-driven basic research can be for the development of drugs. Continue reading “Coronavirus: from molecule to drug”
