MPR 2022 6

04 | 2022
MAX PLANCK
Research
JURISPRUDENCE CHEMISTRY PHYSICS

Emojis in Court Greenhouse Gases Electrified Focal Points in Nuclear Fusion
CONNECTION TO THE WORLD

PHO T O: A D OB E S T O C K / C H E PKO DA N I L
2
O ur senses are our

connection to the world.
It is through them that the
brain receives vital infor-
mation about our environ-
ment. Children practice
using them through play
and in doing so gain essen-
tial experience for life.
Max Planck Research · 4 | 2022

EDITORIAL
Dear Reader,
According to Aristotle, man has five senses. Others talk about six or seven, while according
to Rudolf Steiner and his anthroposophical theory of the senses, we possess as many as
twelve. How many senses we have is, therefore, also a matter of taste.
The importance of our senses in our lives becomes apparent when we lose one. People
with hearing disorders, for example, find it difficult to make contact with other people. But a
new technology is set to make hearing easier for those who cannot benefit from hearing
aids. A crucial element in this process is a light-sensitive protein that originates from algae. 3
Hearing is one thing, but how we perceive what we hear is another. That applies particu-
larly to music: culture and listening habits determine how we perceive rhythms. Be they
indigenous peoples in the Amazon, people in Korea, or in the United States – every cultural
group has its own musical world in mind. One popular children’s game helps scientists
investigate the different perceptions of rhythms.
Other senses, meanwhile, are somewhat alien to us. The sense of magnetic fields,
for example. Birds have it, along with amphibians, fish, and bats. And mole rats. These
rodents with their monstrous incisors perceive the earth’s magnetic field and can navigate
their underground colonies in this way. In a labyrinth, the animals demonstrate their
orientation skills for science.
We hope you enjoy this issue!
Your editorial team

I M AGE S: S C I E NC E PHO T O L I B R A RY / F U R N E S S , DR . DAV I D ( T OP L E F T ); A N NA Z I EGL E R F OR M PG ( T OP R IGH T ); A D OB E S T O C K / V I L MO S ( B O T T OM L E F T );
JA N HO SA N / M PI F OR PL A SM A PH YSIC S ( B O T T OM R IGH T )
30 42
50 60
30 SENSITIZED 42 ENGAGED 50 INTERPRETED 60 ISOLATED
The sensory cells of Krishna Gummadi wants Courts will have to decide Plasma should ideally never
the cochlea transmit sound to make algorithms more what emojis express in online come into contact with the wall
signals to the auditory nerve. fair and transparent. communications. of a fusion chamber.

CONTENT
03 | EDITORIAL 42 | VISIT TO
Krishna Gummadi
06 | ON LOCATION
Asteroid Ryugu 48 | DOUBLE TAKE
08 | 2022 NOBEL PRIZE KNOWLEDGE FROM
50 | “Emojis are Putting the Law

10 | IN BRIEF to the Test”
Smiley faces, thumbs up and thumbs
18 | VIEWPOINT down, and even some offensive symbols
are all part of contemporary online
Inflation: Why Wages Matter communication – and sometimes there
There is a high level of inflation in the are surprising legal consequences.
Eurozone, the likes of which have
not been seen in a while. So far, unions 54 | Greenhouse Gases Electrified
have responded with moderate wage CO2 can be used as a raw material for
demands, and now what’s needed is wise important chemicals and fuels. 5
monetary policy. The key to achieving these results is
finding suitable catalysts.
22 | INFOGRAPHIC 60 | Focal Points in Nuclear Fusion
Shifting Scripts Nuclear fusion could provide virtually
unlimited clean energy. But research
FOCUS institutions and start-ups still have
many obstacles to overcome before they
Connection to the World can achieve fusion power plants.
24 | Sounds Different
68 | POST FROM ...
People perceive music differently in
different cultures. The way they react to Kangiqsujuaq, Canada
rhythms and tones provides insight into
more than just music.
70 | FIVE QUESTIONS
30 | Hearing by Light On New Digital Competences
People with hearing problems are
seriously impaired in their everyday lives, 71 | PUBLISHER’S
and not just when they would like to enjoy INFORMATION
a concert. A new generation of hearing
aids aims to give them a greater differen-
tiation of tones.
36 | Rodents with an Inner Compass

African mole-rats navigate their dark
caves by using the Earth’s magnetic field
as a guide. Now, it is becoming clearer
how their magnetic sense works.

ASTEROID RYUGU
I ts shape resembles that of a diamond, and it is indeed some-

thing of a scientific treasure: Ryugu, an asteroid roughly one
kilometer in size that rounds the sun once every 475 days, pass-
ing through Earth’s orbit in the process. But don’t worry, the
6
cosmic rock doesn’t pose any danger to us. It has been the sub-
ject of research for some years now – and has already received
visitors. These include the Japanese space agency, who sent
the Hayabusa 2 probe to the celestial body in 2014. After taking
soil samples, the scout flew back and dropped off its “message-
in-a-bottle” containing the precious cargo near the Australian
town of Woomera in December 2020.
Five grams from the “Dragon Palace,” which is what “Ryugu”

means in Japanese, ended up in labs on earth and were sub-
jected to a thorough analysis in accordance with all standards of
measurement. The material exhibits a loose, granular structure
and shows obvious signs of prolonged reaction with water.
Amino acids and other complex organic molecules were also
found.
But where did Ryugu come from? Although it travels quite close
to the sun, it probably originates from further afield. This is, at
least, what studies conducted by the University of Göttingen
and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research show.
According to them, the Dragon Palace was born at the furthest
edge of the solar system. The parent bodies of carbon-rich
asteroids – including Ryugu – were formed there more than
4.5 billion years ago. As the gas and ice giants JupIter, Saturn,
Uranus, and Neptune got nearer, it was then flung on a chaotic
voyage toward the sun.
The rotation of Ryugu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/162173_Ryugu

LOCATION
ON
I M AGE: JA X A , U N I V E R SI T Y OF T OK YO & C OL L A B OR AT OR S
7
“The long-term and generous
support of the Max Planck Society
was crucial to our success.”
PHO T O: A N NA S C H ROL L F OR M PG
8

2022
NOBEL PRIZE
SVANTE
PÄÄBO
The circular DNA molecules in

the mitochondria are a great deal
smaller than the DNA in the cell
nucleus and therefore, easier to
analyze. After an organism dies, Pääbo’s own research at the Max different people often carry differ-
the genetic material breaks down Planck Institute for Evolutionary ent Neandertal DNA fragments, at
into fragments of different lengths. Anthropology in Leipzig has fo- least half of the Neandertal genome
However, most of the DNA comes
from microorganisms. cused on extinct forms of humans. still exists in people today. 9
In 1997, he determined the first
DNA sequences from a Neandertal In the course of sequencing DNA
by targeting its mitochondrial ge- from ancient human remains, Pää-
nome. The mitochondrial genome bo’s research group discovered a
Can DNA, the genetic material, sur- is present in many copies per cell, previously unknown form of hu-
vive in the bones of long-dead ani- making it easier to sequence. The mans, which they named Deniso-
mals and humans and provide clues results showed Neandertals to be vans – after the cave in southern Si-
about their ancestry and relation- quite distinct from modern humans. beria where the small bone from
ships? That question has driven The mitochondrial genome is a which they determined the DNA
I L LUS T R AT ION: H E N N I NG B RU E R ; I M AGE: PIC T U R E A L L I A NC E/SZ PHO T O
Svante Pääbo’s research over the small piece of DNA passed only sequence was found. They showed
past forty years and has now landed from mother to offspring, however; that Denisovans were distant rela-
him the Nobel Prize in Physiology in order to get a complete view of the tives of the Neandertals, and have
or Medicine. genetic history of Neandertals, it themselves contributed DNA to
was necessary to study their entire people who today live in Asia.
Isolating DNA from ancient bones is genome.
not easy, as the old DNA breaks Svante Pääbo’s and his team’s work
down into small fragments, chemi- In 2006, inspired by the development now seeks to understand the key
cally modified and present in tiny of new sequencing technologies, differences distinguishing present
amounts compared to the huge Pääbo initiated an ambitious collab- day humans from Neandertals and
quantities of DNA from bacteria orative project, supported by the Denisovans, as well as understand-
and fungi that colonized the bones Max Planck Foundation, to se- ing the consequences in people to-
when they were in the ground. Over quence the Neandertal genome. day of genetic variants originating
many years, Pääbo’s group has de- This culminated in the presentation from Neandertals and Denisovans.
veloped techniques to overcome of a draft version of the Neandertal For example, some Neandertal
these issues. This has created a new genome in 2010. The data revealed variants increase our sensitivity to
research field, paleogenomics, that Neandertals mixed with mod- pain, others decrease the risk of
which centers on using museum or ern humans. As a consequence, miscarriage during pregnancy,
fossil material to gain direct insight present-day people whose genetic while yet others increase the risk of
into evolutionary relationships of roots are outside Africa carry about becoming severely ill when infected
animals, plants and pathogens. two percent Neandertal DNA. As by Sars-CoV-2.

MOMENTUM FOR INDUSTRY
A spin-off from the Max Planck Insti- tational life sciences, will add mo- molecules that have the potential to
tute of Molecular Plant Physiology mentum to the chemical and make agricultural production more
recently added some momentum pharmaceutical company in its search sustainable, despite challenges such
to Bayer’s crop protection research. for new mechanisms of action for as climate change, and to increase
The German biotech startup Targe- crop protection products. With the weed, disease, and insect resistance
nomix, which uses innovative meth- acquisition, Bayer aims to accelerate in crops.
ods from systems biology and compu- the discovery and development of www.mpg.de/19478039
PHO T O: SH A I I T H /A D OB E S T O C K
CENTER
FOR GREEN
From research to
CHEMISTRY
application: biotech A concept developed by Max Planck
start-up Targenomix
scientists has prevailed in a competi-
is set to expand
Bayer’s capabilities in
tion to establish research centers in
the area of crop former coal-mining regions. The
protection. Federal Ministry of Education and
Research, the Free State of Saxony,
10 and the State of Saxony-Anhalt se-
lected the concept of the Center for
the Transformation of Chemistry
(CTC), among others, from nearly
one hundred proposals. The aim of
the new center is to transform the
chemical industry into a sustainable
circular economy by developing sus-
tainable production processes based
on renewable natural resources and
recycled materials. The idea for this
came from Peter H. Seeberger and
Matthew Plutschack at the Max
Planck Institute of Colloids and In-
terfaces. The CTC will receive insti-
OUTSTANDING tutional funding of up to 170 million
euros per annum.
www.mpikg.mpg.de/6750322
SARAH O’CONNOR
Sarah Ellen O’Connor,

PHO T O: SE BA S T I A N R EU T E R
Director at the Max

Planck Institute for
Chemical Ecology,
PHO T O: H DR GE R M A N Y
has been awarded the

Leibniz Prize of the New research site:
German Research the visualization
Foundation for her shows the Center for
fundamental discoveries the Transformation
in plant biosynthesis. The of Chemistry on the
chemist researches biosynthetic land of the former
pathways in plants with the aim of deciphering sugar factory in
the synthesis of complex natural products such Delitzsch near
as cancer-inhibiting or neuroactive substances. Leipzig.

IN
BRIEF
PHO T O: J É R É M I E B OI S SI E R / I R A M
FOR FREEDOM
IN IRAN 11
The Max Planck Society declares its

solidarity with the students and sci-
entists in Iran in their desire for
greater freedom. It condemns the
brutal actions of the security forces
and demands the immediate release
of all those arrested in the course of
the protests. Civil liberties are pre-
cious. Freedom of expression, free-
dom of the press, and academic free-
dom are also prerequisites for suc-
An ear into space: the NOEMA observatory uses its antennas cessful international scientific
to scan the universe in the radio range. cooperation. The Max Planck Soci-
ety would like to maintain the rela-
tionships with its Iranian scientific
partners that have been built up over
decades and continue to collaborate
BROADENED HORIZONS with them even under these very dif-
ficult conditions.
The NOEMA radio telescope on the length, NOEMA is a unique instru- www.mpg.de/19437723
Plateau de Bure in the French Alps is ment for astronomical research.
now equipped with twelve antennas, During observations, the twelve an-
making it the most powerful radio tennas act like a single telescope. The
telescope of its kind in the northern NOEMA’s maximum spatial resolu-
hemisphere. Eight years after the in- tion is so high that the observatory
auguration of the first NOEMA an- would be able to detect a cell phone
tenna, this large-scale European from more than 500 kilometers away.
project is now complete. Thanks to The telescope is operated by the in-
its twelve antennas, which can be ternational institute IRAM, in which
moved back and forth on a special rail the Max Planck Society holds a stake.
system of up to 1.7 kilometers in www.mpg.de/19315974

IN BRIEF
GENETICS OF
DYSLEXIA
It is known that dyslexia occurs more
frequently in some families – partly
due to genetic factors – but until now,
little was known about the genes in-
volved. An international research
team, including members of the Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
in Nijmegen, has now identified 42
genes that are clearly linked to dys-
lexia. About one-third of the genetic
variants have previously been associ-
ated with general cognitive abilities
PROPULSION OF SOLAR WIND
and educational success. Our sun constantly blows a stream of for Solar System Research has visual-
www.mpg.de/19385189 charged particles of varying speed ized a dynamic network of elongated,
into space, and a particularly strong interwoven plasma structures in the
solar wind can produce auroras or central solar corona. The ultraviolet
disrupt satellite communications. telescope looked into a region that
The fast solar winds with speeds of had not been explored before. In
more than 500 kilometers per second combination with the measurement
originate from the interior of coronal data of other space probes as well as
holes, which are regions that appear computer simulations, a clear picture
dark in the ultraviolet radiation of the emerges: the hot solar plasma flows
solar outer gas atmosphere (corona). in the middle corona along the open
The origin of slow solar winds, which magnetic field lines of the coronal
also blow at supersonic speeds of 300 network. Where the field lines cross
to 500 kilometers per second, has and interact with each other, energy
12
been less clear so far. But now, with is released – and this accelerates the
the help of the U.S. satellite GOES, a particles of the slow solar winds.
team led by the Max Planck Institute www.mpg.de/19552630/1123
I M AGE: NAT U R E A S T RONOM Y, C H I T TA ET A L .

The atmosphere
of the sun: ray-like
structures in this
snapshot from a
computer simulation
show the architecture
of the observed
coronal network.

IN BRIEF
ENERGY BOOST FOR

BATTERIES
An invention by researchers at the fleeces have a much larger surface area
Max Planck Institute for Medical Re- than conventional current collectors,
search could make batteries much batteries with these kinds of current
lighter, more efficient, and safer in fu- collectors can be charged and dis-
ture. The team has found a way to cre- charged much faster. What’s more, Neanderthal father with
ate very fine metal fleeces that could the metal mesh reduces the electrical his daughter.
serve as current collectors in the elec- resistance of the electrodes and in-
trodes of rechargeable batteries and creases their mechanical stability,
replace the aluminum and copper foils making the batteries safer. Batene
used so far. The metal fleeces make it GmbH, a spin-off of the Institute, has
possible to increase the thickness of licensed the invention and is now mar-
battery cells to ten times that of cells keting it, having received ten million
I M AGE: T OM BJOR K LU N D
commonly used today, thus saving euros in start-up funding from inves-
material and weight. Since the metal tors. www.mpg.de/19463528/1107
FAMILY FROM
PREHISTORIC 13
PHO T O: H A N NA H ROW L A N D
TIMES
Fifty-four thousand years ago, south-
The peacock ern Siberia was home to a group of
butterfly (Aglais Neanderthals consisting of at least
io) has eyespots on eight adults and five juveniles. The
each forewing and clan included a father with his daugh-
hindwing, which ter and a young boy along with his
appear to be staring cousin, aunt, or grandmother. These
directly at early humans hunted ibex, horses, and
onlookers.
bison in river valleys and gathered the
material for their stone tools. Re-
BUTTERFLY WINGS WITH searchers at the Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology in
THE MONA LISA EFFECT Leipzig came across this extended
family when they analyzed the DNA
Some butterflies have striking prey when they approached from the of bones found in two caves in the Al-
markings on their wings, eye-like perceived line of sight of the eyespots. tai Mountains in Central Asia. The
spots that are supposed to deter pred- With moths that had concentric circu- extremely low genetic diversity sug-
ators from attacking. Researchers at lar eyes, the chicks approached with gests that the clan consisted of only
the Max Planck Institute for Chemical great caution from all directions. The ten to twenty individuals who had lit-
Ecology in Jena, Germany, studied reason for this is apparently the so- tle genetic exchange with other groups.
the deterrent effect of the spots and called Mona Lisa effect – named after The connecting links between differ-
observed the way newly hatched the portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, ent extended families were primarily
chicks attacked artificial moths with whose pupils are symmetrically posi- women – they apparently moved from
eyespots on their wings. The inner tioned in the iris and thus seem to fol- their natal group to another more fre-
circles of the spots were oriented so low the observer everywhere. Simi- quently than men.
that the mock eyes appeared to look larly, the eyes on the butterfly’s wings www.mpg.de/19367938/1014
forward, to the left, or to the right. seem to stare at predators in all
The researchers found that the chicks directions.
were then more hesitant to attack their www.mpg.de/19378715/1018

IN BRIEF
CZECH REPUBLIC
SWITZERL AND
LITHUANIA
BULGARIA
SLOVAKIA
GERMANY
HUNGARY
BELGIUM
ESTONIA
AUSTRIA
SWEDEN
NORWAY
POL AND
FR ANCE
SPAIN
ITALY
USA
GR A PH IC: G C O AC C OR DI NG T O S C HÖL EY, J., A BU RT O, J.M., K A SH N I TSK Y, I. ET A L . L I F E E X PEC TA NC Y C H A NGE S SI NC E C OV I D -19. NAT H U M B E H AV (2 022)
-0
-6
Life expectancy was
reduced by the
coronavirus pandemic
- 12
for two years in a row
in some countries,
- 18 while in others it
increased again in
- 24 2021.
- 30
DECRE ASE / INCRE ASE IN LIFE E XPECTANCY

- 36
2020 2021
- 42
CHANGE IN LIFE E XPECTANCY SINCE 2019
CHANGE IN LIFE E XPECTANCY IN MONTHS
THE CORONAVIRUS SHORTENS LIFESPAN

Due to the coronavirus pan- than in 2020, at 3.1 months, but lowest vaccination rate of all
demic, period life expectancy fell the overall decline for both the countries studied by the fall
in 2021 for the second year in a pandemic years combined was of 2021 and this, along with
14
row in many Western countries. comparatively moderate, at 5.7 poorer health care and signifi-
This is the result of a study con- months. In parts of Eastern Eu- cantly more difficult living con-
ducted with the participation of rope, meanwhile, the mortality ditions, is likely to play a role
the Max Planck Institute for crisis worsened considerably. In there, as in other Eastern Euro-
Demographic Research in 27 Eu- Bulgaria, for example, period life pean countries. Only in France,
ropean countries as well as the expectancy decreased by 2.1 Belgium, Sweden, and Switzer-
USA and Chile. Period life years in 2021, which represents a land did period life expectancy
expectancy is a measure of the drop of 3.6 years compared to the return to pre-pandemic levels in
risk of death to which a popula- pre-pandemic level. More than a 2021. In Norway, it even in-
tion is exposed within a year. In quarter of the loss was due to creased slightly despite the
Germany, the loss of period life increased mortality among 40- pandemic.
expectancy was greater in 2021 to 60-year-olds. Bulgaria had the www.mpg.de/19355241/1011
SAVING ENERGY BEGINS IN THE BRAIN

Winters aren’t easy for the Euro-
pean mole: its metabolism – one
of the fastest among mammals –
constantly demands large quan-
tities of food, more than is avail-
able during the cold winter
months. Since it cannot hiber-
mal Behavior in Constance have size of their brains, even though
discovered that the European they also find little food in the
mole shrinks its skull, and thus dry summer in their home coun-
its brain, during the winter by try. The researchers conclude
eleven percent in the first year of that not only scarce food but also
its life, and then enlarges it again cold weather drives brain size re-
by four percent by summer. In duction. In addition to the Euro-
11
is the percentage by which
the European mole’s brain
shrinks in its first winter.
nate or migrate, it solves this the years that follow, the increase pean mole, shrews, stoats, and
problem in an unusual way: it and decrease probably balance weasels can also shrink their
shrinks its brain. Researchers at each other out. Iberian moles, on brains in winter.
the Max Planck Institute of Ani- the other hand, do not change the www.mpg.de/19235031/0919

IN BRIEF
CHIRPING FOR
GOOD CHEER
A research team from the Max Planck psychological stress and creates a
Institute for Human Development feeling of safety and security. At the
and the University Medical Center same time, however, birdsong seems
Hamburg-Eppendorf has studied
how traffic noise and birdsong affect
to have little influence on manifest
depressive states.
for chemistry
the psyche. In an online experiment,
nearly three hundred healthy test
www.mpg.de/19373671/1017 & life sciences
subjects were given either traffic
noise or birdsong to listen to. Their
mental health was recorded before From chemists to chemists –
and after the listening sessions. Even
healthy people can have anxious make full use of the GDCh
thoughts or occasional paranoid per- network:
ceptions. In the study, listening to
PHO T O: A X E L GR I E S C H
traffic noise exacerbated depressive  Job market – online and in
tendencies, while the sound of bird the Nachrichten aus der Chemie
calls reduced anxiety and paranoia in
participants. One possible explana-  CheMento – The mentoring
tion for these positive effects is that program for young chemists
bird calls are subliminally associated  Publications about career paths
with an intact natural environment,
which diverts attention away from  Workshops
 Job fairs and lectures
Chirping keeps you chirpy: listening to A DV E RT

birdsong reduces anxiety and paranoid
perceptions.
THE MYSTERY OF THE

CLOSEST BLACK HOLE TO
THE EARTH
There are an estimated hundred mil- BH1, poses a number of puzzles for
lion black holes in our Milky Way the team led by Kareem El-Badry of
Galaxy. So far, however, researchers the Max Planck Institute for Astron-
have only directly observed the mass omy. It is unclear, for example, how it
monster in the galactic center, while could have formed at all. The pro-
some other, much smaller ones have genitor star, which later mutated into
only been observed using indirect a black hole, would have had a mass
methods. Recently, the astrometry of at least twenty solar masses and a
satellite Gaia achieved another suc- very short lifespan. It would have
cess: it noticed tiny changes in the transformed into a supergiant before
position of a star – as if an invisible its lower-mass partner even had time
companion object were tugging at it. to become a true star. How did the
This is evidently a double system, companion survive this episode?
consisting of a visible, sun-like star And shouldn’t it have ended up in a
and the invisible black hole with much closer orbit than can be seen
about ten solar masses. At a distance today? Now it’s up to the theorists to
of 1560 light-years, it is the closest to explain the scenario.
Earth. The system, known as Gaia www.mpg.de/19443006/1103
Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker

www.gdch.de/karriere
IN BRIEF
GMVA+ALMA λ3mm HSA λ2cm HST sichtbar

QUASAR IN
HSA HST
FOCUS
x20 ZOOM x2160 ZOOM
Quasars are the bright cores of gal-
I M AGE: H I ROK I OK I NO A N D K A Z U NOR I A K I YA M A ; GM VA+A L M A A N D H SA I M AGE S: OK I NO ET A L .; H S T I M AGE: E SA / H U B BL E & NA SA

axies, each containing a supermas-
sive black hole. Most of these mass
Zooming into the monsters emit so-called jets,
center: the left
2 LICHTJAHRE 40 LICHTJAHRE 86 LICHTJAHRE high-energy streams in which mat-
image shows the
best view yet of
220 MIKROBOGENSEKUNDEN 4,5 MILLIBOGENSEKUNDEN 9,7 BOGENSEKUNDEN
ter shoots into space at nearly the
the plasma jet of
quasar 3C 273.
3C 273 speed of light. A group including
researchers from the Max Planck
Institute for Radio Astronomy have
now taken a closer look at quasar
3C 273, which is about 1.9 billion
light-years away from us. For their
observations, the astronomers used
a worldwide network of radio tele-
scopes, which they combined with
DRIVERS OF POPULISM AND each other. This Very Long Base-
line Interferometry (VLBI) pro-
POLARIZATION vided images of the jet’s point of or-
igin near the black hole – where the
Some consider digital media to be a social networks in particular can dam- hundreds of thousands of light-
threat to democracy, while others em- age trust in politics and in democratic years-long plasma stream is fo-
phasize the opportunities for greater institutions. Trust in traditional media cused into a narrow jet. A look in-
participation. Whether and how digital such as newspapers and TV stations is side the quasar’s engine room
media really affect political behavior also declining. Furthermore, digital shows that the plasma jet’s aper-
was the subject of a meta-study that media promote populism and polariza- ture angle is slowly narrowing. The
also involved the Max Planck Institute tion among the population, although jet is narrowing even outside the re-
for Human Development. The re- the effects differ from country to coun- gion where the gravity of the black
16 searchers found both positive and neg- try: what is potentially destabilizing in hole dominates. This behavior has
ative effects: on the one hand, online established democracies can be benefi- also been observed in less active
media foster the possibility of political cial for those that are emerging and black holes. Now the researchers
participation and the mobilization of can strengthen the opposition in au- are tackling the question of why the
voters, which strengthens the demo- thoritarian regimes. The positive im- bundling of the jets is so similar in
cratic legitimacy of governments and pact of digital media is most pro- different systems.
parliaments. They can also impart po- nounced in emerging democracies in www.mpg.de/19564279
litical knowledge and ensure a more di- South America, Africa, and Asia,
verse news offering. On the other hand, while the negative effects can be seen
communication among like-minded most notably in Europe and the USA.
people in so-called echo chambers on www.mpg.de/19475420/1108
MUSIC WITH LIMITED COVID RISK

Wind music has long been suspected the same amount of time spent in their sults, the particularly infectious larger
of promoting infection with the corona- vicinity in each case. This is r espiratory droplets, above all, remain
virus. Indeed, playing the clarinet can the conclusion of a comprehensive study trapped in the wind instruments.
release relatively large numbers conducted by the Max Planck Institute Nevertheless, five to fifty times more
of pathogens such as Sars-CoV-2 – sig- for Dynamics and Self-Organization in aerosol enters the environment when
nificantly more than playing the flute, Göttingen and the University Medical a person plays a wind instrument than
for example. Otherwise, however, the Center Göttingen. The researchers de- when they breathe. The results provide
risk of infection posed by an infected termined the particle emission and the clues as to how concerts or rehearsals
person playing a wind instrument associated maximum risk of infection can be organized with the lowest
is significantly lower than that of some- from the playing of twenty different possible risk of infection, even during
one who is singing or speaking – given wind instruments. According to the re- the pandemic. www.mpg.de/19306683

IN BRIEF
ESCAPING THE BANGS

For two years, Germany was with GPS transmitters and
largely silent as the new year recorded the birds’ flight move-
began. This year quite lIterally ments for eight years in the weeks
Many humans look started with a bang as private before and after the turn of the
forward to the fireworks New Year’s Eve fireworks were year. The GPS data show that the
on New Year’s Eve; once again allowed almost every- wild geese leave their roosts more
birds, meanwhile, react where throughout the country. A frequently than usual on New
to them with fear and study by the Max Planck Institute Year’s nights, sometimes flying up
flight. for Animal Behavior in Con- to 500 kilometers. This flight
stance shows it is not only humans takes its toll: to regain their
that suffer from the immense strength, the geese have to rest for
noise and pollution caused by several weeks longer and eat more.
fireworks. The researchers For birds that do not manage to
PHO T O: H E L M U T K RUC K E N B E RG
equipped more than 300 coots, replenish their energy reserves,

barnacle geese, pink-footed geese, the fireworks can, therefore,
and bean geese in Germany, prove fatal.
Denmark, and the Netherlands www.mpg.de/19528005/1127
Fruit flies can move the retinas in their eyes

with the help of two muscles. This enables them
to better estimate distances. 17
PHO T O: M A X PL A NC K I NS T I T U T E F OR BIOL O GIC A L I N T E L L IGE NC E , I N F OU N DAT ION/A N JA F R I E DR IC H

EYE
MOVEMENT
The eyes of insects and other ar-
thropods are firmly attached to
their heads. Researchers at the Max
Planck Institute for Biological In-
telligence have discovered that, de-
spite their fixed eyes, fruit flies can
follow movements without having
to turn their heads or bodies. They
merely shift the retinas containing
the visual sensory cells, thereby
changing the image section that is
displayed on the retina. The re-
searchers also found that flies with
less mobile retinas are less able to
estimate the width of crevices in
the substrate. The movements of
the retinas, therefore, also seem to
be important for spatial vision.
www.mpg.de/mpr-2022-041

INFLATION:
WHY WAGES MATTER
Everything is getting more expensive. Prices for energy,

food, and many other things are rising sharply. The
European Central Bank has been trying to counteract this
trend since June 2022: it has already increased interest
18 rates four times and has announced further base rate hikes.
But is this the right strategy? Political scientist
Martin Höpner warns against overzealous monetary policy
and recommends keeping an eye on wage trends.
Inflation appeared to have vanished. It was deflationary rather than infla-

tionary pressure that plagued developed economies over the last two
decades. There was little to indicate that that would soon change. Within
just a year and a half we have landed in a different world. The last time that
there were double-digit increases in consumer prices in Germany was
during the Korean War in 1951 – and even then, only in two out of the four
quarters.
Until the middle of 2022, the European Central Bank (ECB) refrained from
counteracting the increase in prices with interest rate hikes. Their inaction
drew severe criticism from Germany in particular, as the inflation rate of
five percent in the second half of 2021 was already considerably above
the target of two percent. The Central Bankers admit that the ECB
reacted quite late – but when it did, it did so vigorously. Since July 2022,
it has increased the main refinancing interest rate – the key base rate –
four times, and it is hinting at further interest rate hikes. Now, I believe, that
there is a danger of the ECB doing too much as a result of overzealous-
ness. To be more precise, it irritates me that the ECB is not taking wage
policy into account in its decisions. Let me explain what I mean by that.

VIEW
POINT
MARTIN
HÖPNER
I L LUS T R AT ION: S OPH I E K ET T E R E R F OR M PG
19
Martin Höpner completed

his doctorate in 2002 at the
University of Hagen. He
qualified as a full university
professor at the University
of Cologne five years later.
Since 2008, he has led an
independent research group
on the political economy of
European integration at the
Max Planck Institute for the
Study of Societies in Cologne.
Since 2012, he has also been
a supernumerary professor at
the University of Cologne.
His research fields include the
heterogeneity of the European
economic and currency area,
European single market
freedoms, and the export-
oriented German economic
model.

To date, the causes of this inflation have predominantly been found on the
supply side. During the pandemic, supply chain disruptions made primary
products more expensive. There were also significant increases in energy
prices, which fluctuated notoriously. While prices fell in 2020, they accel-
erated considerably in 2021. As we now know, that was only the begin-
ning. Following the Russian attack on Ukraine and the resulting sanctions
imposed on it, energy prices – particularly for natural gas – positively
exploded. This has led to price increases across the board right up to the
present time, as all products and virtually all services involve energy.
Everything that money can buy is becoming more expensive.
Inflation with second-round effects, also referred to as wage-price spirals,

is something different. This term is used to describe dynamics where
prices and wages push one another up. Unions want to counteract the
purchasing power losses suffered by their members and react to
rising prices with rising wage demands, hard-fought industrial
UNIONS HAVE, TO action, and ultimately high wage settlements. This further
increases the cost pressure on firms, which are forced to
DATE, REACTED increase prices in turn. This encourages unions to once again
20
TO THE PRICE make high wage demands – and so on. Even if the initial causes
of the price hikes are eliminated, inflation can be reinforced in this
INCREASES IN way. The fact that central banks have to stop such spirals through
considerable interest rate increases is not in dispute.
A VERY STABILITY-
The unions have, to date, reacted to the price increases in an
CONSCIOUS extremely stability-conscious manner. Consider, for instance, the
MANNER wage settlement reached in the German chemical sector in Octo-
ber 2022 or that in the metal industry in November. If you take
into account the long terms of the wage agreements, the settle-
ments were low (note also that the first wage increase in the metal indus-
try was also preceded by an eight-month pay freeze). The unions are
asking a lot of their members with wage agreements of this kind. There is
no sign of wage-price spirals at present. I would go even further: the level
of stability-focused wage policies that we are currently experiencing in
Germany and also in other euro area countries to date is sensational. We
didn’t expect this. In my view, the ECB should take this into account and
announce that it will increase interest rates further and quite significantly if
second-round effects occur – but only then. Particularly in Germany,
observers are currently encouraging the ECB to raise interest rates
one way or another. They justify this by saying that it is necessary to
reduce demand for goods and services. But this is the precise impact
of a cautious wage policy anyway: the discrepancy between inflation and
wage increases reduces real wages and hence demand.

ZUR
SACHE
Unfortunately, inflation will not disappear quickly even without sec-

ond-round effects. This is evident from the gulf between the increase in
producer prices, on the one hand, and consumer prices, on the other.
Producer prices, which comprise manufacturing costs, including primary
products, rose by not just ten percent or so in 2022 but by 30 to
40 percent. This means that there is still a lot of dormant cost pressure in
firms, which will gradually be passed on to consumers. As a result, con-
sumer prices are likely to continue to increase even when producer prices
begin to fall again. Interest rate hikes would do nothing to change this.
On the contrary, the increase in financing costs would add to the cost
pressure that companies are facing.
If the ECB decides to increase interest rates in the medium term without
taking wage responses into account, this may even increase the risk of
second-round effects. Then there would be no disciplinary impact arising
from the central bank’s policy. Instead, the unions would be forced to
conclude that how they respond to price rises obviously makes no differ-
ence to the level of base rates. But that’s not all. By raising interest rates,
the central bank would lower the refinancing capacity of states, which
21
would then find it more difficult to ease the burden on poor households.
Without state relief, however, unions would be left with no alternative
but to provide relief by means of wage policy – but then with direct cost
pressure impacts for businesses.
How inflation develops in the medium term thus depends on

INFLATION wage policy. This is one of the reasons why we at the Max Planck
REPRESENTS AN Institute for the Study of Societies are devoting particular atten-
tion to wage policy. In the near future, a problem could arise from
ENORMOUS the fact that there is in truth not “one” wage policy in the euro
area; instead, there are 19 different ones with different institu-
ENDURANCE tions, power relations, problem perceptions, and response pat-
TEST FOR THE terns to economic shocks. The ECB can respond in an ordered
fashion to uniform wage policy reactions – even if to the detriment
EURO AREA of growth and employment – but not to 19 different ones.
To date, there have been few indications of wage-price spirals in

other countries in the euro area either. But we don’t know whether that will
remain the case. If there is no accord with respect to wage policy
responses, significant inflation spreads may emerge within the eurozone.
This is precisely what happened during the first ten years of the euro,
when the competitiveness of the countries with higher inflation rates dete-
riorated and their ability to refinance their national debt hit rock-bottom.
This resulted in the euro crisis. Inflation thus represents an enormous
endurance test for the euro area. The euro is not yet out of the woods.

INFOGRAPHIC
SHIFTING SCRIPTS
Throughout history, people have created different writing systems ago. One exception, however, is the West African Vai script,
that correspond to the peculiarities of each language. And these which did not come into being until the 1830s. Its well-documented
scripts have evolved in the process. How exactly can no longer be development provides researchers with insights into the evolution
determined these days, as this evolution generally ended millennia of scripts.
GR A PH IC: G C O AC C OR DI NG T O K E L LY, P., W I N T E R , J., M I T ON, H ., MOR I N, O.: T H E PR E DIC TA BL E EVOLU T ION OF L ET T E R SH A PE S. C U R R E N T A N T H ROP OL O GY (2 ,022); W I K I PE DI A . DE; T H E B R I T I SH L I B R A RY (C C 0)
WRITING SYSTEMS Letter-based script
Different scripts around the world can Arabic Greek
roughly be divided into three systems –
although there are also mixed systems.
Letter-based scripts are divided into [kalima] [ˈlɔɣɔs]

alphabetic scripts, such as Greek, Latin, or word, speech word, reason
Cyrillic, and consonant scripts, such as
Arabic, in which vowels are not represented.
With syllabic scripts, the individual Syllabic script

characters (graphemes) usually stand for
several letters, for example, a combination Japanese (Hiragana) Vai
of consonant and vowel.
In logographic scripts, each character has a

meaning, but does not usually represent a [ko-n-ni-chi-ha] [ɓɛ-ɛ-na]
whole concept. To represent concepts, hello good
characters are combined. In Chinese, there
are often combinations of one or more
symbols of meaning (pictograms) and a Logographic script
22 character that also includes pronunciation
(phonogram). Chinese
[rì] [qīng] [qíng]

sun blue-green in combination:
clear, bright
Mixture of pictogram (left) and phonogram (right)
DEVELOPMENT OF THE ALPHABET Protosinaitic Phoenician Greek

Protosinaitic, the oldest known alphabetic from 1700 B.C. from 1100 B.C. from 800 B.C.
script, can be traced back to hieroglyphics.
The Phoenician script represents a further
stage of development, from which, among
other things, the Greek script developed. A
However, it is no longer possible to trace alp (ox) ʔalf alpha
exactly which changes the individual letters
M
underwent. Presumably, characters were
simplified over time to make writing easier,
but only to the extent that they can still be
maym (water) mēm my
easily distinguished for reading.
K
kap (palm of the hand) kaf kappa

INFOGRAPHIC
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHARACTER <GA>

IN THE VAI SCRIPT
1834
THE VAI SCRIPT

This syllabic script with around 200 graphemes (script elements)
1845 was developed by illIterate people in Liberia from the 1830s
onwards. Thanks to a large number of documents, the script’s
evolution from its beginnings to its standardization as Unicode in
2005 is well documented. An international research team, including
Olivier Morin, Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute
1849 for Geoanthropology, has analyzed the changes in the characters
with mathematical models. From this, it can be concluded that the
individual character elements do indeed become simpler over time,
as has long been suspected.
1868
1898
THE CHANGING COMPLEXITY OF THE CHARACTER <GA>

23
1899
BYTES
700
1906
600
1909
500
YEAR
1860 1900 1950 2000

1933
Descriptive complexity, as measured by the size of the image
file in zip format, has decreased significantly over time.
1958
1962
1981
2005

FOCUS
CONNECTION TO THE WORLD
24 | Sounds different
30 | Hearing through light
36 | Rodents with an inner compass
24
Musical diversity:
Fidel Canchi
Cuata from the
indigenous
Chimane people
plays a kind of vio-
lin. Researcher
Nori Jacoby’s
work in Bolivia
included
documenting
regional musical
instruments.
PHO T O: E DUA R D O A . U N DU R R AGA

FOCUS
SOUNDS
IFFERENT
D
TEXT: NOR A LESSING
25
Drumming and singing, rhythm and sound – music moves us

and brings us together. But what exactly we perceive when
a song reaches our ears is something most of us wouldn’t be
able to articulate. For Israeli researcher Nori Jacoby, this sim-
ply won’t do: at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthet-
ics in Frankfurt am Main, he and his team are investigating,
among other things, how people around the world perceive
rhythms and pitches. In doing so, the researchers are gaining
insights into much more than just the perception of music.

FOCUS
PHO T O: JOAQU Í N VA L DÉ S
26
Singing for research: the test subject from the Chimane people listens to intervals via headphones
and sings what she hears. Cognitive researcher Nori Jacoby (right) controls recording and playback
via laptop, with a local translator on hand to assist.
PHO T O: NOR I JAC OBY / M PI F OR E M PI R IC A L A E S T H ET IC S

The first time Nori Jacoby heard about the Tsimané who small villages where the Tsimané live,” Nori Jacoby ex-
live in the Bolivian Amazon was in 2016, when he was plains. The experiments involved asking participants
a postdoctoral researcher in Josh McDermott’s lab at to tap out rhythms and to sing certain tones back to the
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). experimenter. “The social aspects of the experiment
McDermott’s lab studied how humans extract infor- were not that different from those you would encounter
mation from sounds. “Josh approached me,” Nori while running tests in New York or Boston,” the scien-
Jacoby recalls, “and said, ‘I’m going to the Amazon tist recalls. “But in terms of auditory perception, we
with cultural anthropologist Ricardo Godoy to work soon realized that the experiences of the Tsimané are
with the Tsimané. You’re interested in music and you completely different from those of people brought up
love to travel. Would you like to come with us?’” in the Western world.”
Within a few weeks, the young scientist had traded the

street noise and urban bustle of Boston for the humid- Understanding what’s going
ity and shrill chirps of the Amazon rainforest. Here, in
northeastern Bolivia, the Tsimané live in small com-
on in brain without words
munities where they hunt and fish, grow cassava and
bananas. Most people here don’t have cell phones or A few years earlier, Nori Jacoby, who is a proficient player
access to the Internet. “We did our experiments in of several musical instruments and has worked as a

FOCUS
composer, had already had a similar experience. While no means an exact copy of the musical world “out
on a concert tour in India, he worked closely with a lo- there”: the mental representations a person has at their
cal sound engineer. “This man’s approach to sounds disposal, the things this person can perceive and pro-
and music completely differed from mine – he treated duce, depend on previous experiences. Moreover,
sound in a way that I simply didn’t understand.” That mental representations are not fixed, but change with
experience, the researcher says, made a great impres- each new auditory experience. This tricky situation for
sion on him – and the memory of it came up again as he researchers is exacerbated by the fact that most people
worked with the Tsimané in the Amazon. “I asked my- have no language to describe what they perceive when
self: is it the same anywhere else? Do people all over they listen. “So, the question I constantly ask myself is:
the world hear the same sounds, but perceive them dif- without direct access to the brain, and preferably with-
ferently?” To find answers, the scientist conducted ex- out words, how can I understand what is happening in
periments in Mali and Uruguay, and began collaborat- a person’s mind when they hear something? How can I
ing with researchers around the world. Since 2018, he read people’s thoughts?”
has been leading a research group at the Max Planck
Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am The answer the researcher has found is extremely cre-
Main. One of the group’s goals is to systematically re- ative: he makes use of humans’ ability to imitate. “How
search the human perception of music and sounds do people around the world respond to music? They
across cultures. start singing along, stomp out the rhythm, move to it,”
says Jacoby. “No words are needed for this, just sound.
Specifically, Nori Jacoby is concerned with the ways in So we asked subjects to listen to different sounds and
which people experience musical elements such as imitate what they heard.” In one experiment, the re-
rhythms, pitches, and intervals. His research studies searcher played test subjects computer-generated
how different brains represent such musical elements rhythms, asking them to tap the rhythms back to him.
internally. “What I want to extract from people’s What the test subjects didn’t know was that they were
minds with my experiments are the mental representa- actually playing a “telephone game” – with themselves.
tions of the building blocks that make up music,” the In the “telephone game” also known as “Chinese whis-
scientist explains. This is an interesting field of study pers,” one person whispers a complicated word to an- 27
since the musical world represented in the mind is by other, who then whispers the same word as they have
understood it, to a third person. Finally, the word,
which progressively changes as the game goes on, is
spoken aloud. In a similar way, subjects heard a rhythm
that they were asked to tap out. A rhythm was then
played to them again – an auditory, averaged copy of
what they themselves had previously tapped. Over the
course of several rounds, the test subjects tapped
rhythms, which consistently underwent slight changes.
What exactly did Jacoby and his team hope to find out
in this way?
Expectation determines
perception
“The interesting thing about the telephone game is that
you start with an obscure word, but the game usually
ends with a banal one,” the scientist explains. “People
regularly don’t pass on the word they actually heard,
but a word they think they heard. “With the help of ex-
periments designed according to this scheme, re-
searchers can thus learn something about people’s lis-
tening expectations, or more precisely, find out which
words are sufficiently familiar to test subjects that they
expect to hear them – and which words this is less
Remote research site: the village of Emeya is located on the banks of the likely to apply to. It was precisely this mechanism that
Maniqui River in the middle of the Bolivian rainforest. Those who wish to Jacoby and his team took advantage of to find out
travel there must take a motorized canoe upriver for three days. something about the subjects’ expectations of rhythm.

FOCUS
Randomly generated triple rhythm Tapped out triple-meter rhythm
Round
Round 1 5
(1:1:2)
500 ms 500 ms
E
E
2
ND
ND
IM
IM
666 ms 666 ms
BE
BE
T
T
AT
AT
1000 ms 1000 ms
AT
AT
BE
BE
T
T
IM
IM
3 RD
3 RD
500 ms
E
1000 ms 1000 ms
666 ms 666 ms
E
IM
500 ms 500 ms 666 ms
T
AT
BE
1000 ms
3 RD
1000 ms 666 ms 500 ms 1000 ms 666 ms 500 ms
1 ST/4TH BEAT TIME 1 ST/4TH BEAT TIME
2
ND
Round 2
BE
1000 ms
AT
TIM
666 ms
E
500 ms
E
2
ND
666 ms
IM
BE
T
1000 ms 500 ms
AT
AT
BE
T
IM
3 RD
E
1000 ms
666 ms
500 ms
1000 ms 666 ms 500 ms
1000 ms 666 ms 500 ms 1 ST/4TH BEAT TIME
1 ST/4TH BEAT TIME
low high
Round 3 (...)
500 ms Illustration of the degree to which the rhythms that were

tapped out by various subjects concord with one another.
2
ND
E
666 ms
IM
BE
T
1000 ms
AT
AT
BE
T
IM
3 RD
1000 ms
666 ms
28 500 ms
Test subjects from the USA were given the task of tapping a
randomly generated three-beat rhythm. The researchers
1000 ms 666 ms 500 ms
accurately recorded the timing of the beats (beat times). The
1 ST/4TH BEAT TIME
result was recorded and played back to the participants as a
sample. Most of them fell into a familiar rhythm over the course
of the five rounds, as shown by the clusters in the black-and-
white graphs and the evaluation in the heat map.
They played them a computer-generated, “obscure” Many of the test subjects can’t say anything about the
starting rhythm and received back “banal” target rhythms they’re tapping – and yet these rhythms sit in
rhythms: equivalents of the participants’ mental repre- their heads, determine what they perceive when they
sentations. hear something, and accordingly, what they tap out in
the experiment.”
“It is actually like magic: we play a random, computer-gen-
erated rhythm, and without them having to explicitly It was not necessarily possible to infer the rhythms the
tell us anything about it, what people imitatively tap participants would tap from their place of residence
gradually approaches their musical perceptual catego- and native language. “A lot of our test subjects were
ries,” Nori Jacoby enthuses. He and his colleagues have students, for example, and although they came from
repeated the experiment countless times in 15 coun- countries as different as Korea and the USA and spoke
tries to date, including Korea, Uruguay, and the very different languages, they often ended up tapping
United States. Heat-map representations of the cumu- very similar rhythms in our experiment.” The re-
lative results demonstrate that people’s tapping researchers are not exactly sure why this is the case, but
sponses are highly ordered and follow distinct princi- they suspect that similar listening habits indicate sim-
ples. “When we first saw the distributions, we were re- ilar experiences, meaning that students worldwide are
ally astonished: the mental, musical representations of exposed to the same influences and in many cases
people with the same cultural background are the same. probably listen to similar music. In contrast to the stu-

FOCUS
dents’ fairly uniform results, the rhythms tapped by one. Another phenomenon that seems to support Py-
residents of big cities like Bamako in Mali or La Paz in thagorean ideas: with each note that is struck, the
GR A PH IC: JAC OBY, J. H . MC DE R MO T T, I N T EGE R R AT IO PR IOR S ON M USIC A L R H Y T H M R EV E A L E D C RO S S - C U LT U R A L LY
Bolivia were enormously diverse. “Our analyses sug- whole-number multiples of its frequency resonate, re-
gest that socioeconomic factors and the type of educa- sulting in the overtone series. So, is the human percep-
tion a person has experienced, among other things, in- tion of sound, with all its rhythmic and tonal diversity,
BY I T E R AT E D R E PRODUC T ION, C U R R E N T BIOL O GY, VOLU M E 27, I S SU E 3, 2 017, PAGE S 359 -370.
fluence the rhythms they tap.” ultimately determined by mathematical integer ratios?
“If there really were a biological mechanism at work
The study shows that whether in the Amazon, in Seoul, here, it would have manifested all over the world,”
or in La Paz, people all over the world have a sense of comments Jacoby.
rhythm. Which rhythms they actually perceive, how-
ever, varies. There are certain rhythmic structures To test this hypothesis, the researcher designed another
which even Nori Jacoby, who has had extensive musi- experiment based on imitation. He played Tsimané
cal training, cannot pick out – the rhythm of the local and participants from the United States two high-
dance Maraka, for example, which percussionists from pitched tones outside their vocal range and asked them
Mali immediately recognize. The researcher reports to imitate what they heard. “All participants mimicked
this as just one of numerous examples his experiments the interval between the two tones very accurately,”
have brought to light, revealing the great wealth of lis- the researcher recalls. Yet in terms of the frequency of
tening habits and musical traditions around the world. the notes as they were sung back, there were consider-
The fact that rhythms are heard so differently suggests able differences: “When we do the experiment with
that music perception is highly dependent on cultural musicians from the Western world, they sing the same
imprints. At the same time, however, rhythms and notes to us three or four octaves lower – an expression
other musical elements are often characterized by sim- of octave equivalence.” Non-musicians from the US,
ple mathematical relationships. Does this not, in turn, however, did so only about half the time. In the Ama-
suggest that music perception is universal on a more zon, meanwhile, there was no sign of octave equiva-
general level, expressing a kind of mathematical intu- lence. “The Tsimané also sang the interval between
ition? the two notes very precisely. But the first note they
sang did not relate to the source, and thus did not show 29
octave equivalence,” Jacoby explains. In a follow-up
Octaves don’t sound experiment, the researcher found out that the Tsimané
the same to everyone also perceived the two tones an octave apart as blended.
“However, this did not lead them to consider the two
tones as equivalent. They judge the phenomenon dif-
“Western thought is indeed deeply influenced by this idea, ferently than musicians from the Western world.”
which can be traced back to Pythagoras,” comments
Jacoby, explaining how the ancient Greek philosopher With his research, Nori Jacoby aims to get to the bottom
found mathematical relationships to be fundamental of sound perception. But his results tell us about more
to the world and thus to the perception of music. than just our listening experience. Rather, human per-
“Many physical phenomena, for example, ception in general is under examination here, revealing
string vibrations, are indeed associated itself empirically to be the product of an interpretative
with simple mathematical relationships process that our brains undertake again and again on
SUMMARY like integer ratios. It has been widely as- the basis of previous experiences and current sensory
sumed that the workings of the human impressions. “What makes this even more exciting is
Studies with people from many mind also reflect Pythagoras’ ideas.” that these processes happen simultaneously in all of us
nations demonstrate that,
contrary to popular belief,
One prominent example of a physical and are tremendously dynamic: on a larger scale, this
music is not a global language. phenomenon that links integer ratios is the basis of cultural development,” Jacoby maintains.
with a sound that is often perceived to be For people who place great emphasis on preserving
How a person perceives musical harmonious is the octave. Many people tradition, this may not be the very best news. “Even if
elements such as rhythms or in the Western world describe the inter- I think of myself as a traditional musician and play the
intervals is shaped, among other val as sounding the same, hearing the two same piece over and over again, my brain, and there-
things, by their culture and
listening habits.
notes as if the same note was struck twice, fore, my perception of that piece, is constantly chang-
once with a lower and once with a higher ing,” says the cognitive researcher. For example, he ex-
The way the brain processes sounding frequency. This is reflected in plains, people perceived early bebop as very innovative
music is influenced by each a notation system that uses the same let- at the time it emerged, and Elvis Presley’s rock ‘n’ roll
new experience and is ters – G and G’, for example – for notes as scandalous. “These days, lots of people find both
constantly being altered by that lie an octave apart. Physically, the bebop and rock old-fashioned. This shows that our
these experiences.
octave is characterized by the higher note perception is forever in flux – and with it our culture.”
vibrating exactly twice as fast as the lower www.mpg.de/podcasts/sinne (in German)

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The coiled structure of

the cochlea is revealed in
an electron micrograph.
Located within its coils
are the auditory cells
(orange – the membranes
surrounding the cochlear
canals are partially torn;
this occurred during
the preparation process
for this photograph).
30
I M AGE: S C I E NC E PHO T O L I B R A RY / F U R N E S S , DR . DAV I D

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HEARING BY
LIGHT
TEXT:
CATARINA PIETSCHM ANN
31
Talking with friends, enjoying a concert, talking on

the phone on noisy streets – people with hearing
problems are often unable to hear things that others
can. Tobias Moser aims to make sound accessible
to those with hearing disabilities in a whole new way
through a new generation of hearing protheses.
Known as optical cochlear implants, these devices
serve as an example of therapies developed on the
basis of fundamental research.

FOCUS
Some 16 million people living in Germany suffer from a ber of sensory hair cells and auditory nerve cells. These
hearing impairment, and about 80,000 are deaf. Ap- have to last a lifetime, as the body cannot replace them.
proximately two out of every one thousand children “Noise and age are the probable main causes for hair
are born with a hearing impairment that until now has cells, synapses and, eventually, auditory nerve cells dy-
been irreversible; others develop a hearing impairment ing off,” Moser explains. When exposed to 100 deci-
during the first few years of their life. Those born with bels or more for long time, at a disco club, for example,
little or no hearing have trouble learning to speak vo- sensory hair cells are likely to be damaged or destroyed.
cally, or remain unable to, impairing their ability to Furthermore, some antibiotics or cancer drugs can
communicate with the people around them. Their so- cause hearing loss, which may be temporary or perma-
cial life suffers as a result. nent.
Tobias Moser is a neuroscientist and otolaryngologist Cochlear implants are used for children who are born
who heads a research group at the Max Planck Institute deaf as well as for adults who develop profound hearing
for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, and the loss or deafness. These implants take over the function
Institute for Auditory Neurosciences at the University of the cochlea, bypassing the sensory cells to directly
Medical Center Göttingen. Moser is a specialist for stimulate the auditory nerve cells. In
synaptic hearing loss, which is an inner ear hearing the surgical procedure, an electrode
disorder for which hearing aids are typically ineffec- carrier with 12 to 24 electrodes (de-
tive. At present, the only option for an infant suffering pending on the model) is implanted
SUMMARY
from synapse hearing loss is to have a cochlear implant into the cochlea, and an electrical stim-
to enable it to hear and speak later in life. Such an im- ulator with receiving coil and magnetic Hearing impairments
plant will ideally be implanted in the first year of life, coupling is placed in the temporal bone stemming from the inner
before the child begins to speak. “Many synaptic con- behind the ear. A speech processing ear can be partially
nections in the brain expand and change during the unit inductively linked to the implanted corrected using a cochlear
first years of life,” Moser explains. “If during this device breaks down sound into its vari- implant. Researchers are
phase of development, the brain does not receive ous frequencies and then transmits fre- currently developing
optogenetic implants to
enough auditory stimuli transmitted from the ears, quency, time, and volume data to the afford a better hearing
many such synaptic connections will not be made cor- stimulator. The patients have to relearn perception than is possible
32 rectly. This deficit is difficult or impossible to com- how to hear using the cochlear implant with today’s electrical
pensate for later.” because the artificial signal provided to implants.
the nerve is rather limited. “Many pa-
A new generation of optical
Our sense of hearing is complicated. Sound waves are tients say they perceive a whooshing,
cochlear implants will be
conducted from the auricle into the outer ear canal and metallic sound at first.” Moser de- able to transmit more
on to the eardrum, where they are picked up by the os- scribes patients’ initial impressions af- frequencies for improved
sicles of the middle ear – the malleus, incus, and stir- ter the surgery as follows: “Speech is hearing. The first human
rup – and passed on to the spiral-wound cochlea in the often difficult or impossible for them to trials are slated for 2026.
inner ear. “Up to this point, microsurgery has been so understand. It may, for example, sound
successful in treating disorders with impaired sound like someone is talking to them from
transduction that the patient doesn’t even need a hear- behind a wall: they can hear that some-
ing aid,” says Moser. However, in 70 percent of cases one is saying something, but are unable to understand
the cause of hearing loss lies in the inner ear or auditory what. Even after months of practicing, in many cases it
nerve. is still hard for patients to tell the difference between a
spoken question and a statement, as they are unable to
perceive the intonation of what was said.”
Transmission to the inner ear
The patient and his/her relatives always have extensive
The spiral-shaped cochlea in the inner ear features four consultations with doctors, engineers, and speech
rows of sensory hair cells; their hair bundles protrude therapists before undergoing the operation. “Those
into the fluid-filled interior of the cochlea. Sensory tis- unwilling or incapable of practicing intensively for a
sue is set in motion by the mechanical vibrations trans- year or more should not go for an implant,” says Moser.
mitted to the cochlea from the ossicles, thereby de- But even after doing intensive listening training, things
flecting the hair bundles of the sensory cells by the ti- never get back to the way they used to be. “The p
atients
niest fraction of a millimeter. That suffices to activate will always have difficulty understanding speech in
the sensory hair cells. The outer three rows of sensory everyday situations where there is background noise,
hair cells amplify these mechanical vibrations for faint and/or with multiple conversation partners. Melodies
sounds. The inner row transmits the sound informa- are also difficult for them to recognize.” After inser-
tion from its synapses to auditory nerve cells, which tion of a cochlear implant, the auditory experience of
carry the information to the brain as a series of nerve listening to a Sergei Rachmaninoff piano concerto or a
impulses. Every individual is born with a limited num- Whitney Houston song will not be the same at all.

FOCUS
An optogenetic cochlear
implant translates acoustic
stimuli into pulses of light.
Fine light-conducting fibers
(blue) guide the pulses into
the inner ear: to the base for
high-pitched tones, further
Light up toward the tip of the
cochlea for lower-pitched
tones. Neurons in the
auditory nerve equipped
with molecular light sensors
convert the light pulses into
electrical signals, which are
then transmitted to the
brain for further processing.
Electrical signal
33
At his office at University Medical Center Göttingen, Bamberg discovered light-sensitive ion channels in
Moser frequently talks to patients who are unsatisfied green algae while working at the Max Planck Institute
with the results they are getting from “electrical hear- for Biophysics in Frankfurt. These channels form the
C H A RT: G C O AC C OR DI NG T O MO SE R / I NS T I T U T E F OR AU DI T ORY N EU RO S C I E NC E
ing”. Such a problem can be a source of despair for pro- basis for optogenetics, a new research field that is en-
fessional musicians in particular. Moser’s hope, then, abling advances in how scientists unravel the mysteries
is that the optical cochlear implants his research team of how cells and organs work. Optogenetics are of par-
has been working on since 2007 will be a success. The ticular use in neurosciences. Outside of the eye, nerve
concept is to have sound information transmitted by cells are insensitive to light. In order for these cells to
light rather than electrically as light can be better con- be activated by light, they first have to be equipped
fined in space promising better frequency selectivity. with a corresponding sensor. The light-sensitive ion
If feasible, this technology would truly be a break- channels originally deriving from algae cells are uti-
through, rendering the audial perception of speech and lized for this purpose. Researchers first introduce the
music much more natural and rich in nuance. genetic blueprint for these proteins into the nerve cells
of the auditory nerve via gene therapy techniques.
The work of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Harmless, non-reproductive viruses are utilized as
Biochemistry in Martinsried laid the foundations for gene shuttles, which bind exclusively to the nerve cells
this technology back in the 1970s, when Dieter Oester- in the auditory nerve and then place the gene for the
helt and his team discovered ion pumps within the cell channel protein in the cell nucleus of the nerve cell.
membrane of bacteria which are activated by light. The nerve cells then integrate the light sensor into their
Then, around the turn of the millennium, Peter Hege- membrane. When the sensor detects light, it opens its
mann of the University of Regensburg (now at Hum- floodgates so that ions flow in, electrically activating
boldt University of Berlin) in collaboration with Georg the cell. As with a conventional electrical cochlear im-
Nagel (now at the University of Würzburg) and Ernst plant, sound is broken down into frequency bands –

FOCUS
but many more and finely defined ones in this case. cussions in larger groups, he still prefers talking one-
Sixty-four optical fibers corresponding to the fre- on-one. “It’s exhausting to me when there are multiple
quency bands then conduct light into the inner ear, people talking at the same time. I sometimes will just
C H A RT: G C O AC C OR DI NG T O MO SE R / I NS T I T U T E F OR AU DI T ORY N EU RO S C I E NC E
with high frequencies fed to the base of the cochlea and have to leave the conversation.”
lower frequencies further along the coils of the cochlea
to its tip. “The brain knows that activated nerve cells at He doesn’t want to get a cochlear implant for his other ear,
the base of the cochlea mean high-pitched sounds, and as he explains: “My hearing is worse in the ear with the
that activated cells at the end mean low-pitched hums. hearing aid than in the ear with the implant, but when
All we have to do, then, is ensure that the optical fibers listening to music I am able to enjoy rich sound and
attach to the right places on the cochlea to activate the hear high frequencies. I wouldn’t want to give that up!”
nerve cells matching the particular sound,” Moser El May has now started taking piano lessons, and the
elaborates. These implants thus deliver an auditory only difficulty he has encountered is that he is unable
perception even when there are no more intact sensory to hear the difference between chords and individual
cells left. notes, making him unable to correct an improperly
played chord. Despite their drawbacks, cochlear im-
plants have at least one small advantage over natural
Pitch differences are hearing: El May can use them as headphones. The im-
easily distinguishable plant automatically connects to his smartphone via
Bluetooth, allowing him to make phone calls undis-
turbed by ambient noise, because he has his “EarPod”
Initial testing via computer simulation and trials with ro- right in the ear itself.
dents has demonstrated that the technology works. At www.mpg.de/podcasts/sinne (in German)
low and medium volume levels, frequency selectivity is
near to that of normal hearing. Now Moser and his
team intend to test out the new implants on common
marmosets at the Primate Center in Göttingen. These
monkeys are real chatterboxes, much like humans are,
which plays into research. Marmoset calls are played
34 from a loudspeaker, which only has as many frequen-
cies as an optical cochlear implant is capable of. “De- LIGHT-STIMULATED
NERVE CELL
spite the limited frequencies, the monkeys recognize
the calls and respond, which suggests that new im-
plants can communicate communication sounds in an
understandable way,” says Moser. As the next step, the In order for an auditory
research groups led by Marcus Jeschke, a junior re- nerve cell to perceive light
search group leader at Göttingen, intend to insert op- Light pulses and transmit the
tical cochlear implants in monkeys to find out whether information contained
therein via aural
they are still able to recognize calls from their fellow impression, the cell has to
monkeys. be genetically modified so
that it produces
Moser and his team will have to fine-tune the technology Light-sensitive light-sensitive ion
before initial human clinical trials can commence in ion channel channels and integrates
these into its cell
2026. The implants’ energy consumption needs to be
membrane. Electrically
reduced, and time and frequency resolution need to be charged atoms flow
optimized. There is one person who will be particu- through these channels
Ions
larly happy when the trials start, even if he cannot take when exposed to light. The
part in them himself: Fadhel El May, one of the doc- inflowing ions cause the
toral researchers working with Tobias Moser. Hear- Electrical signal creation of an electrical
signal which the nerve cell
ing-impaired from birth, El May grew up wearing transmits to the brain.
hearing aids. Then at the age of sixteen, he received an
electrical cochlear implant.
We asked him about how the implant changed his life. “At
first, I was shocked at how little I was able to under-
stand. But after six months, my brain became able to
understand language. If I were to switch off the im-
plant today, I would be totally unable to follow a group
conversation,” relates El May, who studied engineer-
ing in Lausanne and Boston. Now able to follow dis-

FORSCHUNG
RESEARCH
LEICHT
DOESN’T
GEMACHT
HAVE
TO BE HEAVY. Das Magazin der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft als ePaper:
www.mpg.de/mpf-mobil
The Max Planck Society’s magazine is available
www.mpg.de/mpforschung
as an ePaper:
ABLE www.mpg.de/mpr-mobile
AVA I L EO
sRLTOFA
e RD
N L ETsH E
FOO
N F R! E E ! www.mpg.de/mpresearch
D OKW O
LFAO
LEO A
DRDe!N
DDO
AOW
ZWNNN
I
E M AG
FOCUS
Unmistakably a rodent:
Ansell’s mole-rat (Fukomys
anselli) is one of about a dozen
36 species of African mole-rats.
Its powerful incisors are
constantly growing. The
animal uses these when
digging its tunnels to loosen
the soil, kicking it backwards
with its front and hind legs.

FOCUS
RODENTS
WITH AN INNER
COMPASS
TEXT: ANDREAS LORENZ-MEYER
37
PHO T O: C H R I S T OF SE E L BAC H F OR M PG
Magnetic fields have no smell or taste,

they are invisible, and they do not make
any noise. As a result, we humans are
not able to sense them on our own. The
African mole-rat, on the other hand, has
a magnetic sense or magnetoreception
that it uses to find its way in the dark-
ness. Pascal Malkemper and his team at
the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology
of Behavior – caesar in Bonn are
studying how this subterranean rodent
senses magnetic fields.

FOCUS
As soon as the light goes on in the room with the mole- ented to the two magnetic poles of the earth. While the
rats, the rustling begins. Every so often, an elongated birds’ magnetic compass requires light, that of the
body with light brown fur emerges from the tunnels mole-rats works even in complete darkness.
and chambers in the cages, before disappearing again.
There is a sudden thumping sound. “Those are warn- Pascal Malkemper chose the African mole-rats (of the ge-
ing signals,” whispers Pascal Malkemper. “See this an- nus Fukomys) because they are the only known ro-
imal in the tube here! It makes undulating movements dents to use the earth’s magnetic field for orientation.
with its body, creating vibrations.” The message does It is still uncertain whether their relatives, the naked
not go unanswered: a conspecific appears at the other mole-rats (which are kept in many a laboratory), can
end of the tube and responds by thumping. likewise sense magnetic fields. Keeping African mole-
rats is also a bit easier than naked mole-rats because,
The African mole-rats’ room is full of cages, of which thanks to their fur, they are better able to maintain
plexiglass tubes always connect two. The temperature their body temperature and because their colonies of
is 26 degrees and the humidity is over 60 percent, two to 12 individuals are considerably smaller than
matching the conditions underground in Zambia. those of the naked mole-rats, which can consist of as
This species is not found anywhere else in the world. many as 300 animals.
The cages are designed to provide for the rodents’ hab-
itat requirements. The animals live in family groups
and move around for their entire lives in tunnels, sim-
ulated by the tubes. The cages provide a latrine cham-
ber, a sleeping chamber, and a food chamber. There are
pieces of potato or carrot to eat, and sometimes apple
too. However, there is no need for a water dispenser,
because these African mole-rats do not drink. They “Magnetoreception
take up all water through their food.
seems to occupy an inferior
38
In the wild, the animals inhabit underground tunnel sys-
tems that can be several kilometers long. They live in position in the hierarchy
of the senses.”
permanent darkness and yet they find their ways per-
fectly fine in this maze of narrow passageways. They
head for the various chambers with instinctive cer-
tainty – and they are intimately acquainted with the lo-
PASCAL M ALKEMPER
cation of the food chamber where they stash the roots
and tubers.
Eyes, noses, and ears help guide the African mole-rats

only to a limited extent in their underground burrow
system. To find their way, the animals use a special
Optical sagittal section through the African
sense called magnetoreception. It has been known for
mole-rat brain. In the cerebral cortex, the researchers
some time that these creatures can sense the earth’s came across neurons (arrows) that might
magnetic field. This ability is not unique within the be involved in processing information from
animal kingdom as fish, turtles, amphibians, and bats the magnetic sense.
have it too. Migratory birds are also guided by the
earth’s magnetic field, and their magnetic sense is well
studied. It is probably located in the eye.
Birds have what is called an inclination compass. This

F OR N EU ROBIOL O GY OF B E H AV IOR
I M AGE: PA S C A L M A L K E M PE R /M PI
means that they sense only the inclination angle at

which the magnetic field lines meet the earth’s surface.
At the equator, this angle equals zero, and the farther a
bird flies to the north or south, the larger the angle be-
comes. As a consequence, birds cannot distinguish be-
tween the magnetic south and north poles. They are
either flying towards a pole or towards the equator. Lit-
tle is known so far about magnetoreception in mam-
mals, but the mechanism appears to be fundamentally
different from that in birds. African mole-rats have a
polarity compass that, like a compass needle, is ori-

FOCUS
39
Pascal Malkemper is investigating the orientation capabilities
of African mole-rats in a maze. The corridor system is located in an artificial
magnetic field, which the animals use for orientation.
Pascal Malkemper opens a heavy steel door and enters a dents should not be distracted by anything. Since they
small room. On a table inside is a maze, with corridors could even be disturbed by odors, the chamber is me-
that the researchers can open and close using flaps. ticulously cleaned after each run. “So it’s a low-stimu-
The room is filled with a construction of rods and lus environment, except for the artificial magnetic
struts, which surrounds the table. “Many kilometers field. This way, we ensure that our measurements can
of copper wire are wound up in this coil system. When be attributed solely to the animals’ magnetic sense,”
current flows through these wires, a magnetic field is Malkemper explains.
generated within the coil that we can control precisely.
It allows us to create artificial magnetic fields of all Like most creatures, African mole-rats always use all of
kinds,” explains Malkemper. their senses. In many cases, if they hear or smell some-
thing, they prefer to orient themselves to this rather
than to the magnetic signals. “Magnetoreception gen-
Virtual reality for mole-rats erally seems to occupy rather an inferior position in
the hierarchy of the senses. One reason for this could
During the experiments, the researchers offset the real be that the signal-to-noise ratio is low due to the low
geomagnetic field of the earth with magnetic coils, at intensity of the earth’s magnetic field.”
the same time simulating a new geomagnetic field. In
addition, black curtains shield the miniature maze, Malkemper’s team was able to show that the African
thus preventing the animals from being guided by vi- mole-rats use their magnetic sense for orientation by
sual stimuli in the room during an experiment. The means of a simple experiment in the maze. Animals
maze is also isolated from noises and vibrations; the ro- that have previously learned to locate a chamber con-

FOCUS
40
Well placed: the research

group, consisting of
Runita Shirdhankar,
Alessia Atzori, Pascal
Malkemper, Georgina
Fenton, Li Zhang, and
Sybille Wolf-Kümmeth.

FOCUS
SUMMARY
The research group wants to

understand where and how
magnetic information is
processed in the brain of the taining food within the maze take the cells become active at a different point if we change
African mole-rat.
much longer to find their way to the the magnetic field only. Then we would know that the
Initial findings indicate that the food if the artificial magnetic field place cells are receiving information from another type
sensory cells for magnetorecep- around the labyrinth is changed so of cell in the brain that processes the direction of the
tion are located in the eyes. that their orientation is confused. magnetic field. We are looking for these cells,” explains
However, it is not only the direction Malkemper. When searching for these cells in other
of the earth’s magnetic field that Afri- regions of the brain, Malkemper and his team make
can mole-rats might use as an aid to use of proteins that are expressed whenever a neuron is
orientation in the wild. A question that remains unan- active. To make them visible, the researchers label
swered is what role is played by local magnetic anoma- them with fluorescent dyes and then make the brain
lies that are caused in nature by iron ores, for example. transparent. Under the microscope, the neurons
They might be used by the animals as magnetic land- activated by the magnetic field then reveal themselves
marks. In the magnetic field chamber at the Max by their glow. “Initial results indicate that several re-
Planck Institute in Bonn, magnetic anomalies such as gions are involved in the processing of magnetorecep-
these can also be created. “We want to test whether tion, including the hippocampus and the superior col-
anomalies of this sort make it easier for the animals to liculus in the midbrain. That’s where information
navigate within the labyrinth, like markings or signs on from different senses is integrated in other mammals,”
the walls of a maze would help to guide a person. For says Malkemper.
this purpose, we can alter the magnetic field in real
time, dependent on the position of the animal in the
maze – sort of virtual reality for mole-rats,” says Cells with particles of iron
Malkemper.
Starting from these areas, Malkemper and his team want 41
Pascal Malkemper and his team want to find out how the to find the sensory cells – that is, the actual compass
African mole-rats sense the magnetic field and which organ – that the African mole-rats use to sense a mag-
regions of the brain process the signals. To do this, the netic field. They are seeking cells that contain tiny
researchers measure the activity of neurons in a brain magnetic particles of iron. These magnetic needles
region known as the hippocampus, which is very im- made of iron oxide, however, are only a few millionths
portant for spatial orientation. This is where informa- of a millimeter in size. Thus, instead of looking for
tion is transferred from short-term memory to long- them directly, the researchers want to be led from the
term memory – so the hippocampus is sort of the main brain areas to the sensory cells. Dyes highlight the
memory of the brain. neurons and their processes. The researchers are aim-
ing to follow the way through these circuits, from one
PhD student Runita Shirdhankar investigates so-called neuron to the next, right to the origin of the magnetic
place cells in the hippocampus and analyzes them. signal – the magnetoreceptor cells. The team already
Each of these neurons or place cells is active at a spe- has an initial indication of the location of the magneto-
cific position in the maze. “The question is whether reception; temporarily anesthetizing the eyes also dis-
rupts the magnetic sense. “So the eyes appear to some-
how be involved in sensing magnetic fields,” says Pas-
cal Malkemper.
Once the sensory cells for the magnetic information have

been found, the researchers want to investigate how
they work and identify the genes that enable the per-
ception of magnetic fields. These would also reveal to
“The eyes are probably researchers how magnetoreception developed in mam-
mals. It could also help us to better assess whether and
involved in how the electromagnetic fields in the modern, human-
influenced, nature affect animals. And finally, the
sensing magnetic fields.” African mole-rats in Malkemper’s lab could provide
answers to the question: do primates, including
we humans, also have an unconscious magnetic sense?
PASCAL M ALKEMPER www.mpg.de/podcasts/sinne (in German)

When he was still in primary school, Krishna
Gummadi learned to play musical instruments
and studied programming. He soon gave up on
music, but programming turned out to be his
calling. These days, as director at the Max Planck
Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken,
he is researching, among other things, why Krishna Gummadi is the director of the Max Planck
artificial intelligence often makes decisions that Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken. He
has focused for many years on distributed comput-
are just as discriminatory as the ones humans ing networks, cloud computing, and secure data
make, and how this can be prevented. traffic on the Internet, and for some time now, he
has been particularly interested in the merging of
society and technology. He calls this “social com-
42 TEXT: TIM SCHRÖDER puting”. The extent to which the decisions of “so-
cio-technical systems” are unjust and can disad-
vantage people is a topic of increasingly frequent
debate – including among the public and in the
media. Krishna Gummadi examines these algo-
When the first algorithms that came close to match- rithms closely.
ing human intelligence appeared on the market in
the early 1990s, they sparked great enthusiasm. A few years ago, the public learned about the AI soft-
Banks used them to take on the time-consuming ware COMPAS (Correctional Offender Manage-
task of deciphering handwriting on cheques, while ment Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) from the
others recognized objects in pictures for the first USA, which was supposed to reliably calculate the
time – soccer balls on grass, for example. Comput- recidivism risk of offenders. To evaluate this risk,
ers were no longer simply processing instruments, the software used not only information about pre-
mathematical robots that, like a chess program, vious convictions and the severity of current of-
simply played through thousands of variations in a fense, but also personal data such as the age of the
matter of seconds. Now they could actually recog- offender. Though the software designers denied
nize and interpret things. Since then, algorithms using additional data, the program also accessed
have begun to take a lot of decisions away from hu- criminal records of close relatives, information
mans, and this is often controversial: they filter out about alcohol and drug abuse within the family,
the best candidates from applications for a new po- social ties, friends, and the person’s financial situ-
sition. Other algorithms sense the preferences of ation. This data was further supplemented by
Internet shoppers in order to place targeted adver- character traits such as tendency toward anger and
tisements. Artificial intelligence (AI) is thus en- aggression. In many states, judges handed down
croaching more deeply than ever into our everyday particularly harsh sentences based on poor COM-
lives, and our society. “Artificial intelligence has PAS scores. Experts from the research network
spawned socio-technical systems that have a sig- ProPublica examined the COMPAS results more
nificant impact on how we live together,” says closely – and then published a study that made
Krishna Gummadi. “What interests me is the headlines. It showed that the COMPAS algo-
problems this brings and how we can solve them.” rithms gave defendants of color a higher risk of re-

VISIT
TO
KRISHNA
GUMMADI
43
PHO T O: A N NA Z I EGL E R F OR M PG
Cross-border researcher: Krishna Gummadi carries out research at the interface between computer
science and social sciences. For example, he investigates the social impacts of artificial intelligence.

VISIT TO
44
Programmed for fairness:

sometimes artificial neural
networks make discriminatory
decisions. Krishna Gummadi
is expanding algorithms to
prevent this in the future.

VISIT TO
offending than was actually the case. The reverse go further in life. “Our parents made sure we were
was true for white defendants: COMPAS gave overly educated as broadly as possible,” he recalls. “Our fa-
positive predictions more often. AI algorithms like ther enrolled us in various courses when we were still
the ones used for COMPAS are based on processes in primary school – guitar lessons, for example, as
of machine learning. well as flute lessons and a computer science course,
where we gather our first experience of program-
The algorithms are constantly fed with data from real- ming.” It wasn’t long before he gave up the flute and
ity and trained to then make decisions independently. the guitar, but the computer science grabbed him.
Yet these decisions are only ever as good and accu- After finishing school, he – along with around
rate as the data with which the algorithms are 200,000 other Indian high school graduates in his
trained. A well-known example is an algorithm that year – took the university aptitude test, which in-
learned to recognize soccer balls in pictures. An cluded questions about various subjects. He came
analysis of the software showed that the algorithm 18th overall. “That was a huge bonus, because the
identified soccer balls by the crIteria “black and first 20 are free to choose the subject they study.” He
white,” “hexagonal”, and “green” because many of chose computer science and engineering and moved
the photos showed grass – a correlation that has to Chennai, where he did his bachelor’s degree at the
nothing to do with the characteristics of soccer balls. Indian Institute of Technology. A master’s and doc-
The soccer ball algorithm makes for a good anecdote, torate followed at the University of Washington in
but the COMPAS algorithm had dire consequences Seattle, where he worked as a research assistant for
because it discriminated against people of color. Ul- several years.
timately, COMPAS had been trained with data that
had been gathered by human beings – and quite ob- Ending up in Saarbrücken was merely coincidence. “I
viously, these were so prejudiced that they disadvan- applied to several universities for tenure in 2005 –
taged such people. “We call this kind of thing a bias, including Rice University in Houston. That put me
a distortion of the data,” says Krishna Gummadi. in touch with Peter Druschel, who was working
“Basically, the developers of COMPAS meant well. there at the time.” Peter Druschel is the founding
They wanted to make risk assessment more objec- director of the Max Planck Institute for Software 45
tive by letting the computer do the work.” Humans Systems. He was impressed by Gummadi’s work
can be biased, but the computer is not – or so they and asked him whether he could picture himself
thought. moving to Saarbrücken. At first, Gummadi was
hesitant about relocating to Germany, but he even-
There was a similar situation a few years ago with a US tually agreed after Peter Druschel offered him a ten-
software program that was supposed to automati- ure track position – a permanent role that can lead to
cally select suitable employees from a large number a professorship. At the time, no one could have fore-
of applicants. It was found that it suggested women seen that Krishna Gummadi would one day become
as suitable candidates significantly less often. “We director of the Institute – or even that he would stay
want to understand how the algorithms work so that in Saarbrücken for so long. “But the city is incredi-
these kinds of weaknesses can be ironed out,” says bly international, perhaps because of its proximity
Krishna Gummadi. When asked if he is concerned to France. And thanks to the other computer sci-
with discrimination because he may have been a vic- ence institutes on the campus, there’s a high density
tim of it himself, he shakes his head. “No, I’m just of professional colleagues here.” Together with his
interested in a lot of different topics – combining so- wife, he lives on the Saar in a little village, which is
cial aspects and computer science is something I re- next to the border with France. And there’s another
ally enjoy.” Krishna Gummadi often smiles when thing he particularly likes – the region’s cuisine. As
he discusses his work. “I really enjoy working and things stand, Krishna Gummadi is here to stay.
actually don’t have all that many hobbies.”
And that’s despite the fact that even after so many years
Krishna Gummadi grew up in the Indian city of Hyder- in Germany, he still prefers to conduct longer con-
abad. It was important to Gummadi’s father that his versations in English. “The Institute is so interna-
two sons receive a good education. He had been the tional that everyone speaks English here, which
first in the family to go to university, completing a means you don’t practice much on a day-to-day ba-
bachelor’s degree in engineering. At the time, he only sis.” He speaks German, of course, when he does his
had one option: after his bachelor’s he had to earn shopping, but because his wife is also from India,
money. Krishna and his brother, meanwhile, were to there is no reason to speak it at home. When a new

VISIT TO
doctoral researcher recently asked if it was possi- categories to which they belong or are perceived to
ble to survive in Germany without speaking Ger- belong.” Computer scientists must cast references
man, the people in his working group laughed. such as “based on groups” or “belonging” into al-
“I’m the best example of that,” they said. gorithms – an abstraction task that initially has
nothing to do with bits, ones, and zeros. “We spent
For the past five years or so, Krishna Gummadi has a long time thinking about how you can abstract
been getting more and more involved with “social discrimination in order to develop algorithms that
computing”. With the development of AI algo- will be free of discrimination in the future. In the
rithms that use machine learning, you give the process, we came up with the notion of envy-free,”
computer a goal and then just let the algorithm do says Krishna Gummadi. Among other things,
it. “We call this the declarative approach, where I membership in groups becomes problematic when
just define the goal – for example, ‘Pick the best one is favored and the other disadvantaged, which
applicant.’ The path through the individual devel- can generate envy, he explains. And that can be ex-
opment steps is of no concern,” says Krishna pressed mathematically.
“Now it’s clear that with socio-

technical systems, information science is one
of the tools we need to solve problems.”
46
Gummadi. The tools used in this process include Krishna Gummadi’s social computing goes beyond
so-called deep neural networks. Although these the topic of discrimination. He is interested in how
algorithms and neural networks deliver results, it algorithms work in “digital public spaces” – on
is no longer possible to see how the computer made platforms such as Facebook and TikTok or at on-
its decision. The process is like a black box, and line mail-order companies such as Amazon. In a
this becomes problematic, among other things, recent study, he and colleagues at the Indian Insti-
when women are less likely to be invited to a job in- tute of Technology examined the extent to which
terview because the computer filters them out be- Amazon’s website algorithms discriminate against
forehand. vendors. Amazon has long been more than just a
mail order company. They also manufacture their
“Just a few years ago, computer scientists doubted that own products – and offer them in competition
such cases were computer engineering problems,” with established manufacturers. Gummadi’s team
says Krishna Gummadi. “Now it’s clear that with examined how often on the Amazon site the win-
socio-technical systems, information science is one dow “Other customers also bought...” displayed
of the tools we need to solve problems.” Instead of Amazon’s own products or the goods of other man-
pursuing just one goal in a “utilitarian” fashion as ufacturers. They focused on batteries and back-
in the past – aiming for an outcome with the lowest packs, and the results are sobering: in the case of
possible error rate – in the future, additional goals backpacks, Amazon displayed its own products
must be defined, such as preventing unequal treat- twice as often. This is admittedly not illegal, but
ment and discrimination. The challenge today is to Amazon has another major competitive advantage:
also teach the computer the social context. the company simultaneously acquires countless
customer and market data, which are not available
One of the definitions of discrimination is: “Dis- to the other providers. “In the long run, this can
crimination is the act of distinguishing between weaken the market position of the other providers
people on the basis of the groups, classes, or other and is basically a case for the regulators,” says

VISIT TO
Krishna Gummadi. “Amazon can’t be both a less stream of short videos. Without people click-
player and the referee setting the rules.” He also ing on videos or entering search terms, the plat-
believes it is his duty to point out such abuses in a form learns about users’ preferences in just a short
scientifically sound manner, but says it’s up to oth- space of time. How quickly does someone keep
ers to take action. scrolling? How long does someone spend watching
a video? After only about half an hour, the algo-
Back in 2015, he and Emilio Zagheni, director at the rithm delivers videos that fit perfectly – and thus
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research keeps users on the platform. “This leads us to yet
in Rostock, had already investigated what data other aspects of social computing,” says Krishna
Facebook manages in the so-called API, a pro- Gummadi, “to the question of the extent to which
gramming interface, as part of a project together. the direct, often emotional appeal leads to addic-
Via the API, companies can place advertisements tive behavior, to depression or to loneliness.” The
and leverage the browsing behavior of users and beauty of working at the Saarbrücken Institute is
potentially interested parties. A whole universe of the freedom to do research without having to de-
new data opened up for social science research and liver results right away, he says. “Here, my curios-
particularly, for demographic research. The re- ity is given free rein – so I can take a detour now
searchers were able to study migration patterns, and again in subject matter, too.”
including migration of refugees during crises.
When conducting the studies, Gummadi’s team
discovered a privacy vulnerability due to a bug in
the API design. A malicious advertiser would be
able to retrieve an explosive amount of people’s
private data, including their addresses, phone Bound by algorithms: social
numbers, and all the personal information that media platforms like the video
platform TikTok are often
came from databases to which Facebook is linked. programmed to cast a spell over
“The amount of private data that was exposed here users – the psychological 47
was staggering,” says Krishna Gummadi. consequences of this are still
“Through the API, we had access to several thou- unknown.
sand attributes.” Together with his collaborators,
Gummadi published a specialist article on the
matter, and Facebook has since revised the API in-
terfaces.
“It’s funny,” he says. “Social computing is a hot topic

today – but bringing together social and technical
aspects is basically old hat.” For example, he says,
many of the great computer scientists of the early
days had a background in the social sciences – and
PHO T O: A D OB E S T O C K / NAT TA KOR N
only later tackled topics such as cognition or deci-

sion-making, paving the way for artificial intelli-
gence. In this respect, he says, social computing
has now come full circle. Two years ago, Krishna
Gummadi organized a symposium for the Max
Planck Society on the intersection of society and
computer science. Interest was enormous. In just a
short time, 270 participants from various Max
Planck Institutes signed up.
And the volume of topics is also enormous. Krishna

Gummadi and his colleagues are constantly com-
ing across new aspects, but right now he is inter-
ested in how the algorithm of the social media
platform TikTok works. TikTok delivers an end-

48
I M AGE: M PI F OR M A R I N E M IC ROBIOL O GY / B E N E DI KT GE I E R / M A X I M I L I A N F R A N K E

DOUBLE
TAKE
MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE
FOR MARINE MICROBIOLOGY
The deep-sea mussel Bathymodiolus

azoricus is a relative of the edible
blue mussel. It inhabits so-called
black smokers – towering vents on
the seafloor from which hot,
mineral-rich water flows out at
temperatures of up to 400°C.
Survival under such extreme
conditions requires teamwork. The
mussel harbors symbiotic bacteria
inside it that are able to use methane
or hydrogen sulfide from the hot
springs to generate energy. These
microscopic subtenants transfer
part of the energy to their host and
in return are housed in a protected
environment where they are
surrounded by water containing
sulfur and methane. The picture on
49
the left provides a view under the
mussel shell. On the right,
researchers at the Max Planck
Institute for Marine Microbiology
in Bremen have made the microbes
visible. They form extensive
colonies inside the mussel, which
glow here in fluorescent light.
I M AGE: M PI F OR M A R I N E M IC ROBIOL O GY / B E N E DI KT GE I E R / M A X I M I L I A N F R A N K E

“EMOJIS ARE PUTTING
THE LAW TO THE TEST”
INTERVIEW: BARBAR A ABRELL
Digital communication is prone to

misunderstandings – and that espe-
cially applies when emojis are used.
The popular pictograms are fre-
quently understood in completely
50 different ways, depending on age,
gender, or cultural background. They there were a surprising number of Could you perhaps give us a few
prompts to pursue the topic: from my examples of typical misunder-
are, therefore, increasingly becom- former boss, who used a in his e-mails standings?
ing a subject for courts – for exam- whenever I had done my work well, to
ple, when contracts are concluded the experiences I had while clearing out Sure. I have younger brothers. One of
by e-mail or a messenger service my home before moving from Vienna to them recently explained to me that the
or when posts are perceived as Hamburg. Many of my ads on the classi- face with tears of joy emoji is no lon-
fieds portal “Willhaben”, which is very ger used at all by his generation – Gener-
defamatory. Matthias Pendl, Senior popular in Austria, were commented on ation Z. When he’s amused by some-
Research Fellow at the Max with emojis like or with various emoji thing, he now sends a skull as a re-
Planck Institute for Comparative faces. As a lawyer, I asked myself: were sponse, which means you’re dying from
and International Private Law in these binding agreements? Then came laughter at what the other person said. I
I M AGE: A D OB E S T O C K / V I L MO S
the lockdown, and I suddenly had time have advised him to be careful with this
Hamburg, has been researching
to research something new. in WhatsApp – especially when he’s
the role of emojis in (private) law sending messages to his grandparents…
considering judgements from sev- As a means of communication, Communication between the sexes,
eral jurisdictions around the world. emojis often replace intonation, meanwhile, frequently has implications
gestures, facial expressions, and in terms of labor law. Often, women no
other elements of body language. longer perceive emojis as funny, for ex-
What are their strengths and ample, when colleagues send them the
Researching emojis isn’t some- weaknesses? supposedly harmless eggplant emoji
thing immediately associated with as a phallic symbol, or the peach emoji
legal scholarship. Mr. Pendl, what Emojis are so popular because they en- as a suggestive reference to the human
motivated you to devote yourself rich communication with emotional buttocks. A third example can be drawn
to this research topic? touches. The difficulty, however, is that from a recent email exchange with a
interpretation is not entirely straightfor- guest researcher from China. I noticed
MATTHIAS PENDL Actually, a con- ward – and this brings us straight to the that emojis I sent him didn’t show up at
cern at the beginning was whether my legal problem. One and the same emoji his end at all. In addition to the misun-
rather quirky research interest would be can be understood in different ways de- derstandings that often occur when peo-
well received in professional circles. Yet pending on the context. ple from different cultures communicate,

KNOWLEDGE
FROM
CULTURE & SOCIETY
51
A multifaceted emoji: is
someone lost in thought
here; is he thinking about
what has been said, is he
questioning it, or does
he perhaps think that it’s
questionable? Depending
on the context, one and
the same pictogram is
interpreted quite differently.

KNOWLEDGE FROM
Whether contracts are concluded

via e-mail or messenger app, the
interpretation of emojis can become EMOJIS,
the key issue. EMOTICONS & CO.
Emojis and emoticons are

similar only at first glance.
Emoticons consist of dots,
dashes, brackets, letters, and
numbers and – read sideways
What do you say to this quote?
I M AGE: G C O AC C OR DI NG T O M PG
– result in a symbol that

reflects a certain facial
expression. The term is
composed of the words
emotion for “feeling” and icon
for “symbol.” Well-known
examples are the smiley face
:-), the sad face :-(, the wink ;-),
Perfect and the surprised expression
:-O. In other cultures,
completely different
emoticons are often used; for
example, Kaomojis in Japan,
which also look completely
different. A happy facial
Has a contract been concluded here? expression, for example, looks
like this: .
Emojis, on the other hand, are

colorful pictograms or
ideograms – such as and .
They are defined by uniform
52
encoding, Unicode. This
forms the technical basis for
text and symbols in modern
software and regulates their
use in digital media. There are
there are also technical hurdles in the In matters like this, it makes now also many animated
emojis that, for example, roll
use of emojis – especially when different sense that the courts are con-
their eyes or actively wink at
e-mail programs are used. fronted with emojis. But do emojis you.
also play a role in criminal law?
What is the relevance of emojis
in legal practice? Is there a trend Yes, a big role, in fact. In the United
you can observe? States, there is an unfortunate number of
reports involving threats of violence in
Emojis are putting private law to the test: schools through digital communication
there is a growing number of court deci- using emojis. In one case at the Califor-
sions in which emojis play an important nia Court of Appeal, for example, a mi-
role. This trend is evident in Germany as nor had suggested in her tweets that she mer partner and then sending her the
well, even though most of the published wanted to go on a rampage at her school. following text message: “You have 12
judgments in this country concern viola- Her defense, that the numerous laughing hours to find me, before I find you.” And
tions of personal rights or stem from la- emojis she had used were a sign that it he supplemented the message with vari-
bor law. One example is a case before the was just a joke, was rejected by the court, ous emojis that showed, among other
Regional Labor Court of Baden-Würt- which instead assumed that the threats things, bombs , guns , knives ,
temberg. The case concerned an extraor- were deliberate. Furthermore, the po- and needles .
dinary dismissal that was issued because tential of emojis for making threats very
of publicly viewable comments on Face- often emerges after failed relationships. Court rulings rarely depict the col-
book. Among other things, it said in ref- For example, a Frenchman, was report- orful pictograms; they simply use
erence to a supervisor: “The fat is go- edly given a custodial sentence for send- the word “emoji” – often written
ing nuts!!! ” The court consid- ing his ex-girlfriend a gun emoji , in square brackets – or “[laughing
ered this to be a gross insult, but the which the court considered a death emoji],” “[sad emoji],” or “[aston-
dismissal had to be revoked due to the threat. In California, a man was con- ished emoji].” What is the reason
lack of a warning. victed of first physically abusing his for- for this?

CULTURE & SOCIETY
That is an important question to which I the USA, Canada, the UK, Austra- by giving preference to posts that
do not have a clear answer. I have never lia, Germany, Austria, and Israel. contain emojis. Is our communica-
been a judge myself, so I simply don’t Are there significant differences tion suffering as a result?
know and can only make assumptions. between the individual countries?
It’s probably just too cumbersome to in- Personally, I have developed a very posi-
clude the colored pictograms – I know of The data available is still too thin for a di- tive attitude towards emojis. Through
only one case where a screenshot was rect comparison. In Germany, for exam- the enrichment of written language with
used – especially since the judgments are ple, there have been hardly any studies emotional elements, our communication
mostly black and white when printed out. on this so far, which is why I have at- gains more than it suffers. But you’ll
tempted to fill this gap. In general, the probably get different answers depend-
Or because the judgment itself discourse has progressed to different de- ing on who you ask.
would appear less serious … grees: in the USA, in particular, but also
in Canada, there is significantly greater What do you think of the
Yes, that may be a concern as well. Emo- awareness of the importance of emojis in inimalist tendency to respond to
m
jis are sometimes considered not formal communication. There – similar to Aus- a message with just an emoji?
enough for legal language use, but that’s tralia – the lIterature is also adopted in
something I find problematic. If emojis the judgments and the phenomenon is I don’t see an overall trend here, but
are crucial in a case, it is important to dealt with in more detail. there are linguists who believe that emo-
know what they actually look like, other- jis have the potential to form an alterna-
wise essential information will be lost. Social media platforms, messen- tive language. However, that – as far as I
ger services, and even video understand – is a very controversial field.
You have examined court cases platforms propagate the use of
from seven different countries – emojis, and some even reward it Many thanks for talking to us!
53
Use of emojis in Germany
DON’T KNOW / NO INFORMATION SEVERAL TIMES A DAY

70 % 47 %
5% 22 %
I M AGE: G C O AC C OR DI NG T O BI T KOM R E SE A RC H 2 021
in messenger in social
services networks
NEVER
30 % 17 %
17 % DAILY
in handwritten
letters / postcards in SMS
19 %
MORE RARELY
17 % 13 %
15 % in chats,
forums, blogs
in e-mails
ONCE A WEEK SEVERAL TIMES A WEEK

7%
miscellaneous, e.g.
11 % 12 % Post-its / notepads
The survey encompassed a total of 1004 people in Germany aged 16 and over. The survey encompassed 788 people in Germany
Source: Bitkom Research 2021 who use emojis; multiple responses possible.
Source: Bitkom Research 2021
The Bitkom association, which represents more than 2000 companies in the
information and telecommunications industry, regularly conducts surveys on
digital topics. The two surveys from the last year demonstrate how often
Germans use emojis - not only in electronic media but also in handwriting.

KNOWLEDGE FROM
PHO T O: F R I T Z H A B E R I NS T I T U T E OF T H E M PS
54
Multi-purpose research
station: the Berlin-based Max
Planck team is able to observe
experiments within this
vacuum apparatus using
various instruments. The steel
hemisphere on top contains the
analyzer for measuring the
energy of photoelectrons.

MATERIALS & TECHNOLOGY
GREENHOUSE
GASES ELECTRIFIED
TEXT: K ARL HÜBNER
In future, the greenhouse gas carbon

dioxide could be used to create
important chemicals and fuels. If this
vision becomes reality, it would be a
major step towards achieving a sus-
tainable circular economy. The Inter-
face Science Department of Beatriz
MaxPlanckResearch 3/2021). Indeed, water. Ideally, of course, the electric-
Roldán Cuenya at the Fritz Haber In- the gas is already being processed in- ity required for the process should be 55
stitute of the Max Planck Society in dustrially, together with hydrogen, to “green” – for example, derived from
Berlin is working toward this very goal. produce methanol – a raw material of solar or wind power.
major importance in the chemicals in-
dustry. Furthermore, a research Carbon monoxide (CO) is a possible by-
group led by Walter Leitner, Director product of CO2 electrolysis. It is pos-
The concentration of CO2 in the atmo- at the Max Planck Institute for Chem- sible to obtain numerous important
sphere is inexorably rising – which ical Energy Conversion, is collaborat- basic chemical substances from this
has well-understood consequences ing with a team from Covestro AG to gas, in combination with hydrogen
for the climate. Stopping this process develop another special process. For (which should also be produced using
is a task of mammoth proportions. Yet several years now, a polymer has been renewable energies). What’s more, the
in some areas, such as waste incinera- partially derived from CO2 that is necessary industrial infrastructure
tion or cement production, it is almost used to produce foams used in mat- for this already exists. A further idea
impossible to avoid producing carbon tresses (see MaxPlanckResearch is the direct electrocatalytic produc-
dioxide exhaust. One option is cap- 2/2019). The method reduces con- tion of some of these basic chemicals
turing the gas at the point where it is sumption of the crude oil from which from CO2 (and water). This avenue is
released and disposing of it in under- the corresponding polymer compo- being explored by a team led by Beat-
ground storage facilities. Another nent is usually extracted. Neverthe- riz Roldán Cuenya, who is Director of
possibility is to use it as raw material less, using CO2 in chemical processes the Interface Science Department at
for synthesizing fuels and chemicals is no simple matter, because it is the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin,
as a way of carbon recycling. Such highly stable as a molecule. A substan- part of the Max Planck Society.
CO2-neutral production would have tial amount of energy has to be spent
two positive impacts: avoiding direct to make the molecule responsive, The researchers are especially interested
CO2 emission and reducing consump- which is why high pressure and high in ethylene (also known as ethene) and
tion of fossil raw materials. temperature are required for such ethanol. “Those substances are of
methanol synthesis. There is another great interest due to their high energy
Research groups around the world, in- approach, however: using electrical content, and because they are easy to
cluding some at the Max Planck Soci- instead of thermal energy to get CO2 store,” explains Beatriz Roldán
ety, are working on ways to utilize car- to react. This represents an electro- Cuenya. Furthermore, ethylene is the
bon dioxide as a raw material for the catalytic route comparable to the elec- base substance for plastic polyeth-
production of useful chemicals (see trolytic generation of hydrogen from ylene (PE), the most important plastic

KNOWLEDGE FROM
CO2
capture
and storage
CO2
CO2 Water-Gas Shift
+
electrolysis
Fischer-Tropsch
CO2 recycling pathways:
CO2 can be directly
captured from combustion
gases and from the air.
Together with hydrogen, to
be generated with electrical
power from regenerative
sources, CO2 can be C2H5OH C x Hy
converted into industrial ethanol hydrocarbons
chemicals and fuels via the
water-gas shift and CO2
Fischer-Tropsch reactions,
or electrochemically.
combustion
56 engines
Industrial
applications
quantitatively speaking, and a key for the electrolysis of CO2 but also for
building block in many chemicals the electrolysis of water, which is split
SUMMARY used in widely different industries. In into hydrogen and oxygen in the pro-
the past, ethylene was produced ex- cess. Roldán Cuenya’s team is cur-
Numerous research groups around clusively from fossil raw materials. rently working on catalysts for split- GR A PH IC: G C O AC C OR DI NG T O B E AT R I Z ROL DA N / F H I , I S T O C K
the world are working on obtaining Ethanol, on the other hand, is suitable ting water molecules that can replace
fuels or substances for chemical for use as a fuel due to its good com- the costly use of iridium, which is
production from carbon dioxide.
bustibility, and it is already being commonly used for the oxygen evolu-
The team led by Beatriz Roldán added to premium petrol. For Roldán tion reaction. The objective: to make
Cuenya is trying to use electrolysis Cuenya, ethanol and ethylene are and the entire electrolysis process, and
for the targeted production of will be “essential molecular building hence hydrogen synthesis, more eco-
fuels and industrial chemicals blocks of chemistry,” even in the lon- nomical. Great hopes are pinned on
through high-yield processes.
ger term. The physicist thus believes green hydrogen as a possible replace-
Experiments have shown that the that fossil-free production of these ment for fossil raw materials one day,
size, shape and chemical substances from CO2 and green hy- for example, in the steel and chemical
properties of the copper catalyst drogen is a “high-priority goal in industries. Green ammonia could
required make it possible to chemical energy conversion efforts.” also be synthesized this way, thus
influence the reaction, so as to functioning as a storage medium for
promote the creation of either
From a scientific perspective, one of the (green) hydrogen, facilitating its
ethylene or ethanol.
primary tasks is to develop suitable transport in tankers and through
catalysts for the production of eth- pipelines. Additionally, ammonia is
ylene and ethanol. This is what the the primary raw material used in the
Berlin-based researchers are doing production of artificial fertilizers.

With a few clicks on a computer just next trolysis be controlled so as to maxi-

to the lab apparatus, the chemist calls mize production of ethylene, or etha-
up measurement curves that provide nol? Clearly, the right catalyst is re-
information about the products quired for this. The basic job of the
formed. “That’s the ethylene there,” catalyst is to break the bonds of CO2
says Clara Rettenmaier, pointing to and stabilize certain intermediate
a peak in a curve. Moving her finger products to enable new bonds to form.
on to further spikes, she continues: Roldán Cuenya’s team is studying
“And that’s methane, this is carbon precisely what happens on the surface
monoxide, and up here we have of the catalyst during the reaction
hydrogen.” process, namely, how the material re-
acts and adapts to the reaction condi-
tions.
Green In search of a process
H2
electricity
selection mechanism To date, copper has been the only known
catalyst material that can electro-
chemically convert CO2 into com-
The problem the research group is in- pounds with two or more carbon at-
tensively working on can be described oms. The necessary carbon-carbon
Water as a search for a process selection coupling process in electrolysis oc-
electrolysis mechanism. “Theoretically, a whole curs only with copper. This is appar-
range of compounds can be created ently the case because the distances
from CO2, but unfortunately, they of- between the copper atoms in the cop-
ten form at the same time,” explains per metal lattice and the strength of
Roldán Cuenya. Another problem is the bonds between the copper and
that the applied voltage simultane- carbon atoms are optimal.
ously also splits water into hydrogen
H2O and oxygen. Since product mixtures Unlike in the apparatus used for their
make further processing complicated demonstration, the actual experi- 57
and expensive, it is important to have ments do not involve a copper coin
an economically feasible process in but rather tiny little copper oxide
which the single desired substance is cubes. The Berlin-based team pro-
obtained with maximum yield, as duces these so-called “nanocubes”
Roldán Cuenya further elaborates. themselves – you would have to line
up about a thousand of the cubes to
Thus, the question her research depart- equal the diameter of a hair. The tiny
Returning to CO2 electrolysis, the good ment is addressing is: how can elec- cube shape means the copper has a
news is that it is already possible to ob-
tain the two desired substances eth-
ylene and ethanol from CO2 through
electrolysis. Clara Rettenmaier, a PhD
Depth at surface level: Lara Celeste Chaves, Rosa Maria Arán-Ais,
student in Roldán Cuenya’s depart- Clara Rettenmaier, Antonia Herzog, and Beatriz Roldán Cuenya (from
ment, showed us what this looks like left) study ways of controlling the electrocatalytic conversion of CO2.
on a small scale in a lab at the Fritz
Haber Institute. She presented a cy-
lindrical glass vessel containing a col-
orless liquid with gas bubbling
PHO T O: F H I / C H R I S T I A N T E S SM A R
through it. Inserted into the liquid is a

kind of stylus, with a one cent coin at-
tached to the bottom. “The stylus
serves as the electrode; we apply volt-
age to it to reduce the CO2 released
into the water through the gas bubbles.
The copper coin is our catalyst,” ex-
plains the chemist. The coin makes
the demonstration more striking for
visitors. The actual catalysts used are
much smaller – copper nanoparticles
invisible to the human eye.

KNOWLEDGE FROM
are too small, they simply detach and

accumulate elsewhere,” says Roldán
Cuenya. This is disadvantageous, she
notes, because such agglomerations
mean a loss of catalytically active sur-
face area.
However, the catalyst also changes

chemically in the course of the reac-
tion, as experiments using X-ray pho-
PHO T O: F H I / J Ü RGE N L Ö SE L
toelectron spectroscopy have shown.
The textbook rule that a catalyst does
not change in the course of a reaction
is thus not true in all cases. The
Nanoscopic
surface pre-catalyst was initially in oxidized
exploration: Felix form owing to the production process,
Landwehr and but gradually this was reduced until a
Claudia certain proportion of elemental cop-
Khanh-Ly per was reached. The problem: this
Nguyen adjust an steers the reaction in a different di-
atomic force
microscope usable rection than the oxide.
to create profiles
of surfaces.
Anti-aging cure for
the catalyst
The scientists devised a clever idea
much larger surface area per gram In some cases, multiple measurement for controlling the conversion to
58 than a cent coin, so with the same technologies have to be combined for pure copper during the reaction:
amount of copper, much more CO2 a single experiment. Doing so was simply reversing the process after a
can react. The researchers affix the necessary, for example, to reveal that certain period by applying a voltage
catalyst cubes directly to the elec- the actual active centers of the cata- with opposite polarity. That served
trode, which is then immersed in lyst material only form under reac- to re-oxidize the metallic copper at-
CO2-saturated water. In addition, the tion conditions, and that these con- oms, regenerating the catalyst to
water’s electrolytic properties have stantly change during the process. some extent. The group commenced
been improved using dissolved potas- Using liquid-phase electron micros- experiments in which they applied
sium salt. copy, the team has now also made vis- voltage in pulses, switching between
ible other changes in the catalyst that positive and negative polarities. As
The electrolytic cell will fit into a coffee occur during CO2 electrolysis. “We predicted, the procedure did indeed
cup, but the Berlin research group have observed that the catalyst cubes effectively reverse changes in the cat-
employs entire rooms full of equip- change their shape and size during alyst, prompting Roldán Cuenya to
ment. This is because with some the electrolysis process,” explains call this an “anti-aging” procedure.
measurement methods, the smaller Roldán Cuenya. Clearly, such mor- But regularly switching the voltage
the structure that is to be studied, the phological changes affect catalytic between positive and negative had an-
more space is required. Ultimately, properties as well. Routine use of this other effect as well: it acted as a selec-
the researchers are interested in what process in an industrial setting would tivity lever, because the duration of
happens to the catalyst at the atomic thus only be possible once it is known the respective pulses can be used to
level during electrolysis, which how to stabilize the active phases of promote the formation of certain
means on the scale of a millionth of a these catalysts. products. Long reduction pulses, for
millimeter. The department main- example, promote the production of
tains a vast range of equipment to ren- Another of the team’s key findings is that ethylene, while long oxidation pulses
der this visible in complete chemical the active centers of the catalyst for produce more carbon monoxide. Fur-
and physical detail, distributed over the undesired side reaction – in which thermore, long reduction pulses of
several large laboratories in multiple hydrogen is split off from water – dif- several seconds’ duration combined
buildings. Roldán Cuenya and her fer from the active centers for the with short oxidation pulses signifi-
team have modified certain methods, electrocatalytic reduction of CO2. cantly increases ethanol yield.
such as electron microscopy, to allow Furthermore, the researchers have
their use in the aqueous environment also discovered that there is appar- The extensive analysis conducted by the
of electrolysis. ently an ideal cube size. “If the cubes team has now enabled good visual

rendering of precisely what happens. nisms,” emphasizes Roldán GLOSSARY

For example, the researchers ob- Cuenya, adding: “You just can’t
served that more ethanol is synthe- make a leap before you’ve learned ELECTROLYSIS
sized when thin, disordered copper how to walk.” In other words, we An electric current between two
oxide clusters form on the surface of still have a lot to learn before it electrodes in an electrolyte is used to
chemically transform substances.
elemental copper. Ethylene, in con- will be possible to custom-design
One electrode (the anode) takes on
trast, appears more likely to form on the optimal catalyst for a specific electrons from a substance within the
elemental copper than on oxidized desired reaction and bring it into electrolyte, while the other (the cathode)
copper. This provides a plausible large-scale industrial usage. gives up electrons to another substance.
explanation for why longer reduction
pulses promote ethylene synthesis. Industrial applications may still be a LIQUID PHASE ELECTRON
MICROSCOPY
The methods employed by the team long way off, but for the Max
Electron microscopy is a high-vacuum
at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin Planck Director Roldán Cuenya, microscope that uses an electron beam
are also effective, among other things, conducting “fundamental re- to depict atomic structures.
for identifying the influence on elec- search with social relevance” is Beatriz Roldán Cuenya has found a
trolysis of defects or foreign metal at- important. She envisions that method enabling the study of samples in
oms in the lattice of copper atoms. sometime in the future, electro- liquids that under normal conditions
would immediately evaporate.
Thus, it emerged that ethanol synthe- chemical processes will be
sis is accelerated by adding five-per- conducted with CO2 right out of CATALYST
cent silver. the air. Research is already under- A substance that lowers the energetic
way at various institutions into the hurdle for a reaction to occur, thereby
direct air capture technologies enabling or facilitating the formation of
A contribution to required for this. Roldán Cuenya certain products.
fighting climate believes that achieving a complete

restructuring of the energy and
X-RAY PHOTOELECTRON
SPECTROSCOPY
change chemicals industries around sus- A technique in which an X-ray beam
tainability objectives will pose one releases electrons from the surface of a
These are all just initial insights into of the greatest challenges society sample; these electrons provide
possible ways to achieve selectivity. faces in the fight against climate information about the chemical
properties of the surface.
“The main thing right now is to gain a change. And she hopes to contrib- 59
better understanding of the mecha- ute to these efforts with her work.
Controlled reaction: carbon

monoxide and methane
CO2 CO CH4 C2H5OH C2H4
carbon monoxide methane ethanol ethylene
(left cube) are the primary
products generated during
electrolytic reduction Cu+
of CO2 on nanocubes with
substantial copper oxide on Cu0
their surface. The reaction
proceeds in this direction if
the polarity of the reducing
voltage is regularly reversed
over an extended period of
time (left square graph), so
that the surface is oxidized.
Less oxide forms on the
surface if the oxidation
pulses are shorter, in which
case ethanol is the main
product (center cube). Long
Time interval
reduction pulses keep the
surface free of oxides, Voltage
resulting in CO2 being
reduced to ethylene (right
C H A RT: G C O AC C OR DI NG T O T I MO SH E N KO, J., B E RGM A N N, A ., R ET T E N M A I E R , C ., ET A L . S T E E R I NG T H E S T RUC T U R E A N D SE L EC T I V I T Y OF C O 2
cube). E L EC T RO R E DUC T ION C ATA LYS TS BY P O T E N T I A L PU L SE S. NAT C ATA L 5, 259 –2 67 (2 022)

KNOWLEDGE FROM
Sophisticated windings:
the plasma chamber of the
Wendelstein 7-X resembles
a strip of dough twisted in
on itself. Its wall is lined
with particularly robust
graphite tiles
PHO T O: JA N HO SA N / M PI F OR PL A SM A PH YSIC S
60

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY
FOCAL POINTS
IN NUCLEAR FUSION
TEXT: ANDREAS MERIAN
The National Ignition Facility in the USA

announced a breakthrough in fusion
research in December 2022. Nuclear
fusion offers the promise of a clean
and practically inexhaustible source of
energy. The Max Planck Institute for
Plasma Physics is also working on 61
ways to harness this. The institute’s
scientific director, Sibylle Günter, and
director emeritus, Karl Lackner, share Fusion energy is produced when light into starting the fusion reaction. But
insights into where some of the public nuclei fuse together. This, however, Iter will not generate electricity. This
and private fusion projects stand – only occurs naturally under condi- will first happen in a demonstration
and how they compare to the concepts tions such as those found in the sun. power plant, which is being planned
their institute is researching. Scientists and engineers alike have under the simple name of Demo and
been trying to achieve the technical is intended to test the interactions be-
prerequisites for decades. But between all of the power plant’s compo-
cause fusion research is still a long nents. It will be built as soon as the
way off from being used in an ener- Iter experiments are complete. That,
gy-producing power plant, some peo- however, may be a while yet.
A glass of seawater contains as much en- ple sarcastically refer to it as the “fu-
ergy as a barrel of oil. But unlike the sion constant”: generating electricity Iter was originally scheduled to begin
more than 300 kilograms of CO2 re- from a fusion reactor is always thirty operations back in 2016. It was then
leased when 159 lIters of oil are or even fifty years in the future. said that the reactor would be up and
burned, no greenhouse gases are running in 2025 and able to produce
produced when energy is extracted Iter is currently the largest and most ex- fusion power in 2035. But it was re-
from water. However, in order to be pensive fusion project in the world, cently announced that even this time-
able to access this energy at all, we with a current estimated cost of 18 to line would not be met. “Iter is not a
must first master nuclear fusion. It of- 22 billion euros. The name stands for purely scientific project; it also has a
fers the enormous promise of practi- International Thermonuclear Experi- political component,” says Sibylle
cally unlimited energy, and clean en- mental Reactor and is a research proj- Günter, Director at the Max Planck
ergy at that – which is to say: it also ect undertaken by the EU, USA, Institute for Plasma Physics in Garch-
wouldn’t produce long-lived radioac- China, India, South Korea, Japan, ing. Political constraints also create
tive waste. Nuclear fusion would be and Russia. The Max Planck Institute technical difficulties. This is because
an ideal addition to renewable energy for Plasma Physics is also involved. the partner countries not only share
sources in seasons and areas with lit- Iter is expected to release about ten the financing, but also the develop-
tle wind and sun. times as much fusion energy as goes ment and production. “This means

KNOWLEDGE FROM
that the individual components of the sweltering 15 million degrees Celsius. and tritium. The Max Planck Insti-
reactor are manufactured in the dif- Under these conditions, matter exists tute for Plasma Physics is investigat-
ferent countries, which results in as plasma, meaning that electrons and ing two of the oldest concepts for a fu-
some things not fitting together as positively charged atomic nuclei are sion reactor. Researchers at the Gar-
planned,” says Sibylle Günter. Iter’s no longer bound to each other. The ching site are experimenting with the
press release also mentioned “exten- high temperature provides the posi- Asdex Upgrade, which, like Iter, is a
sive repairs“. tively charged nuclei with the neces- tokamak. A tokamak is a do-
sary speed to overcome the electro- nut-shaped vessel within which a
Meanwhile, many private enterprises static repulsive force between them. strong plasma current is used to con-
have also started working on nuclear The pressure inside the sun also com- fine the electrically charged plasma
fusion despite, or perhaps because of, presses matter to the point that it be- particles. By contrast, the Greifswald
the painstaking progress of this large- comes more likely that two nuclei will site is working on the Wendelstein 7-X
scale, government-funded project. reactor, a stellarator. The stellarator
After all, the prospect of unlimited also constrains the plasma in a ring-
clean energy is incredibly exciting. shaped vessel using a magnetic field,
According to the Fusion Industry As- which is, however, produced purely by
sociation, 33 companies around the currents in external conductors. In
SUMMARY
world are trying to achieve just that. this case, however, his plasma vessel
Some of them are pursuing funda- Nuclear fusion has the potential to and magnetic field resemble a strip of
mentally different technical ap- provide practically unlimited dough twisted in on itself several
proaches to nuclear fusion and are clean energy and is, therefore, times rather than a smooth doughnut.
promising both their investors and being researched in some
the general public that fusion energy large-scale government research The first task for both types of reactors
projects such as Iter, Asdex
will soon be commercially viable. The Upgrade, and Wendelstein 7-X, as is to trap the hydrogen plasma with
companies have raised more than $4.7 well as many start-up companies. the magnetic field in such a way that
billion in investments to date to the charged particles do not touch the
62 achieve this goal. Although start-ups The intention is for Iter to deliver wall if possible. If the plasma makes
are certainly more agile than govern- more energy than goes directly too much contact with the vessel, it
ment projects such as Iter, they are of- into triggering nuclear fusion, but will cool down too much and make a
it keeps getting delayed. To
ten on much shakier ground in terms operate, however, Iter also self-sustaining fusion reaction impos-
of scientific and technical feasibility. requires more energy than nuclear sible. Although the geometry of the
“The current mainstream research ap- fusion generates and it does not magnetic field in the tokamak is sim-
proaches are compromises,” says Karl produce electricity. The Demo pler than in the stellarator, a current
Lackner. The director emeritus at the power plant is intended to do just must flow through the plasma ring in
that.
Max Planck Institute for Plasma the tokamak, which introduces some
Physics in Garching spent decades re- Some of the private initiatives have practical problems for efficient power
searching nuclear fusion and experi- announced very ambitious plant operation. These problems do
enced both progress and unexpected timelines, which should be viewed not appear in a stellarator. “Concep-
obstacles in the process – the same skeptically. These often provide a tually, the stellarator is better suited
process on which Iter is based. “A re- very good solution for one problem for a fusion power plant,” Günter ex-
posed by nuclear fusion, but do not
actor like Iter presents a solution to all plains. “However, a stellarator’s mag-
adequately address others.
the problems we’ve identified so far – netic field has to be optimized, which
it’s not the optimal solution for any of is only possible with sufficient knowl-
them, but it’s at least a sufficient solu- edge of physics and computing power.
tion for all of them. A few of the alter- This is why fusion research initially
native approaches do an excellent job took the simpler approach of the toka-
of solving one problem and are, there- collide. It is not technically feasible to mak.” Demo is currently also planned
fore, exciting. But the other problems achieve this pressure on Earth, which as a tokamak. If, however, the stellara-
are proving more difficult or may is why much higher temperatures are tor concept proves to be superior by
even be impossible to solve.” required in fusion reactors to trigger the time construction begins, these
the fusion of nuclei. Ordinary hydro- plans could still be overturned. The
All of the approaches have one thing in gen atoms also fuse much too slowly fact that both the stellarator and the
common: they are modeled after the for technical use. However, a techni- tokamak are being researched at the
process by which the sun generates cally feasible solution was found in Max Planck Institute for Plasma
energy. In it, the nuclei of hydrogen physics more than seventy years ago: Physics is unique for any research fa-
atoms fuse to form helium at a pres- the fusion of heavy and superheavy cility worldwide. This enables a level
sure of around 200 billion bar and a hydrogen – also known as deuterium of objectivity that is important in ba-

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY
I L LUS T R AT ION: P. BA L L , T H E R AC E T O F USION E N E RGY, NAT U R E , VOLU M E 59 9 I S SU E 78 8 6 , 25 NOV E M B E R 2 021; T R ÄGE H E I TSF US ON: G C O
TOKAMAK STELLARATOR
The Asdex Upgrade, Iter, A winding magnetic field
and potentially Demo encloses the plasma in the
have plasma chambers plasma chamber, which is
that are shaped like a shaped in the same way, for
doughnut. instance in the Wendelstein 7-X.
63
LINEARER REACTOR
TAE’s system fires two
plasma packages at each
other, producing rotating
cylindrical plasma.
MODIFIED TOKAMAK INERTIAL CONFINEMENT FUSION

General Fusion generates The NIF and some start-up
plasma in a container of companies are exploiting the inertia
rotating liquid metal that is of mass that holds the plasma together
compressed with pistons to after it has been compressed and
ignite it. heated with powerful lasers.

KNOWLEDGE FROM
sic research, says Sibylle Günter: “We approach,” says Karl Lackner. “There result in a radioactive reactor wall. “It
are not locked in and can compare and is a good chance of success, since the is, however, much more difficult to
openly discuss the pros and cons. In basic principle has been tried and fuse boron and proton, and the yield is
addition, the research conducted on tested for a long time. Having said also lower,” says Karl Lackner.
both types of facilities benefits the that, experience has taught us to be
other.” skeptical when it comes to announced While TAE’s progress was based on the-
timelines.” Nevertheless, Common- oretical calculations, General Fu-
wealth Fusion Systems was able to sion’s breakthrough is expected to
Small tokamak with convince private investors of its idea: come from innovative engineering. In
powerful magnets the startup raised more than $1.8 bil-
lion last year.
both the conventional tokamak and
the stellarator, the interaction be-
tween the reactor wall and the plasma
In order to reach the necessary tempera- The merger start-up TAE Technologies presents a problem. Consequently, fu-
ture for fusion in both types of reac- also has strong support from Google, sion research has been searching in-
tors, the hydrogen plasma is heated by and not just financially. Google is also tensively for years for the right mate-
firing in fast hydrogen atoms, using helping by providing computing rials for the reactor wall. General Fu-
electromagnetic radiation, and, in the power and expertise in the field of ar- sion is taking a different approach
case of the tokamak, also by the resis- tificial intelligence. “TAE is taking an
tance of the plasma current. Once the old approach that has only regained
conditions are finally right, the nuclei traction with the use of advanced feed-
of deuterium and tritium fuse, and a back techniques,” explains Karl Lack-
helium nucleus and a neutron are cre- ner. TAE combines particle accelera-
ated, both with considerable kinetic tors and magnetic coils to create a
Typical large
energy. The magnetic cage is perme- plasma cylinder that is roughly the
construction site: the
able to uncharged neutrons, allowing shape of a tin can without a lid or bot- Iter fusion reactor is
the particle to penetrate the vessel tom. The cylinder rotates like a roller, being built at the
64 wall with full energy. The resulting which stabilizes it – but only tempo- Cadarache research
heat is to be used to generate electric- rarily. Without additional measures, center in France – but
ity in the same way as in a conven- its rotation would gradually slow down there have been
repeated delays. The
tional power plant. The material in and the plasma cylinder would even- plasma chamber will
the wall, however, remains as slightly tually collapse. It was only through ex- run through the
radioactive waste. tensive calculations with the support loop-shaped elements
of Google that TAE was able to get an when it is finished.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is also understanding of the instabilities and
among the startups focusing on the control them through feedback loops.
tokamak design. The company even Karl Lackner is impressed by this
announced that its prototype Sparc progress, but he is also critical: “TAE
should be operational in as little as is currently at the same stage as re-
five years. They are aiming to achieve search on tokamaks in the 1970s and
this with a tokamak that is much 1980s in terms of the triple product,
smaller than Iter and which can be i.e., the combination of temperature,
modified more quickly and cost-ef- particle density, and confinement
fectively to produce a reactor that is time, but most importantly, it still has
ready for the market. In order to con- a particle density that is far too low.”
fine the plasma in it, much stronger The triple product is a measure of how
magnetic fields are required. Conse- close the plasma comes to the condi-
quently, at the core of Sparc are novel tions for self-sustaining nuclear fusion.
magnetic coils made of high-tempera- In 2019, TAE had not yet reached the
ture superconductors that are more value achieved by the predecessor of
powerful than Iter’s superconducting Asdex Upgrade at the Max Planck In-
coils and require less cooling. Re- stitute for Plasma Physics in 1989.
search into this technology was con- Moreover, like a few other companies,
ducted for a long time at MIT in TAE is not pursuing the fusion of tri-
Cambridge, Massachusetts, giving tium and deuterium, but of boron and
rise to the start-up. “I’m happy that protons. This would eliminate the
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is need for tritium, which is radioactive
continuing to explore the high-field and difficult to obtain, and would not

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY
from mainstream research here: they into this cavity. However, in order to paving the way for the first commer-
are attempting to enclose the plasma ignite the plasma, i.e., to start nuclear cial fusion power plants in the late
with liquid metal. The metal will not fusion, it needs to be further com- 2020s or early 2030s.
be destroyed by the interaction with pressed. In order to accomplish this,
the plasma and therefore, does not General Fusion plans to use precisely What all the projects mentioned so far
need to be repeatedly replaced. More- controlled pistons mounted all around have in common is that they use a
over, the wall of liquid metal facili- the reactor wall to compress the liquid magnetic field to enclose the plasma.
tates the dissipation of fusion energy metal and its plasma core. But Lack- The National Ignition Facility (NIF)
in the form of heat. General Fusion is ner also believes that this is one of its in the USA and the German start-ups
employing a modified tokamak de- biggest challenges: “The compressed Marvel Fusion and Focused Energy
sign for the reactor. To do this, the plasma is likely to be unstable.” De- are pursuing a completely different
liquid metal is made to rotate in the spite this, General Fusion announced path. They are focusing on la-
reactor. It is pressed against the wall that it will be building a demonstra- ser-based inertial confinement fusion.
of the vessel in the same way as laun- tion power plant in Culham, England, In this process, the conditions re-
dry during a spin cycle, creating a in partnership with the United King- quired for nuclear fusion can only be
cavity in the center. The deuterium dom Atomic Energy Authority. This achieved for a very short time, usually
and tritium plasma will be introduced is expected to be completed in 2025, for a few nanoseconds. The plasma is
65
PHO T O: I T E R ORGA N I Z AT ION, H T T P:// W W W.I T E R .ORG/

KNOWLEDGE FROM
Using light power for

inertial confinement
fusion: the National
Ignition Facility in the
U.S. splits what is
currently the world’s
most powerful laser into
multiple beams that
generate X-rays in the
reactor chamber. This
detonates a capsule
containing deuterium
and tritium, creating
plasma and resulting in
nuclear fusion.
66
held together for this short time confinement fusion. NIF uses what is smallest deviations in the geometry of
purely due to its inertia and does not currently the most powerful laser in the experiment, among other things,
have to be elaborately confined in a the world. It produces the tempera- can lead to large differences in the re-
magnetic cage. High-powered lasers ture and density required for fusion sults. In any case, this approach is far
are used by the researchers to achieve indirectly via multiple intermediate from being implemented in a power
the high temperature and density re- steps, with the laser heating the inner plant: at present, the NIF facility can
quired for nuclear fusion within a wall of a cavity to a temperature mak- only fire four to six shots per day; a
very short time. The NIF at Law- ing it an effective radiator of X-rays. power plant would need to fire several
rence Livermore National Laboratory In December 2022, NIF researchers per second.
is primarily a military research facil- made a record-breaking shot: the nu-
ity, since laser-based inertial confine- clear fusion process released about 50 Unlike NIF, the two German startups
ment fusion can be used to study what percent more energy than was input are aiming ultra-short laser pulses di-
happens when a hydrogen bomb is by the laser to create and ignite the rectly at a capsule containing the fuel.
detonated. Despite this – or perhaps plasma. The team has, however, only Focused Energy, a spin-off of the
because of it – this facility is the most been able to reproduce similar suc- Technical University of Darmstadt,
advanced system around for inertial cesses with difficulty, since even the wants to first generate and compress

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY
GLOSSARY
NUCLEAR FUSION
is the fusion of atomic nuclei.
When these are light nuclei such
as protons, energy is released in
the process; this is how stars
sion technology has a trick to it: the generate energy.
capsules containing the fuel have a
MAGNETIC CONFINEMENT
special nanostructure. Only a few sci- is the name of an approach to
entific details of the approach are nuclear fusion in which plasma is
public, however, and Günter and confined in a magnetic field.
Lackner are accordingly skeptical. This is mainly carried out in toka-
“Based on the publicly available infor- mak and stellarator systems,
PHO T O: L AW R E NC E L I V E R MOR E NAT IONA L L A B OR AT ORY
mation, it is not clear how Marvel Fu- which differ in terms of how the
magnetic field is generated.
sion’s approach is supposed to work,”
Lackner states. INERTIAL CONFINEMENT
FUSION
takes its name from the way
The overall energy the fusion plasma retains the
necessary density for a short
balance causes time due to the inertia of mass.
Lasers can generate, compress,
problems and heat the plasma.
One problem is thwarting all of the ap-

proaches currently being pursued: so
far, fusion reactors are nowhere near
being able to produce more energy
than is needed for their entire opera-
tion. When it comes to the use of converted into electricity. However,
nuclear fusion in power plants, it is the demonstration pilot power plant 67
ultimately not the energy balance of Demo aims to prove that nuclear fu-
the fusion reaction that is decisive, sion by magnetic confinement, at
but the net energy yield of the entire least, is capable of producing true ex-
power plant. Even Iter will not be in cess energy, as long as the plant is
the black. Although, it should gener- large enough. But even if research
ate more energy than flows directly groups someday manage to produce a
into the plasma, Iter, as a power plant, self-sustaining fusion reaction with a
would still consume more energy in positive energy balance, it remains to
total than it generates. This is because be seen whether this type of power
an enormous amount of energy is re- generation will be economical.
quired to cool the large magnetic coils
and to heat the plasma. Moreover, the Despite all the difficulties, fusion power
heat generated by nuclear fusion can- remains a worthy goal. After all, the
not be converted into electricity with- problems associated with fossil fuels
the plasma by bombarding a pellet out efficiency losses. In theory, Iter are well known, and whether renew-
filled with deuterium and tritium could cover about half of its own enable sources such as wind and solar
with a laser beam. A second, more ergy needs. With inertial confine- power will actually be able to meet hu-
powerful, but shorter pulse laser ment fusion, the difference is even manity’s growing energy needs is still
should then produce fast ions heating greater: in the most recent and uncertain. Which of the many ap-
the plasma to ignition. This two- best-performing experiment to date proaches to nuclear fusion will ulti-
stage approach reduces the total laser on laser-based inertial confinement mately be successful is difficult to
energy required, thereby saving costs. fusion at NIF, 150 percent of the en- predict. What is clear, however, is that
“It’s an exciting approach – if it works,” ergy from the laser was recovered competition should not stifle scien-
says Sibylle Günter. “And I’m skepti- through nuclear fusion. But generat- tific exchange: “Whether it is govern-
cal of the timeline.” After all, the first ing the laser energy required about ment-funded research or a pri-
power plants are expected to produce 150 times more energy than arrived in vate-sector initiative, it is important
electricity in the mid-2030s – a plan the reactor chamber. As such, the fu- that the results are openly communi-
that even the company itself calls sion reaction released only about one cated,” says Karl Lackner. ”This way,
challenging. Marvel Fusion’s la- percent of the energy used as heat. At we will definitely be able to achieve
ser-assisted inertial confinement fu- best, about 50 percent of this could be our goal more quickly.”

PHO T O: E L SPET H R E A DY
The village of
Kangiqsujuaq, with its
800 inhabitants, lies in
the far north of Quebec.
For the Inuit who live
there, hunting and
sharing food are still
important today.
68
Max Planck researchers coop-
erate with partners in more
than 120 countries. In these
articles, they talk about their
flights are often delayed due to bad houses and buy food and materials in
personal experiences and im- weather, sometimes for several days. shops, but the local language and cul-
pressions. Elspeth Ready from tural practices like hunting and food
the Max Planck Institute for I first visited Kangiqsujuaq in 2011 with sharing are still strong. Nevertheless,
Evolutionary Anthropology in a team of archaeologists. We worked the changes have not been easy. One
on documenting semi-subterranean of my current research projects, in
Leipzig regularly travels to the houses just a few kilometers away collaboration with the local commu-
Canadian Arctic for research. from the modern village. The houses nity council, focuses on experiences
She tells of magnificent ex- were occupied for hundreds of years of stress and stress management strat-
panses, special culinary de- by both Inuit and Tuniit, a population egies in the community.
who lived in the region before Inuit
lights, and an icy dog sled ride.
arrived. After that first summer, I During my last stay in Kangiqsujuaq, I
kept returning to Kangiqsujuaq and, lived in a small teacher’s apartment
motivated by my experiences and that was free during the school holi-
conversations with hunters, devel- days. In the morning, I usually write
The village of Kangiqsujuaq has 800 in- oped a research project focused on the field notes and then conduct inter-
habitants and is located in Nunavik, role of hunting and food sharing in views in the afternoons. In the eve-
in the far north of Quebec. To get food security in Inuit communities. nings, I often go visiting at the homes
there, you take a flight from Montreal of my Inuit friends. Visitors are some-
to Kuujjuaq, where you change to a Over the past century, Inuit have experi- times invited to eat, and a variety of
smaller plane, filled with passengers enced extreme changes in their way of local foods—like caribou, seal, beluga
and cargo, that stops at several towns life. Many elders were born in igloos whales, geese, and grouse—might be
along the Hudson Strait coast. The or tents and lived on the land until served. My personal favorite is Arctic
trip from Kuujjuaq usually takes half they were told by government offi- char. It tastes a lot like salmon, but
a day, but it’s important to be patient cials to move to the village in the much better! I especially like it dried
and keep your plans flexible because 1960s. Today, Inuit live in permanent with Montreal steak seasoning.

POST
FROM
KANGIQSUJUAQ , CANADA
69
Traditional foods are an important scape is vast, and the sense of freedom
source of nutrients and vitamins for is indescribable. In Germany I am
Inuit today. Fresh foods are rare at the often asked how I cope with the

supermarkets in Kangiqsujuaq. Rice, darkness of the Arctic winter, but I
PHO T O: PR I VAT E
pasta, and other nonperishable goods grew up in Canada, so as a child, I was

are delivered by cargo ship during the used to going to school and coming
summer. Some fresh fruits and vege- home in the dark. In fact, I often find
tables arrive weekly by plane, but are the German winter much more
very expensive and soon out of stock. oppressive: everything is gray and the
Traditional foods are also widely sky is full of clouds. In the Arctic, the
shared, and this sharing brings fami- sky is usually clear, and you can see
lies and the wider community closer the moon and the stars, and the snow
together. makes everything bright. Elspeth Ready
Because much of my research focuses on Once, I had the opportunity to go on a 36 is Canadian and studied
traditional foods, I try to go along dog sled trip with friends who were anthropology at the University
on hunting and fishing trips whenever training for an annual sled race. of Alberta and Trent University.
After completing her Ph. D. at
I get the chance, so I can learn about For seven hours we travelled across Stanford University, she moved
what local food production involves. the snowy tundra and sea ice to a to the Max Planck Institute for
I can drive a snowmobile and I try to small cabin where we spent the night, Evolutionary Anthropology in
be helpful wherever I can – for in- then back again the next day. During Leipzig at the beginning of 2019.
stance, lending a hand in butchering a the several hours of sledding at minus Together with her team, she
studies how traditional foods
whale. 25 degrees Celsius, I got frostbite
support food security,
on my nose, but my Inuit companions well-being, and resilience to
Being out on the land in the Arctic is an noticed it quickly before it got too bad. climate change in Inuit
uplifting feeling for me. The land- Fortunately, it has healed well! communities.

FIVE
QUESTIONS
I L LUS T R AT ION: S OPH I E K ET T E R E R F OR M PG

ON NEW DIGITAL
COMPETENCES
FOR ANASTASIA KOZYREVA
Researchers from Berlin, Stanford, time we spend on our smartphones, tablets, No, absolutely not! Because that’s exactly
and Bristol have identified “critical or PCs, and you can do this by setting up what these people want to achieve in spread-
ignoring” as a new way for people to time limits on the devices, for example, or ing that kind of thing: they aim to provoke,
gain more control over their use of enabling do not disturb mode at night. This and they feel vindicated when they get a re-
online media. frees up time for offline activities that bring sponse. The point here is to protect our-
70 value to one’s life – such as time spent with selves: engaging in discussions with online
Ms. Kozyreva, you were part of the family and friends. trolls and cyberbullies can be really damag-
team. Why do we spend so much time ing for our mental health and our relation-
reading things online in the first When I am online, though, quite a lot ships with other people. It’s better to ignore
place? of news reaches me. How can I find the provocateurs, to block them, and in or-
out which bits are fake news? der to prevent them from damaging others,
ANASTASIA KOZYREVA For us humans, to report abusers to the platform operators.
it has always been very important to get There is a strategy for this, too, called lateral
information from our community and share reading, i.e. reading sideways. In school Who did you develop your recom-
it with others to survive. Negative or very we learned to critically examine a text by mendations for?
emotional news grabs our attention, in going through it very carefully from begin-
particular, because it prepares us to avoid ning to end. Fact checkers proceed differ- This really concerns all of us, young and old
possible dangers, for example. This has ently: they open another tab in the browser – alike. But I think it is particularly important
served us well for millennia. But for a few i.e., sideways – and do internet searches to teach these strategies in schools. They are
years now, online media have been virtually on who’s b ehind the website. There is an easy to learn and very effective. By teaching
flooding us with information. They are de- astonishing number of sites that appear to young people critical ignoring, you empower
signed so that we spend as much time as be quite legitimate but in fact display inac- them to allocate their attention to online
possible on them, which means providers curate information (e.g., climate change content consciously and intentionally.
can place as much advertising as possible. denial), for example, in the interest of cer-
We have not had time to adapt to this, which tain lobby groups, who try to influence pub- Interview: Mechthild Zimmermann
is why we need new digital competences. My lic opinion in this way. We should always be
colleagues and I consider critical ignoring to suspicious of sources that we can’t identify –
be just as important as critical thinking in whether they are websites, videos, or for-
dealing with online media. warded posts. With lateral reading, it often
takes just a few minutes or even seconds to
How does critical ignoring work? find out whether information is
trustworthy.
You can use three strategies here. The first
one is self-nudging, which means that I de- A big problem in chats or on social
sign my environment in such a way that I media is hate speech. Should I Anastasia Kozyreva works at the Max Planck
Institute for Human D evelopment in
can control what I really engage with. We respond when I read insults or racist
the research area of Adaptive Rationality.
can and we should actively decide how much and sexist comments?

RESEARCH ESTABLISHMENTS
S C H L E S W IG -
HOL S T E I N
Institute / research unit Plön Rostock

Sub-institute / branch Greifswald
Other research facilities
M EC K L E N BU RG -
Associated research facilities VOR P OM M E R N
Hamburg
Bremen
Netherlands B R A N DE N BU RG
Nijmegen L OW E R SA XON Y
Berlin
Italy
Rome Hanover
Potsdam
Florence Magdeburg
Münster
USA NORT H R H I N E -W E S T PH A L I A SA XON Y-A N H A LT
JupIter, Florida Göttingen
Dortmund
Mülheim Bochum Halle
Brazil
Manaus Düsseldorf Leipzig SA XON Y
Cologne H E S SE
Luxembourg Jena Dresden
Bonn
Luxembourg Marburg T H U R I NGI A
Bad Münstereifel
Bad Nauheim
RHINELAND
PA L AT I NAT E
Mainz Frankfurt
SA A R L A N D Kaiserslautern
Saarbrücken Erlangen
Heidelberg
BAVA R I A
Stuttgart
71
Tübingen Garching
BA DE N -
W Ü RT T E M B E RG Munich
Martinsried
Freiburg
Seewiesen
Constance
PUBLISHER’S INFORMATION
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MaxPlanckResearch reports on research currently being conducted at the
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Max Planck Institutes and is aimed at a wide audience with an interest in
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04 | 2022

JURISPRUDENCE CHEMISTRY PHYSICS

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