Research

Feng shui from China, ritual magic in Germany, vodun in West Africa or kabbalah ma'asit in Israel: practices used to try and predict, control or manipulate future events can be found all over the world. An FAU research unit is to investigate and compare these esoteric practices in a large-scale interdisciplinary project that has received almost four million euros of funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Since May 2021, doctors at the Department of Ophthalmology at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen have successfully treated four patients suffering long-term effects of a COVID infection. All four people suffering from severe Long COVID symptoms experienced a reduction in symptoms after receiving the cardiac drug BC 007. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research is now supporting further research at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen.

From October, Dr. Alison Mitchell and her Emmy Noether junior research group at the Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics (ECAP) are to investigate the role pulsars play in creating galactic, high-energy cosmic rays. The project is set to run for six years, and has received nearly 1.5 million euros in funding.

The diffuse symptoms at the early stage of complex autoimmune diseases make it hard to diagnose the condition early on, which in turn delays treatment. A team of researchers at FAU has now demonstrated that treatment can be extremely effective if autoimmune diseases are treated as early as possible, even before the first clinical symptoms appear.

Snakes benefited from the mass extinction after the asteroid impact 66 million years ago. The asteroid impact wiped out 95 percent of all life on Earth, including the dinosaurs, and only a few species of snake survived. The lack of predators and their ability to survive for long periods without food helped snakes to spread to other continents and exploit new habitats, allowing a wide variety of new species to develop. The patterns seen in snakes show that natural disasters play a greater role in evolution than previously thought.

The influence of rapid climate change on biodiversity depends to a significant extent on longer-lasting climate trends in previous periods of the Earth’s history.

Although patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can benefit from treatment that suppresses the virus and thus protects them against AIDS, they usually have more health problems than people not affected by the virus and their life expectancy is lower New studies indicate that increased and ongoing inflammation could be the cause.