Research

Evidence for crimes is increasingly to be found in the digital world. Normal police work often runs up against its limits when investigating digital crimes. The research training group ‘Cybercrime and forensic computing’ at FAU brings together experts from the areas of computer science and of law to systematically explore and research the topic of criminal investigation of cybercrime.

Everyone is talking about global warming. A team of palaeontologists at GeoZentrum Nordbayern at FAU has recently investigated how prehistoric organisms reacted to climate change, basing their research on belemnites. These shrunk significantly when the water temperature rose as a result of volcanic activity approximately 183 million years ago, during the period known as the Toarcian. The FAU research team published their results in the online publication Royal Society Open Science.

Magnets are usually produced using rare earths and conventional manufacturing methods. A team of researchers at FAU has worked together with other researchers from the Graz University of Technology, the University of Vienna and the research institution Joanneum Research to produce specially designed magnets using a 3D printer.

Can phagocytes act like a Trojan horse, transporting tumour cells within themselves and thereby causing metastases in cancer patients? PD Dr. Heiko Bruns at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen, FAU, has been accepted to the funding programme ‘Experiment! In search of bold research ideas’ on the basis of this unusual question.

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Dr. Helen Kaufmann's research interests include late Latin poetry, intertextuality, poetic genres, local identities and reception. In 2020, Dr. Kaufmann will further her research on Latin poetry of late antiquity at the Chair of Classical Philology (Latin) at FAU. Her stay is supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

How can fossils predict the consequences of climate change? A German research team from FAU, the Museum of Natural History Berlin and the Alfred Wegener Institute compared data from fossil and marine organisms living today to predict which groups of animals are most at risk from climate change.

Wouldn’t it be handy if you were able to record your baby’s heartbeat or even take an ultrasound scan just using a smartphone app at home, without having to make an appointment to visit your obstetrician, with all the additional waiting time that entails? FAU and Universitätsklinikum Erlangen (UKER) are investigating what would be needed in order to offer a service like this. The Federal Ministry of Health is providing funding of approximately 3.2 million euros for this purpose.

A team of researchers at FAU has developed a method which can be used to reliably measure the speed of electron transfer between two materials. This could lead to the development of innovative electronic components with ultrafast transfer rates. The results were published in the specialist journal Nature Photonics under the title ‘Attosecond-fast internal photoemission’.

How is reading changing in the age of digitalisation and social change? What significance and function will it have in future? Together with researchers from other institutions, researchers at FAU are investigating these questions in the newly-founded ‘Network for Reading Research’.