Heike Lappert, secretary of the Biophysics group, wins the 2020 Erlangen cycling contest in the category “individual ranking”. She cycled 1026 km in 3 weeks. Congratulations! 

Camera traps for motion-triggered or continuous time-lapse recordings are readily available on the market. For demanding applications in ecology and environmental sciences, however, commercial systems often lack flexibility to freely adjust recording time intervals, suffer from mechanical component w... 

Magnetic tweezers based on a solenoid with an iron alloy core are widely used to apply large forces (∼100 nN) onto micron-sized (∼5 μm) superparamagnetic particles for mechanical manipulation or microrheological measurements at the cellular and molecular level. The precision of magnetic tweezers, ho... 

Camera images and video recordings are simple and non-invasive tools to investigate animals in their natural habitat. Quantitative evaluations, however, often require an exact reconstruction of object positions, sizes, and distances in the image. Here, we provide an open source software package to p... 

Missense mutations in keratin 5 and 14 genes cause the severe skin fragility disorder epidermolysis bullosa simplex (EBS) by collapsing of the keratin cytoskeleton into cytoplasmic protein aggregates. Despite intense efforts, no molecular therapies are available, mostly due to the complex phenotype ... 

Cell migration through the extracellular matrix is governed by the interplay between cell-generated propulsion forces, adhesion forces, and resisting forces arising from the steric hindrance of the matrix. Steric hindrance in turn depends on matrix porosity, matrix deformability, cell size, and cell... 

The growth of cell colonies is determined by the migration and proliferation of the individual cells. This is often modeled with the Fisher–Kolmogorov (FK) equation, which assumes that cells diffuse independently from each other, but stop to proliferate when their density reaches a critial limit. Ho... 

The ups and downs of stock prices are the result of a complex interplay between traditional investors, day-traders and high-frequency hedge funds. The seemingly erratic short-term price fluctuations can be characterized by a diffusion constant – called volatility. However, volatility itself changes ... 

For Emperor penguins waddling around a warming Antarctic, diminishing sea ice means less fish to eat. How the diets of these tuxedoed birds will hold up in the face of climate change is a big question scientists are grappling with. Researchers at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, the Centre Scie... 

Penguin Observatory is on the move to Antarctica Our penguin observatory is on the research vessel “Polarstern”  on its way to Antarctica.  It will arrive there around Dec 20th. We hope that the observatory will not be battered too much by braking waves.