Last night German president Christian Wulff honored the winners of the 2011 Deutscher Zukunftspreis (German Future Prize award). It is considered one of the most prestigious here and is sometimes regarded as the German Nobel Prize for engineers, worth 250,000 Euros and a dinner with the president. The latter was especially delicate this year after newspapers reported on Wednesday, that Wulff accepted a half a Million Euro loan at an unusual low interest rate from a private donor in his former position as the prime minister of the Federal German state of Lower Saxony.
But back to the “Zukunftspreis”: The award aims to “identify projects, which show not only a high scientific value, but which have concrete applications and are mature enough for commercial markets.” Three projects made it to the finals:
– high efficiency photovoltaic cells
– an automated visual hazard recognition system for cars
– organic electronics
The third team carried the award home last night. Like in former years there was more reporting about the nominees before the event than the day after. The regional newspapers dedicate long features to their local researchers.
The winning team from Dresden was featured yesterday in the Sächsische Zeitung. Writer Stephan Schoen not only explains the OLED technology, but also explains how the transfer from basic research into a product occurred. “Technology transfer depends on smart brains”, Schoen quotes project leader Karl Leo, a professor of Dresden University, director at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems and founder of six companies – but he does not consider himself to be a businessman. For him the quote works quite literally: He sent two of his PhD students to build companies around the OLED technology.
Members of the team, who developed the driving assistant system, were celebrated by the Süd-West-Presse already in November without treating the reader with useful information on how the system works and when it could be integrated in mass market cars. Today the same paper brought a comforting commentary. This team was winner of the public online poll with 46 percent of the votes.
The Heilbronner Stimme featured the solar team from federal state Baden-Württemberg. The piece left out almost all technical details but explains that the nominated technology is very expensive compared with regular PV-Cells. That’s the reason why Solar cells from the company Azur Space, who commercializes the invention, feed 400 satellites with electricity, but is not common in solar power plants. The Badische Zeitung provided more technical background: A sandwich made from three different semiconductor materials absorbs light from a wider spectrum than ordinary PV-cells. On top of the sandwich are small lenses mounted to bundle the sunlight giving the product an efficiency around 40 percent.
Other stories:
Hair protects from bed bugs
Some outlets picked up a Biology Letters paper with the self-explaining title “Human fine body hair enhances ectoparasite detection”. “Our results show that fine body hair enhances the detection of ectoparasites through the combined effects of (i) increasing the parasite’s search time [for a spot to suck] and (ii) enhancing its detection”, the scientists conclude.
Wissenschaft Aktuell explains that this could be the reason, why humans gave up fur: Parasites are easier to catch from less hairy skin. The piece argues that the leftover hair might be “a compromise” between fur and bald. It speculates about female mate choice for hairy men, “because those are better protected against bed bugs and parasites”. The Ärzteblatt also speculates about a selective mechanism during evolution against fur, but for a fair amount of body hair, and concludes: “The common practice of shaving body hair to raise attractiveness could come with some disadvantages.” None of them mentioned the fun fact that the bed bugs used in this study “originated from recently field-collected populations that have retained natural behaviours despite being reared in the laboratory”, as the scientists write in the materials section of the paper.
What’s more problematic: None of them confronted independent experts with this new theory for fur loss. Chimpanzees and other apes are doing quiet well with their dense and long hair so why didn’t the selective pressure occur in our relatives? Juergen Langenbach in the Austrian Die Presse tells a more conclusive story. He explains the old theory that early humans started to lose most of their body hair, when they started to stand up, and he adds new research from the current issue of PNAS. Upright walking comes with the risk of overheating – at least in those regions, where our ancestors evolved. Losing hair – or more precisely: shrinking it into thinner and shorter hair – could have been one form of adaptation to this problem. Or as the scientists put it: “Our model suggests that only when hair loss and sweating ability reach near-modern human levels could hominins have been active in the heat of the day in hot, open environments.”
A surreal self-portrait
Already some days old but this piece is still remarkable. The Stuttgarter Zeitung sent one reporter to meet with the heavily criticized plastic surgeon Werner Mang, who claims that he conducted 20,000 surgeries. The newspaper chose an interesting journalistic form: The reporter “recorded” what Mang told him. Which means, that the talk between reporter and interviewee is not written down as Q & A but the reporter writes it down as if it is a self-portrait of Mang. Don’t know how to call it…
Other newspapers like Die Zeit use a similar form to profile celebrities (I have a dream). It can get interesting when the reporter is able to get the subject to open up. But in this case? Recently, the news magazine Der Spiegel and others collected complaints about manipulated patient files, operations without concession, and bungling during surgery. Not one of the over 1300 words in this impressive piece of fluff journalism mentions the accusations.
Hanno Charisius
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