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The bending of a hook into wire to fish for the handle of a basket by the crow Betty 15 years ago stunned the scientific world. However, the finding was recently relegated as similar behavioural routines were discovered in the natural repertoire of the same species, suggesting the possibility that Betty’s tool manufacture was less intelligent than previously believed. Now cognitive biologists from the University of Vienna and the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna studied tool making in an Indonesian cockatoo. Other than the New Caledonian crows Goffin cockatoos are not using tools in the wild. To the researchers' surprise the birds manufactured hook tools out of straight wire (and in a second task unbent curved wire to make a straight tool) without ever having seen or used a hook tool before.

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Quantum physics teaches us that unobserved particles may propagate through space like waves. This is philosophically intriguing and of technological relevance: a research team at the University of Vienna has demonstrated that combining experimental quantum interferometry with quantum chemistry allows deriving information about optical and electronic properties of biomolecules, here exemplified with a set of vitamins. These results have been published in the journal "Angewandte Chemie International Edition".

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Behavior experiments are useful tools to study brain function. Standard experiments to investigate behavior in popular lab animals such as fish, flies or mice however only incompletely mimic natural conditions. The understanding of behavior and brain function is thus limited. Virtual Reality (VR) helps in generating a more natural experimental environment but requires immobilization of the animal, disrupting sensorimotor experience and causing altered neuronal and behavioral responses. Researchers at the University of Freiburg, and the Max F. Perutz Laboratories (MFPL), a joint venture of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna, in collaboration with groups at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) and the MPI for Ornithology in Konstanz, have now developed a VR system for freely moving animals – FreemoVR – to overcome most of these limitations. Their findings are now published in Nature Methods.

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Researchers from ETH Zurich and the University of Vienna have discovered a type of bacteria that uses tiny daggers to prevent itself from being eaten by amoebae. The scientists also resolved the three-dimensional structure of the mechanism that allows the micro-daggers to be shot quickly.

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In quantum mechanics particles can behave as waves and take many paths through an experiment, even when a classical marble could only take one of them at any time. However, it requires only combinations of pairs of paths, rather than three or more, to determine the probability for a particle to arrive somewhere. This principle is a consequence of Born’s rule, a cornerstone of quantum physics and any measured violation of it might hint at new physics. Now, researchers at the Universities of Vienna and Tel Aviv have addressed this question for the first time explicitly using the wave interference of large molecules behind various combinations of single, double, and triple slits. The analysis – published in the Journal ‘Science Advances’ – confirms the formalism of established quantum physics for massive particles.

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Flowering plants with at least 300,000 species are by far the most diverse group of plants on Earth. They include almost all the species used by people for food, medicine, and many other purposes. However, flowering plants arose only about 140 million years ago, quite late in the evolution of plants, toward the end of the age of the dinosaurs, but since then have diversified spectacularly. No one knows exactly how this happened, and the origin and early evolution of flowering plants and especially their flowers still remains one of the biggest enigmas in biology, almost 140 years after Charles Darwin called their rapid rise in the Cretaceous "an abominable mystery". A new study, coordinated by Juerg Schoenenberger from the University of Vienna and Hervé Sauquet of the Université Paris-Sud and published in "Nature Communications" reconstructs the evolution of flowers and sheds new light on what the earliest flowers might have looked like.

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Magnetic quantum objects in superconductors, so-called "fluxons", are particularly suitable for the storage and processing of data bits. Physicists around Wolfgang Lang at the University of Vienna and their colleagues at the Johannes-Kepler-University Linz have now succeeded in producing a "quantum egg-box" with a novel and simple method.

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Scientists at the University of Vienna have created a new hybrid structure, termed buckyball sandwich, by encapsulating a single layer of fullerene molecules between two graphene sheets. Buckyball sandwiches combine for the first time soccerball-like fullerenes, each consisting of sixty carbon atoms, and graphene, a one-atom thick layer of carbon. This structure allows the scientist to study the dynamics of the trapped molecules down to atomic resolution using scanning transmission electron microscopy. They report observing diffusion of individual molecules confined in the two-dimensional space, find evidence for the rotation of isolated fullerenes within the structure, and even follow their merging into larger molecular clusters.

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Physicists have searched for deviations from standard quantum mechanics, testing whether quantum mechanics requires a more complex set of mathematical rules. To do so a research team led by Philip Walther at the University of Vienna designed a new photonic experiment using exotic metamaterials, which were fabricated at the University of California Berkeley. Their experiment supports standard quantum mechanics and allows the scientists to place bounds on alternative quantum theories. The results, which are published in "Nature Communications", could help to guide theoretical work in a search for a more general version of quantum mechanics.

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A new bioinformatics tool to compare genome data has been developed by teams from the Max F. Perutz Laboratories, a joint venture of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna, together with researchers from Australia and Canada. The program called “ModelFinder” uses a fast algorithm and allows previously not attainable new insights into evolution. The results are published in the influential journal Nature Methods.

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Graphene is considered as one of the most promising new materials. However, the systematic insertion of chemically bound atoms and molecules to control its properties is still a major challenge. Now, for the first time, scientists of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, the University of Vienna, the Freie Universität Berlin and the University Yachay Tech in Ecuador succeeded in precisely verifying the spectral fingerprint of such compounds in both theory and experiment. Their results are published in the scientific journal "Nature Communications".

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Acute psychosocial stress leads to increased empathy and prosocial behavior. An international team of researchers led by Claus Lamm from the University of Vienna investigated the effects of stress on neural mechanisms and tested the relationship between empathy and prosocial behavior in a new experiment. The study has just been published in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

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Our understanding of the world is mostly built on basic perceptions, such as that events follow each other in a well-defined order. Such definite orders are required in the macroscopic world, for which the laws of classical physics apply. However, in the quantum world orders can be ‘scrambled’. It is possible for different orders of quantum operations to coexist in a superposition. The current work by a team of physicists from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences is the first experimental quantification of such a superposition. It will be published in an upcoming issue of "Science Advances".

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Ravens have impressive cognitive skills when interacting with conspecifics – comparable to many primates, whose social intelligence has been related to their life in groups. An international collaboration of researchers led by Thomas Bugnyar, Professor at the Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, could uncover for the first time the group dynamics of non-breeding ravens. The results help to understand the evolution of intelligence in this species and were published in the scientific journal "Scientific Reports".

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Since a couple of decades, metal-containing drugs have been successfully used to fight against certain types of cancer. The lack of knowledge about the underlying molecular mechanisms slows down the search for new and more efficient chemotherapeutic agents. An international team of scientists, led by Leticia González from the University of Vienna and Jacinto Sá from the Uppsala University, have developed a protocol that is able to detect how metal-based drugs interact with DNA.

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Due to increasing globalization, the linguistic landscape of our world is changing; many people give up use of one language in favour of another, a phenomenon called language shift. Katharina Prochazka and Gero Vogl from the University of Vienna have studied why language shift happens using the example of southern Carinthia, Austria. Making use of methods originally developed in diffusion physics to study the motion of atoms, they built a model for the spread and retreat of languages over time and space. With this model, they were able to show that interaction with other speakers is the main factor influencing whether language shift occurs. The interdisciplinary study is published in the journal PNAS.

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When measuring time, we normally assume that clocks do not affect space and time, and that time can be measured with infinite accuracy at nearby points in space. However, combining quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity theoretical physicists from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences have demonstrated a fundamental limitation for our ability to measure time. The more precise a given clock is, the more it "blurs" the flow of time measured by neighbouring clocks. As a consequence, the time shown by the clocks is no longer well defined. The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

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A research team led by Mathematician Tatsuya Sasaki from the University of Vienna presents a new optimal theory of the evolution of reputation-based cooperation. This team proves that the practice of making moral assessments conditionally is very effective in establishing cooperation in terms of evolutionary game theory. "Our study also demonstrates the evolutionary disadvantage of seeking reputation by sanctioning wrongdoers," says Sasaki. The results of the study were published on the in Scientific Reports.

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Annette Rompel and her team of the Department of Biophysical Chemistry at the University of Vienna are investigating so-called polyoxometalates. These compounds exhibit a great diversity and offer the scientists a wide range of applications. In interaction with enzymes they can enable the crystallization of proteins. On the other hand, the polyoxometalates represent compounds with an enormous application potential in catalysis and materials science.

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Manuela Baccarini and her team at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories (MFPL) of the University of Vienna and Medical University of Vienna are one step closer to unravelling the mechanisms behind liver cancer. The researchers discovered that RAF1, a protein known as an oncogene in other systems, unexpectedly acts as a tumour suppressor in hepatocellular carcinoma. The study is published in the renowned journal Nature Communications.

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Monkeys and apes are unable to learn new vocalizations, and for decades it has been widely believed that this inability results from limitations of their vocal anatomy: larynx, tongue and lips. But an international team of scientists, led by Tecumseh Fitch at the University of Vienna and Asif Ghazanfar at Princeton University, has now looked inside monkeys' vocal tracts with x-rays, and found them to be much more flexible than thought before. The study indicates that the limitations that keep nonhuman primates from speaking are in their brains, rather than their vocal anatomy.

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Whether Peter Paul Rubens or Damien Hirst – the personal taste of art can be argued. Scientists from the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Vienna have now shown that the individual taste of art is also dependent on social factors. The personal valuation of art was influenced by who else liked the work - or not. And even the value of a painting strengthened the subjective feeling of how much a work of art appeals to us. The study was recently published in the international journal "Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts".

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"Till death do us part" – for marine bristle worms, these words are invariably true: Shortly after mating, the parent worms die, leaving thousands of newly fertilized eggs to develop in the water. This extreme all-or-nothing mode of reproduction demonstrates a general principle: Animals need to decide if they invest their available energy stores either in growth or in reproduction. Researchers around Florian Raible at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories (MFPL) of the University of Vienna and Medical University of Vienna were now able to solve a 60-year-old riddle and determine the molecule that orchestrates this decision in marine bristle worms. Their results are published in the journal eLife.

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Humans, as well as many other organisms, possess internal clocks. The exact timing, however, can differ between individuals – for instance, some people are early risers whereas others are "night owls". Neurobiologist Kristin Tessmar-Raible and her team at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories (MFPL) of the University of Vienna and Medical University of Vienna investigated that underlie such timing variations or "chronotypes". The non-biting midge Clunio marinus has two internal clocks, since it times its reproduction according to sun and moon. The team around Tessmar-Raible and Postdoc Tobias Kaiser were now able to identify relevant genes for this adaptation, and published their results in the current issue of "Nature".

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The research team around Anton Zeilinger has succeeded in breaking two novel records while experimenting with so-called twisted particles of light. In one experiment, the scientists could show that the twist of light itself, i.e. the screw-like structure, is maintained over a free-space propagation of 143 kilometers, which could revolutionize future data transmission.

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Microorganisms like bacteria and archaea play an indispensable ecological role in the global geochemical cycles. A research team led by ERC prizewinner Christa Schleper from the Department of Ecogenomics and Systems Biology at the University of Vienna succeeded in isolating the first ammonia-oxidizing archaeon from soil: "Nitrososphaera viennensis" - the "spherical ammonia oxidizer from Vienna". In the current issue of the renowned journal PNAS, the scientists present new results: They were able to detect all proteins that are active during ammonia oxidation – another important piece of the puzzle for the elucidation of the energy metabolism of Archaea.

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"How do massive stars form?" is one of the fundamental questions in modern astrophysics, because these massive stars govern the energy budget of their host galaxies. Using numerical simulations, researchers at the University of Tübingen in a collaboration with Eduard Vorobyov from the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Vienna revealed new components of the formation of massive stars, which were already known from the formation process of low-mass as well as primordial stars. The study has now been published in the peer-review journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Marine symbiotic bacteria may help to "fertilize" animal growth in the oceans. Microbiologist Jillian Petersen and colleagues from the University of Vienna and the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology have discovered that chemosynthetic bacteria in marine animals can fix nitrogen as well as carbon. This is the first such symbiont known to be capable of nitrogen fixation.

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New insight about how cells dispose of their waste is now given by the group of Claudine Kraft at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories (MFPL) of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna. They show the necessity of a regulation in space and time of a key protein involved in cellular waste disposal. Dysfunctions in the waste disposal system of a cell are linked to cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. The study is published in the renowned journal Molecular Cell.

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Azure-winged magpies, an Asian bird species, take any opportunity to provide food to their group members, even without receiving any reward themselves. A team of cognitive biologists, lead by Lisa Horn and Jorg Massen from the University of Vienna, showed this type of prosocial behavior experimentally in a bird species for the first time. There are very few other animals that show such human-like generosity. The results of their study have been published in the scientific journal Biology Letters.

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The chemical properties of atoms depend on the number of protons in their nuclei, placing them into the periodic table. However, even chemically identical atoms can have different masses – these variants are called isotopes. Although techniques to measure such mass differences exist, these have either not revealed where they are in a sample, or have required dedicated instrumentation and laborious sample preparation. Publishing in the prestigious open access journal Nature Communications, researchers at the University of Vienna report a new way for "weighing" atoms by atomic-resolution imaging of graphene, the one-atom-thick sheet of carbon.

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Bacteria are immortal as long as they keep dividing. For decades it has been assumed that a continuous, proteinaceous ring is necessary to drive the division of most microorganisms. An international team led by Silvia Bulgheresi, University of Vienna, revealed that the symbiont of the marine roundworm breaks the ring dogma and divides without. These findings have been published in the current issue of Nature Microbiology.

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Unraveling the structure and function of the enzyme aurone synthase.

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Since the 17th century, science was intrigued by the nature of light. Isaac Newton was certain that it consists of a stream of particles. His contemporary Christiaan Huygens, however, argued that light is a wave. Modern quantum physics says that both were right.

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tars are born inside a rotating cloud of interstellar gas and dust, which contracts to stellar densities thanks to its own gravity. Before finding itself on the star, however, most of the cloud lands onto a circumstellar disk forming around the star owing to conservation of angular momentum.

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>Wild-caught chimpanzees, who were orphaned and imported from Africa in their early infancy, exhibit an impaired social behaviour also as adults. So far long-term effects of early traumatic experiences on social behaviour were known only for humans and socially isolated chimpanzees.