What do we know about conspiracy theories from a psychological perspective? On October 26, social psychologist Karen Douglas will give this year’s Bernoulli Lecture for the Behavioral Sciences. She will highlight the importance of conspiracy theories in psychological research as well as shed light on why people believe in them and what their consequences are. Uni News spoke to her in advance.
The values that matter most to primary school children are safety and the well-being of others. Teachers, meanwhile, also want to cultivate self-direction – in the same way that the Swiss curriculum aims to do. These are the initial findings of an extensive study conducted by the Institute for Educational Sciences to explore how values are taught in schools.
The President’s Board has appointed Professor Yuna Heo as assistant professor of corporate and sustainable finance. She will begin her five-year non-tenure track position on 1 November 2022.
For more than a century, the Euler Committee of the Swiss Academy of Sciences has been publishing the works and correspondence of the mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–1783). The publication of the final printed volume at the end of October also marks the beginning of the digital age, explains Prof. Dr. Hanspeter Kraft, President of the Bernoulli-Euler Society.
The new technology platform is operated jointly by the Universities of Basel and Zurich and the ETH Zurich and offers researchers around Switzerland access to cutting-edge technology in the field of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy.
For a long time, antibiotics were considered a silver bullet against bacterial infections. Over time, many pathogens have adapted to resist antibiotics, so the search for new drugs is becoming increasingly important. An international team of researchers including scientists at the University of Basel, has now discovered a new antibiotic by computational analysis and deciphered its mode of action. Their study is an important step in the development of new effective drugs.
The cerebellum is known primarily for regulation of movement. Researchers at the University of Basel have now discovered that the cerebellum also plays an important role in remembering emotional experiences. The study appears in the journal PNAS.
How did teaching staff cope with the sudden switch to online teaching during the coronavirus pandemic? Researchers from the University of Basel investigated this in collaboration with Eucor – The European Campus. Their conclusion: generally well, albeit with mixed feelings.
Nikon has selected the Department of Biomedicine’s microscopy facility as its first “Center of Excellence” in Switzerland. There are only a few of these centers in the world, including one at Harvard. Co-director of the facility Pascal Lorentz explains what this means for Basel as a center of research.