It has long been suspected that spiders are one of the most important groups of predators of insects. Zoologists at the University of Basel and Lund University in Sweden have now shown just how true this is – spiders kill astronomical numbers of insects on a global scale.
Confidence in doctors, therapists and nursing staff leads to an improvement in subjectively perceived complaints, satisfaction and quality of life in patients. This is the conclusion of a meta-analysis by psychologists at the University of Basel, published in the journal PLOS ONE.
On 14 March 2017, the University of Basel celebrates the opening of the new Graduate Center GRACE. Starting at 4:30 pm, the platform for doctoral candidates and postdocs will present itself at the University Library Basel. The program includes a speech by the university’s president, as well as a panel discussion and short movies by early career scientists.
The University of Basel receives seven of overall 42 new professorships awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) this year. Seven young researchers, four men and three women, have chosen the University of Basel as their host institution and will start their research groups at six different departments as well as at the Swiss TPH. The University thus receives more than ten million Swiss Francs in external funding.
Professor Thomas Grob has been appointed the new Vice President for Education at the University of Basel. On the evening of Wednesday, March 1, the Senate of the University of Basel elected the 56-year-old Slavic specialist for a four-year term. The University Council has approved this decision. The new appointment coincides with a reorganization of the Vice President’s Offices.
Enzymes behave differently in a test tube compared with the molecular scrum of a living cell. Chemists from the University of Basel have now been able to simulate these confined natural conditions in artificial vesicles for the first time.
Prof. Richard Neher, who was just recently appointed to the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, is the joint winner of the Open Science Prize, together with Prof. Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The two scientists have been awarded the prize for their open access online tool “nextstrain.org”, which allows the real-time tracking of the evolution and spread of dangerous pathogens, such as Ebola or Zika.
For the first time, theoretical physicists from the University of Basel have calculated the signal of specific gravitational wave sources that emerged fractions of a second after the Big Bang. The source of the signal is a long-lost cosmological phenomenon called “oscillon”.
On February 8th, 2017, the American National Foundation for Cancer Research announced that Michael N. Hall, Professor of Biochemistry at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, has been selected as the winner of the 2017 Szent-Györgyi Prize for Progress in Cancer Research. The award recognizes his groundbreaking discovery of the protein kinase TOR – target of rapamycin – and its role in cell growth control and carcinogenesis.