Brief Enquiries Intro
Brief Enquiries – What drives researchers and what they are currently doing
Brief Enquiries Dr Ottaviano Ruesch
WHAT DOES MARS TEACH US ABOUT EARTH, MR RUESCH?
In the coming years, a European ExoMars Mission’s rover is scheduled to collect the first rock samples that will be sent from Mars to Earth. The geologist, Ottaviano Ruesch, will analyse the collected data. For decades, scientists have been studying Mars. “The main question is, of course, whether there is life there,” says Ruesch, “or, at least, an indication that there was at some time.” So far, no clear evidence has been discovered. But even if there never is any, the Red Planet still allows us some insights into the Earth’s past, because we don’t know exactly how life came about on our planet. Nearly all the evidence from that time has been wiped out. “Mars is effectively the Earth’s little brother. But one who hasn’t developed since childhood,” explains Ruesch. Whilst the Earth developed its own dynamics three and a half to four billion years ago, and its surface in the dense atmosphere was constantly altered by plate tectonics, volcanic activity and the weather kitchen, at some stage, Mars froze over time and the surface rock, in particular, barely changed at all. “For geologists, rocks are like books from the past,” says Ruesch. “In the Mars books we may be able to read about the conditions that prevailed when the first protozoa formed on Earth. We want to understand the context in which life evolves from organic material.” The ESA rover will explore the Oxia Planum plain. From its clay, researchers know that it is approximately 3.9 billion years old. “We will analyse everything in the finest detail, from the topography of the surface to the mineralogy and chemistry of the rock,” says Ruesch.
Dr Ottaviano RueschThe Swiss geologist, Dr Ottaviano Ruesch, has conducted research for the European Space Agency, ESA, at Noordwijk in the Netherlands and for the American Space Agency, NASA, in Greenbelt. He is now a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award Winner, heading his own research project in the Institute for Planetology at the University of Münster.
Brief Enquiries Dr Marta Brković Dodig
WHY SHOULD CHILDREN BUILD A SKYSCRAPER IN A MUSEUM, MS BRKOVIĆ DODIG?
When museums present architecture, visitors are often drawn
into participatory activities. Marta Brković Dodig has run many such hands-on activities for children and young people. She is employing scientific methods to examine the young research field of Built Environment Education. “Blockholm” is a classic example of BEE, Built Environment Education. In the exhibition at the National Centre for Architecture and Design in Sweden, children, young people and adults have recreated the city of Stockholm using the computer game Minecraft. More than 100,000 designs have been produced. A jury selected ten models which were then presented on a scale of 1:5 in a follow-up exhibition. There are, or have been, similar events at museums in Chicago, Munich and Budapest. Together with her team, Marta Brković Dodig is collecting information on BEE programmes around the world, how they differ, and how their success can be evaluated. But why should children acquireexperience of town planning outside of school? “When it comes to urban planning and urban history, we want children to become informed citizens,” says Brković Dodig. Ultimately, it is all about democracy. “The city is the place where we live together. That’s why it’s important to be connected with it – with buildings and squares, with monuments, but also simply with places that are personally important to people.”
into participatory activities. Marta Brković Dodig has run many such hands-on activities for children and young people. She is employing scientific methods to examine the young research field of Built Environment Education. “Blockholm” is a classic example of BEE, Built Environment Education. In the exhibition at the National Centre for Architecture and Design in Sweden, children, young people and adults have recreated the city of Stockholm using the computer game Minecraft. More than 100,000 designs have been produced. A jury selected ten models which were then presented on a scale of 1:5 in a follow-up exhibition. There are, or have been, similar events at museums in Chicago, Munich and Budapest. Together with her team, Marta Brković Dodig is collecting information on BEE programmes around the world, how they differ, and how their success can be evaluated. But why should children acquireexperience of town planning outside of school? “When it comes to urban planning and urban history, we want children to become informed citizens,” says Brković Dodig. Ultimately, it is all about democracy. “The city is the place where we live together. That’s why it’s important to be connected with it – with buildings and squares, with monuments, but also simply with places that are personally important to people.”
Dr Marta Brković DodigDr Marta Brković Dodig is an assistant professor of archi- tecture at Union – Nikola Tesla University in Belgrade, Serbia. She is currently a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning at TU Berlin.
Brief Enquiries Dr Mathieu Casado
WHAT DOES ANTARCTIC ICE TELL US ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE, MR CASADO?
In autumn 2019, he spent two months in the middle of nowhere: Mathieu Casado studies Antarctic ice in order to reconstruct climate change over Earth’s history. To this end, researchers use a drill to take samples from the permanent ice – the deeper they penetrate, the older the ice layer. Formed over hundreds of thousands of years, the ice stores information from those past ages. Pollen, salts, cosmic dust and trapped air bubbles reveal, for example, which gases were contained in the atmosphere at a given time, what vegetation there was and when massive volcanic eruptions occurred. Mathieu Casado analyses the composition of the oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in the ice. “The proportion of these in a layer reveals what the air temperature was at the time,” says Casado. The ice thus delivers pre-historic temperature recordings. And that’s not all: “I have discovered that the isotopes also tell us something about the structure of the snow back then and its albedo, or potential to reflect solar radiation.” The Earth’s albedo also plays an important role in climate change today. Casado’s research seeks to examine climate history to derive knowledge about changes happening now. So far, the oldest samples go back some 800,000 years. The newest sample could reveal secrets going back more than 1.5 million years. The Antarctic climate archive is constantly expanding.
Dr Mathieu CasadoThe French Humboldt Research Fellow, Dr Mathieu Casado, is currently working at the Alfred Wegener Institute’s research centre in Potsdam.
Brief Enquiries Dr Katarzyna Marciniak
HOW DO NEPTUNE, HERCULES AND CO. STILL INFLUENCE CHILDREN AROUND THE WORLD TODAY, MS MARCINIAK?
From Zeus to the Argonauts: In times past, children and young people learned about ancient gods and heroes from books; today, they watch the battle of Troy on screen. Together with an international research team, the Polish classical scholar, Katarzyna Marciniak, studies how antique stories are adapted and received today. The epics of ancient Greece and Rome have long since ceased to be an exclusively European cultural heritage. Take the New Zealand artist, Marian Maguire, who associates the figure of Hercules with Maori traditions in her work. And global popular culture is also steeped in antique myths. In “Beauty and the Beast”, for example, we encounter the story of Eros and Psyche. It emerges that the narrative patterns of the myth contain universal themes, such as the search for love and inner values in “Beauty and the Beast”. The sagas of gods and heroes capture archetypes of human feeling and action and thus furnish adolescents, in particular, with identity, meaning and orientation. “Every new adaptation rekindles the ancient world in our cultural memory; it is universal and embeds us in a local context. The figures and narratives form a communicative code which crosses national and generational borders. Anyone who has learnt to read it has access to the mythical community that is built on the values of humanism,” says Katarzyna Marciniak.
Dr Katarzyna MarciniakThe former Humboldt Research Fellow and Humboldt Alumni Award Winner, Professor Dr Katarzyna Marciniak, heads the international research project “Our Mythical Childhood” at the University of Warsaw, Poland. She is the Humboldt Foundation’s Ambassador Scientist in Poland.
Brief Enquiries Dr Abate & Dr Tachbelie
HOW DOES A LANGUAGE APP HELP IN COURT, MR ABATE AND MS TACHBELIE?
More than 80 languages are spoken in Ethiopia. That makes it very difficult and expensive for courts to find experts to transcribe oral witness statements in the various languages. Self-learning computer systems could offer a remedy. Solomon Teferra Abate and his wife, Martha Yifiru Tachbelie, are developing processes for automatically converting spoken language into written text. “Many people in Ethiopia can’t read or write; not least because written Ethiopian is far more difficult than English, for example,” Solomon Abate explains. An app on your smartphone that translates the spoken word into text could be a big help in many respects. The structure of the languages poses a challenge. It is extremely difficult for the computer to recognise the various manifestations of a word because grammatical distinctions are essentially achieved by additions to individual words. Moreover, there are no comprehensive linguistic dictionaries for the Ethiopian languages that could be used as a data base. So, the couple employs a trick: Even though Ethiopian languages use a system of symbols that is fundamentally different from our alphabet, a considerable proportion of the basic sounds are identical to those in German or English. “That’s why we train the model with acoustic data that is available for other languages – including German.”
Dr Solomon Teferra Abate & Dr Martha Yifiru TachbelieDr Abate and his wife, Dr Tachbelie, from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia are Georg Forster Research Fellows at the University of Bremen.
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Brief Enquiries – What drives researchers and what they are currently doing
WHAT DOES MARS TEACH US ABOUT EARTH, MR RUESCH?
Dr Ottaviano Ruesch
WHY SHOULD CHILDREN BUILD A SKYSCRAPER IN A MUSEUM, MS BRKOVIĆ DODIG?
Dr Marta Brković Dodig
WHAT DOES ANTARCTIC ICE TELL US ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE, MR CASADO?
Dr Mathieu Casado
HOW DO NEPTUNE, HERCULES AND CO. STILL INFLUENCE CHILDREN AROUND THE WORLD TODAY, MS MARCINIAK?
Dr Katarzyna Marciniak
HOW DOES A LANGUAGE APP HELP IN COURT, MR ABATE AND MS TACHBELIE?
Dr Solomon Teferra Abate & Dr Martha Yifiru Tachbelie
