Frank Allgöwer

Nominated by: Leibniz Universität Hannover Presented by: Alexander Börgel

Information is to society as air is to a living organism. We have come a long way to embrace nature protection, conservation, and resource management in our pursuit of environmental quality. A similar comprehensive framework to ensure the quality of our information environment is however missing. My work builds on…

While we know from astrophysical observations that dark matter exists, its nature remains a mystery and its detection in the laboratory would be a major breakthrough. While the discovery of dark matter is still outstanding, in 2019 the experiment observed the decay of Xenon-124 atoms for the first time, with…

Matej Badin’s method can quantify the metastability of emerging phases induced by pressure, thus opening the route towards the synthesis of materials hosting exotic properties by means of pressure quenching.

Superbugs are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics and threaten to cause 10 M deaths per year worldwide by 2050. Without a commitment to finding new antibiotic leads now, we will head back into the pre-penicillin era, where a scrape could cost you your life if it became infected. Soils for…

How Astronomy Explores the Past, Present and Future of the Universe The universe is a mysterious place – we know it is some 13.8 billion years old with the part we can observe being about 90 billion light years in diameter, which means that the most distant edges we can…

The ‘Arborometer’ (2018), is an interactive installation. Visitors enter a geodesic dome containing soil, water and olive trees. Inside, biosensors measure their heart rate – a physiological indicator of emotional response. The information is connected to grow lights and speakers underneath a pool of water, creating a bio-technological feedback loop…

Nominated by: Ruhr-Universität Bochum Presented by: Alexander Kanitz

The rapidly growing gap between social media and real life is one of the most powerful sources of political tribalism in the world today. Platforms such as Facebook and X fuel status-seeking extremists and make moderates seem invisible, leaving all of us feel more polarized than we really are. New…

In this Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation, digital participants had the chance to engage in a live conversation with Marcus Mall, Falling Walls Breakthrough of the Year 2022 in the category of Life Sciences. He talked about his role as chair of the Department of Pediatric Respiratory Medicine, Immunology and Critical…