After surpassing the 600-scholarship milestone last year, this year the remarkable generosity of private individuals, companies, and institutions enabled Goethe University to set a new participant record. A total of 280 private individuals, 45 companies, and 52 nonprofit organizations donated a €1,116,000 to Goethe University in 2025, which according to the matching principle was doubled by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR). This translates into a total of €2,232,000 raised for scholarship recipients.

The Transregional Collaborative Research Centre ‘Constructing Explainability’ (TRR 318) at Paderborn and Bielefeld Universities, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), will be beginning its second funding phase from January 2026. Today, the DFG announced that the interdisciplinary research collaboration on the topic of ‘social artificial intelligence’ would be extended for a further three and a half years beyond its successful first term of four and a half years. Around 14 million euros of funding have been approved for this. 

Higher yields, greater resilience to climatic changes or diseases – the demands on crop plants are constantly growing. To address these challenges, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are developing new methods in genetic engineering. In cooperation with other German and Czech researchers, they succeeded for the first time in leveraging the CRISPR/Cas molecular scissors for changing the number of chromosomes in the Arabidopsis thaliana model organism in a targeted way – without any adverse effects on plant growth. This discovery opens up new perspectives for plant breeding and agriculture. The results have been published in the Science journal. (DOI: 10.1126/science.adz8505)

The reed leafhopper has evolved rapidly from a reed grass specialist into a dangerous pest that attacks important crops such as sugar beets, potatoes, carrots and onions, as well as reeds. It lives in close symbiosis with seven different bacteria, two of which transmit diseases leading to significant crop losses. These symbiotic bacteria likely play a pivotal role in broadening the cicada's host range. These findings could help to develop targeted control strategies in the future, based on influencing pathogenic or beneficial bacteria.

Excessive screen use among school-aged children has been linked to sleep disturbances and behavioral problems, but its effects on brain development have remained unclear. Now, researchers from Japan have examined data from over 11,000 children to explore the relationship between screen time, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, and brain structure. Their findings reveal that longer daily screen exposure is linked to increased ADHD symptoms and measurable changes in brain development.