Silk Road, Slavic Manuscripts, SARS-CoV-2

The current issue of the research magazine uni’wissen presents the work of the following researchers, among others:

Network of Silk Roads

The earlier idea that caravans transported luxury goods along a long trade route leading directly from China to Rome to sell them there at high prices is a myth. A research project by the historian Prof. Dr. Sitta von Reden from the Department of Ancient History takes a close look at what was known in the nineteenth century as the “Silk Road”: a complex network of exchange processes extending across large parts of the Asian and European continents.
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Paradigm Shift in Linguistics

Researchers in Freiburg and Moscow, Russia, are contributing to a possible paradigm shift in linguistics. A team led by Prof. Dr. Achim Rabus from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures is making digital copies of manuscripts from the eleventh to the seventeenth century using new computer programs supported by artificial intelligence (AI). This gives the linguists more possibilities for studying these Slavic texts in both quantitative and qualitative respects, as AI adds grammatical information on parts of speech.
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Pictures of an Infection

Images from a laser scanning microscope show the interaction between the cell and the virus SARS-CoV-2. This visualization, published by Prof. Dr. Robert Grosse from the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology within the context of two large-scale international studies, reveals how SARS-CoV-2 manipulates the structures inside the cell.
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What Remains of Rainwater

A team led by junior professor Dr. Andras Hartmann from the Chair of Hydrological Modeling and Water Resources uses novel methods of measurement to predict available groundwater reserves and their recharge rate in karst areas. In view of the global increase in extreme weather conditions, it is important to determine as precisely as possible how much of what comes down as precipitation will be useable as drinking water.
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Decolonization of Knowledge

When it comes to the topic of flight and migration, there is much talk in Germany and Europe about the people affected by it. However, is it too seldom acknowledged how much knowledge on this topic these people themselves possess. That is why Cita Wetterich from the Department of Political Science and her colleague Dilshad Muhammad at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute offered a digital seminar for students in which they integrated refugees into the scientific process, thus making their voices heard. At the end of the course, the students wrote term papers and collected them in a student journal. With its peer-review and editing stages, the concept was oriented toward the usual processes for scientific papers.
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The current issue of uni’wissen