How do biological species first develop and evolve? What does the genetic “fingerprint” of plants and animals tell us? Both are issues researchers and scientists will investigate in the future at the Berlin Center for Genomics in Biodiversity Research, which has just opened at the Botanical Museum, in Berlin. The new research center is a joint project initiated by Freie Universität Berlin – with the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum in Berlin’s Dahlem district – the University of Potsdam, and three institutions in the Berlin area affiliated with the Leibniz Association.

The Cologne police during the Nazi era – Nadine Rossol, then a student of history, greeted the announcement of the topic of her internship at the NS-Dokumentationszentrum Köln (Museum of History of National Socialism in Cologne) with limited enthusiasm at first. “I really would have preferred to work on the theatre during the Nazi era,” Rossol says. But then she became captivated by the history of the police – a fascination that has gripped her to this day, in her work as a researcher. Since August, Rossol has been an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute at Freie Universität.

The images are unforgettable: On September 11, 2001, two airplanes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, in New York. Two thousand eight hundred people died in that attack alone, and almost 250 others were killed in the related plane attack on the Pentagon and when a fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania, unable to reach its intended target, suspected to be somewhere in the U.S. capital. The series of attacks, for which the Islamic terror organization Al Qaeda claimed responsibility, changed the world, raising one question over and over again: Why do people become terrorists?