Flooding in June, hail storms in August, hurricane-force winds in December: 2013 brought various weather extremes for Germany, all within a few months. Insurers paid about seven billion euros to cover the damage. Experts warn that in the future, costly cleanup work could be needed even more often.

A team of researchers headed by biochemistry professor Florian Heyd of Freie Universität Berlin has succeeded in controlling the circadian clock – the body’s internal sense of time – in mice in such a way that the animals adjust more quickly to different time zones. The members of the RNA biochemistry research group were able to show that the “alternative” splicing of a certain gene controls how the lab animals adjust to different time zones.

In 1955, physician and Nobel laureate Werner Karl Heisenberg proposed that nuclear waste simply be packed up and sunk in the ocean far off the coast. His colleague Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, later a critic of nuclear power, was still certain in 1969 that the newly discovered energy source was a clean one, and disposal would be no problem.