UCSB Historian to Discuss the Cultural Evolution of Beer in the United States

Wine Cask talk is part of the university’s Culture and Nature Series

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– At one time a reviled commodity –– and banned in 1919 as part of Prohibition –– beer has become a familiar presence in American life. Just try to imagine a picnic, party, or sporting event without the ubiquitous bottle, can or mug in hand.

In a talk on Thursday, October 10, Lisa Jacobson, professor of history at UCSB, will examine beer's remarkable transformation from societal scourge to popular potable. Jacobson will focus on World War II as a key turning point in changing the way Americans thought about beer.

Her talk, "Beer: From Prohibition to America's Emblem of the Good Life?" will begin at 6 p.m. at the Wine Cask restaurant, 813 Anacapa St. in Santa Barbara. The program, part of UCSB's Culture and Nature Series, will give the community an opportunity to hear a fascinating story while enjoying the products of Santa Barbara's vibrant food culture.

Jacobson's talk is the first event in the Culture and Nature series. The series will continue through the academic year with events designed to highlight the interrelation between nature and the environment and religion, art, literature and other fields within the humanities and fine arts.

"The series examines how people interact with nature, and how that interaction shapes our world," said John Majewski, professor of history and associate dean of humanities and fine arts in the College of Letters and Science. He is organizing the event with Stefania Tutino, professor of religious studies and history and associate dean of humanities and fine arts at UCSB.
"Humanists have something to say about how societies and cultures interpret nature and how the natural environment impacts society," Majewski continued. "Our faculty members are excited about sharing their research with a broad community audience."

Added Tutino: "Humanists often can study issues related to nature and society and make sense of them in a way that scientists can't."

The various events in the series, some to be co-sponsored by the Wine Cask restaurant, and others by the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum, will take a culinary approach to cultural dimensions relevant to the Santa Barbara community and food culture, or provide compelling dialogue about the environment and sustainability. Each will feature the research of UCSB scholars who are actively engaged in understanding the historical and cultural importance of their particular topics.

Tickets for "Beer: From Prohibition to America's Emblem of the Good Life?" are $50. For more information, contact the Wine Cask at (805) 966-9463.

CONTACT:
Andrea Estrada
(805) 893-4620
andrea.estrada@ia.ucsb.edu
George Foulsham
(805) 893-3071
george.foulsham@ia.ucsb.edu

UC Santa Barbara Jumps Two Spots in Times Higher Education Rankings of the World's Top 200 Universities

October 2, 2013 (Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– UC Santa Barbara has been ranked number 33 on a list of the world's top 200 universities released today by Times Higher Education, a British periodical. Among U.S. universities, UCSB is ranked number 23. The campus's overall placement represents a jump of two places over last year's ranking.

"Times Higher Education's World University Rankings are the only global rankings to judge world-class research institutions against all of their core activities," said Phil Baty, editor of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. "So the University of California, Santa Barbara's rise up the rankings is particularly impressive, demonstrating strength right across the board on a wide range of metrics."

The 2013-14 World University Rankings uses a methodology developed with data supplied by Thomson Reuters. The rankings place less importance on reputation and heritage, and give more weight to hard measures of excellence in all three core elements of a university's mission –– research, teaching, and knowledge transfer.

The rankings include 13 separate performance indicators across five categories: teaching, research, citation impact, industry income and international mix. UCSB's overall score in the rankings was 68.4. The campus was strongest in the areas of citation impact (99.4), industry income (86.7) and international mix (61.8).

Of the top 50 universities offering degrees in engineering and technology and in the physical sciences, UCSB is ranked number 20 in both categories.

The campus's overall score in the Engineering & Technology ranking was 71.0, with scores of 73.3 international outlook, 59.7 in research, 97.5 in citation impact and 100.0 in industry income. In the physical sciences, the UCSB received an overall score of 71.1, with scores of 57.1 in international outlook, 63.2 in research, 98.6 in citation impact and 84.3 in industry income.

A full list of the World University Rankings is available athttp://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings.


UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 • (805) 893-8000

'Aktion 42' – weightless bubbles propelled by sound

Student experiment selected for Alexander Gerst's mission

How do soap bubbles behave in microgravity? And can they be propelled with sound waves? Ideas for experiments were proposed by the participants of 'Aktion 42', a schools' competition held by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the 'Jugend forscht' foundation for young researchers. When German ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst flies to the International Space Station (ISS) in May 2014, he will try to answer these questions. Credit: iStock.com/dmax-foto.

When German ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst flies to the International Space Station (ISS) in May 2014, his daily work will include conducting experiments. One of these experiments will involve analysing how soap bubbles behave in a microgravity environment and whether sound waves can set them in motion. Ideas for experiments were proposed by the participants of 'Aktion 42', a schools' competition held by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the 'Jugend forscht' foundation for young researchers. The jury decided on an experiment that combines the ideas in the top three entries.

One of the winning teams of Aktion 42. From left to right, Max Neumerkel,
 Enrico Olzmann and Thomas Poller, from Sandberg Grammar School in
Wilkau-Haßlau, Saxony. Credit: personal.

Over 50 students took part in the competition and submitted proposals. They were allowed to select items from a list of 42 'ingredients'. 
Quite independently, two teams of students came up with the idea of analysing the behaviour of soap bubbles in microgravity – Thomas Poller (17), Enrico Olzmann (17) and Max Neumerkel (17) from Sandberg Grammar School in Wilkau-Haßlau, Saxony, and Julius Schölkopf (15) and Lukas Bonfert (15) from Friedrich Schiller Grammar School in Marbach am Neckar. The idea proposed by the students is as follows – when in microgravity, soap bubbles should exhibit special properties. The gravitational force on Earth ensures that the water within the soap bubbles is dragged downward, reducing the thickness of the soapy film in the upper section. This is why soap bubbles burst quite quickly. But in a microgravity environment, the soap bubbles should remain stable for far longer. The students asked whether perhaps weightless soap bubbles might last forever? And what happens if you insert a paper clip or join two soap bubbles to form one? This is what Alexander Gerst will examine on the ISS.

16-year-old Katrin Geigenberger from Pater Rupert Mayer
Grammar School in Pullach convinced the jury
with her interesting proposal for an experiment featuring
sound waves. Credit: personal.

Soap bubbles will also be used in a fairly unusual sound wave test. 16-year-old Katrin Geigenberger from Pater Rupert Mayer Grammar School in Pullach convinced the jury with her interesting proposal for an experiment featuring sound waves – is it possible to use concert pitch A or other notes to set soap bubbles in motion? Perhaps suspended droplets of water, too? Alexander Gerst will find out.

Preparing for the mission

"The children came up with some fantastic ideas," says Project Manager Matthias Sperl from the DLR Institute of Materials Physics in Space. "These questions have never been analysed in this combination, so the experiments are of significant scientific interest." Cooperating closely with the young scientists, DLR is now preparing the selected ideas for their implementation on board the ISS to ensure that they are 'space qualified'. The winners – together with four other teams who made it into the final cut – will be invited to a launch event in May 2014 to experience live what it is like when Alexander Gerst takes off to the ISS, and will have the opportunity to meet with the ESA astronaut for a personal interview upon his return to Earth. In addition, DLR will send all of the competing school teams a large aerospace surprise package.

Contacts

Manuela Braun
German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Corporate Communications
Editor, Human Space Flight, 
Space Science, Engineering
Tel.: +49 2203 601-3882
Fax: +49 2203 601-3249
mailto:Manuela.Braun@dlr.de 

Dr Matthias Sperl
German Aerospace Center (DLR)
DLR Institute of Materials Physics in Space
Tel.: +49 2203 601-3434
mailto:Matthias.Sperl@dlr.de 

Dr Volker Kratzenberg-Annies
German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Education, Outreach
Tel.: +49 2203 601-3930
mailto:Volker.Kratzenberg-Annies@dlr.DE 

MIT News: Discovery of charged droplets could lead to more efficient power plants

Condensation on a metal plate leads to formation of droplets that carry electric charge, could improve power-plant efficiency

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- In a completely unexpected finding, MIT researchers have discovered that tiny water droplets that form on a superhydrophobic surface, and then “jump” away from that surface, carry an electric charge. The finding could lead to more efficient power plants and a new way of drawing power from the atmosphere, they say.

The finding is reported in a paper in the journal Nature Communications written by MIT postdoc Nenad Miljkovic, mechanical engineering professor Evelyn Wang, and two others.

Miljkovic says this was an extension of previous work by the MIT team. That work showed that under certain conditions, rather than simply sliding down and separating from a surface due to gravity, droplets can actually leap away from it. This occurs when droplets of water condense onto a metal surface with a specific kind of superhydrophobic coating and at least two of the droplets coalesce: They can then spontaneously jump from the surface, as a result of a release of excess surface energy.

In the new work, “We found that when these droplets jump, through analysis of high-speed video, we saw that they repel one another midflight,” Miljkovic says. “Previous studies have shown no such effect. When we first saw that, we were intrigued.”

In order to understand the reason for the repulsion between jumping droplets after they leave the surface, the researchers performed a series of experiments using a charged electrode. Sure enough, when the electrode had a positive charge, droplets were repelled by it as well as by each other; when it had a negative charge, the droplets were drawn toward it. This established that the effect was caused by a net positive electrical charge forming on the droplets as they jumped away from the surface.

The charging process takes place because as droplets form on a surface, Miljkovic says, they naturally form an electric double layer — a layer of paired positive and negative charges — on their surfaces. When neighboring drops coalesce, which leads to their jumping from the surface, that process happens “so fast that the charge separates,” he says. “It leaves a bit of charge on the droplet, and the rest on the surface.” 

The initial finding that droplets could jump from a condenser surface — a component at the heart of most of the world’s electricity-generating power plants — provided a mechanism for enhancing the efficiency of heat transfer on those condensers, and thus improving power plants’ overall efficiency. The new finding now provides a way of enhancing that efficiency even more: By applying the appropriate charge to a nearby metal plate, jumping droplets can be pulled away from the surface, reducing the likelihood of their being pushed back onto the condenser either by gravity or by the drag created by the flow of the surrounding vapor toward the surface, Miljkovic says.

“Now we can use an external electric field to mitigate” any tendency of the droplets to return to the condenser, “and enhance the heat transfer,” he says.

But the finding also suggests another possible new application, Miljkovic says: By placing two parallel metal plates out in the open, with “one surface that has droplets jumping, and another that collects them … you could generate some power” just from condensation from the ambient air. All that would be needed is a way of keeping the condenser surface cool, such as water from a nearby lake or river. “You just need a cold surface in a moist environment,” he says. “We’re working on demonstrating this concept.”

The research team also included graduate student Daniel Preston and Ryan Enright, who was a postdoc at MIT and the University of Limerick and is now at Bell Labs Ireland, part of Alcatel-Lucent. The work received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy through the MIT Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.

Written by David Chandler, MIT News Office

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue Building 11-400, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 United States

MIT News Release: Building disaster-relief phone apps on the fly

Researchers combine powerful new Web standards with the intuitive, graphical MIT App Inventor to aid relief workers with little programming expertise.


CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Qatar Computing Research Institute have developed new tools that allow people with minimal programming skill to rapidly build cellphone applications that can help with disaster relief.

The tools are an extension of the App Inventor, open-source software that enables nonprogrammers to create applications for devices running Google’s Android operating system by snapping together color-coded graphical components. Based on decades of MIT research, the App Inventor was initially a Google product, but it was later rereleased as open-source software managed by MIT.

With the new tools, an emergency aid worker — or anyone else, for that matter — could, for instance, build an application to monitor many different data sources on the Internet for updated information about the locations of ad hoc shelters, and display them all on a Google map. The app could also allow individual users to revise, annotate or supplement the information displayed in the map.

The researchers presented their new tools in a paper at the Workshop on Semantic Cities last month in Beijing. The MIT researchers on the paper — principal research scientist Lalana Kagal, graduate students Oshani Seneviratne, Daniela Miao and Fu-ming Shih, and postdoc Ilaria Liccardi — are all members of CSAIL’s Decentralized Information Group (DIG).

DIG shares office space in MIT’s Stata Center with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization that establishes Web standards like the hypertext markup language (html) and the extensible markup language (xml). Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s inventor, heads the W3C, but in his capacity as 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering at MIT, he also directs DIG.

DIG’s focus is research that takes advantage of the standards developed by the W3C. The new app-development tool requires that the data it accesses be formatted according to the resource description framework, or RDF.

Feedback loop

RDF is the central standard of the so-called Semantic Web, which would, in effect, convert the Web from a giant text file into a giant database. RDF provides a simple way both to label data items at different locations on the Web and to describe the relationships among them. Where a standard Google search could, say, find Web pages on which the phrases “restaurant” and “Penn Station” appear — including e-books in which they’re thousands of words apart, or the website for a restaurant chain that happens to be called “Penn Station” — a Semantic Web search could retrieve only the pertinent sections of only those sites that contain information about restaurants within a mile of the precise geographic coordinates of New York’s Penn Station that are open past 10 p.m. and have vegetarian entrees.

Since the RDF standard was first released in 2004, its adoption has been slow but steady. Companies like IBM and Sears, media outlets like The New York Times and the BBC, and public information sources like airport websites and the PubMed index of medical-journal articles all use RDF. But perhaps more importantly for the new disaster-response tool, so do many government agencies. Data on the U.S. government’s data.gov site — and at the corresponding sites in many other countries — as well as on the websites of agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Census Bureau, and the National Science Foundation, put data online using RDF.

Kagal, however, hopes that new tools like the disaster-response application she and her colleagues developed will accelerate the adoption of RDF. “We’re hoping that we’ll have a kind of cyclic effect,” she says. “As people use these apps more, they will automatically generate structured data. And as there’s more structured data out there, there will be people building more apps to consume them, which will in turn generate more structured data.”


Written by Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office



Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue Building 11-400, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 United States

Helmholtz funds five collaborative German-Chinese research projects

Ten years since opening its Beijing Office, the Helmholtz Association has established a diverse network of important Chinese partner organisations, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Since 2012, the association, together with the CAS, has been supporting German-Chinese research projects that are of key importance to society. This year, five projects have been selected from the research areas Energy, Earth and Environment, Health, Key Technologies and Structure of Matter. The Helmholtz Association and the CAS are jointly financing the projects with up to €155,000 per year over a three-year period.

Strengthening the German-Chinese partnership
“We can only confront the global challenges of tomorrow if we pool our expertise,” says Jürgen Mlynek, President of the Helmholtz Association. The more research topics grow in complexity, he explains, the more powerful our international cooperation networks will need to become. “We have been fostering a special relationship with China for many years. This joint promotion of German-Chinese research groups has taken the partnership to the next level.”
The projects that have been selected for funding as “Helmholtz-CAS Joint Research Groups” will receive up to €120,000 per year from the Helmholtz Association’s Initiative and Networking Fund, which it established to enable the swift implementation of strategic plans. The CAS is financing the projects with up to €35,000 per year.

“With this funding we are also helping to support talented young researchers of both nationalities and providing them with the conditions that they need to carry out their excellent research, without luring them away from their home countries,” Mlynek says. In this way, he adds, the Helmholtz Association is helping to curb the migration of young researchers out of China as well as to strengthen German research through acquiring excellent research partners. A similar programme with Russia has been running since 2006 – with great success, as Mlynek stresses.

Next round of applications

The next call for applications for the Helmholtz-CAS Joint Research Groups is planned for January 2014. Applications are invited from distinguished researchers in both countries whose research makes a significant contribution to tackling the major challenges of the day. The Helmholtz Association’s Beijing Office supports interested parties with their applications and helps them develop other plans for collaboration.

The Helmholtz-CAS Joint Research Groups selected for funding in 2013
Advanced Laser Technologies for Ultrafast Spectroscopy of Quantum Materials
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY

Development of Human Norovirus Antivirals
German Cancer Research Centre
Characterisation and Energy Production Strategies of Gas Hydrate Deposits in the Northern South China Sea
Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, Kiel (GEOMAR)
RevHy – Study on the Synthesis, Structures and Performances of Complex Hydrides Systems for REVersible High-Capacity Hydrogen Storage at Low Temperatures
Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht Centre for Materials and Coastal Research
Tailored Interfaces for High-Performance Nanolayered Materials
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
The Helmholtz Association contributes to solving major challenges facing society, science and the economy with top scientific achievements in six research fields: Energy; Earth and Environment; Health; Key Technologies; Structure of Matter; and Aeronautics, Space and Transport. With almost 36,000 employees in 18 research centres and an annual budget of approximately €3.8 billion, the Helmholtz Association is Germany’s largest scientific organisation. Its work follows in the tradition of the great natural scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894).

www.helmholtz.de
www.helmholtz.de/socialmedia

Contacts for the Media:

Janine Tychsen
Press Officer
Tel.: 030 206 329-24
janine.tychsen@helmholtz.de 

Communication and Media Relations
Berlin Office
Anna-Louisa-Karsch-Str. 2
10178 Berlin

Traces of immense prehistoric ice sheets: the climate history of the Arctic Ocean needs to be rewritten

Bremerhaven, September 26, 2013. Geologists and geophysicists of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), discovered traces of large ice sheets from the Pleistocene on a seamount off the north-eastern coast of Russia. These marks confirm for the first time that within the past 800,000 years in the course of ice ages, ice sheets more than a kilometre thick also formed in the Arctic Ocean. The climate history for this part of the Arctic now needs to be rewritten, report the AWI scientists jointly with their South Korean colleagues in the title story of the current issue of the scientific journal Nature Geoscience. 

Map of the Arctic, including the location of the ancient ice sheet. Map: Frank Niessen/IBCAO, Jakobsson et al. Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 10.1029/2012GL052219.

AWI geologist Dr. Frank Niessen and colleagues had already discovered the first signs of conspicuous scour marks and sediment deposits on the ocean floor north of Wrangle Island (Russia) on a Polarstern expedition in 2008. However, they were unable to gather extensive proof until last year, during an Arctic expedition on the South Korean research vessel Araon. "After we had analysed the bathymetric and seismic data from our first voyage, we knew exactly where we needed to search and survey the ocean floor with the swath sonar of the Araon on the second expedition," said Frank Niessen, the first author of the study. 

Traces of the ancient ice sheets

Bathymetric map of the Arlis Plateau with sets of different streamlined glacial lineations. 

The arrow marks the flow direction of the ancient ice sheets. Map: Frank Niessen, 

Alfred-Wegener-Institut

The result of this research is a topographic map of the Arlis Plateau, a seamount on which deep, parallel-running furrows can be discerned on the upper plateau and the sides – and over an area of 2500 square kilometres and to an ocean depth of 1200 metres. "We knew of such scour marks from places like the Antarctic and Greenland. They arise when large ice sheets become grounded on the ocean floor and then scrape over the ground like a plane with dozens of blades as they flow. The remarkable feature of our new map is that it indicates very accurately right off that there were four or more generations of ice masses, which in the past 800,000 years moved from the East Siberian Sea in a north-easterly direction far into the deep Artic Ocean," says Frank Niessen.

These new findings overturn the traditional textbook view of the history of Arctic glaciations. “Previously, many scientists were convinced that mega-glaciations always took place on the continents – a fact that has also been proven for Greenland, North America, and Scandinavia. However, it was assumed that the continental shelf region of North-eastern Siberia became exposed in these ice ages and turned into a vast polar desert in which there was not enough snow to enable a thick ice shield to form over the years. Our work now shows that the opposite was true. With the exception of the last ice age 21,000 years ago, ice sheets formed repeatedly in the shallow areas of the Arctic Ocean. These sheets were at least 1200 metres thick and presumably covered an area as large as Scandinavia," says Frank Niessen.

The AWI scientists still cannot say for certain, however, under what climate conditions these ice sheets formed and when exactly they left their marks on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. "We theorize that the East Siberian ice sheets arose during various ice ages when the average global temperature was around five to eight degrees Celsius cooler than what it is today. But evidently this relatively minor temperature difference was often sufficient to allow initially thin ocean ice to grow into an immense ice cap. An example that shows just how sensitively the Arctic reacts to changes in the global climate system," says the geologist. 

In a next step, the AWI researchers now want to try collecting soil samples from deeper layers of the ocean floor with a sediment core drill and thus learn more details about the prehistoric ice sheets. "Our long-term goal is to reconstruct the exact chronology of the glaciations so that with the aid of the known temperature and ice data, the ice sheets can be modelled. On the basis of the models, we then hope to learn what climate conditions prevailed in Eastern Siberia during the ice ages and how, for example, the moisture distribution in the region evolved during the ice ages," says Frank Niessen. This knowledge should then help predict possible changes in the Arctic as a consequence of climate change more accurately. 

Frank Niessen and his colleagues are anticipating a great number of surprising discoveries in the Arctic Ocean in the future. "As the Arctic Ocean sea-ice cover continues to shrink, more formerly unexplored ocean area becomes accessible. Today less than ten percent of the Arctic Ocean floor has been surveyed as thoroughly as the Arlis Plateau," says the AWI geologist. And this study would not have succeeded were it not for the outstanding cooperation of the AWI scientists with researchers of the South Korean Polar Research Institute KOPRI. "We complemented each other perfectly in this research. Our South Korean colleagues had the expedition and ship time, we knew the coordinates of the area in which we now found the evidence of the mega-glaciations," says Frank Niessen. 

Glossary:

Ice ages: 

About 2.7 million years ago the global climate cooled considerably. We have had a permanent ice cap on Greenland ever since. Then came around 55 changes between ice ages and warm periods until today. About 800,000 years ago the magnitude and duration of the glaciations in the Northern Hemisphere increased considerably. Since then the world climate has regularly alternated between two extremes: each cycle of an ice age followed by a warm period now lasts 100,000 years. Warm periods or interglacials, such as the "Holocene” in which we are living, only lasted about 10,000 to 15,000 years. Afterwards the ice masses on the continents began to grow once again, causing the sea level to drop as much as 130 metres compared to today at the peaks of the glacial cycles. Vast areas of the northern continents were then covered by kilometre-thick ice masses, which, for example, expanded over and over again from Scandinavia even into Northern Germany. The last time that this happened was 21,000 years ago. Thus far there has been little research on the role of the Arctic Ocean in this interplay. 

Notes for Editors:

The study was published under the following original title:

Frank Niessen, Jong Kuk Hong, Anne Hegewald, Jens Matthiessen, Rüdiger Stein, Hyoungjun Kim, Sookwan Kim, Laura Jensen,Wilfried Jokat, Seung-Il Nam and Sung-Ho Kang: Repeated Pleistocene glaciation of the East Siberian continental margin, Nature Geoscience, October 2013, DOI: 10.1038/NGEO1904; link to online version: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1904.html 

Your scientific contact person at the Alfred Wegener Institute is:

Dr. Frank Niessen (Tel.: +49 471 4831-1216, mobile: 0172-409 55 69, e-mail: Frank.Niessen@awi.de) 

Your contact person in the Department of Communications and Media Relations is Sina Löschke, (Tel.: +49 471 4831-2008, e-mail: medien@awi.de).

Follow the Alfred Wegener Institute on Twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/AWI_de) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/AlfredWegenerInstitut) to obtain all current news and information on everyday stories from the life of the Institute.

The Alfred Wegener Institute conducts research in the Arctic and Antarctic and in the high and mid-latitude oceans.  The Institute coordinates German polar research and provides important infrastructure such as the research icebreaker Polarstern and stations in the Arctic and Antarctic to the international scientific world. The Alfred Wegener Institute is one of the 18 research centres of the Helmholtz Association, the largest scientific organisation in Germany.