Mouthful of Knowledge: Unraveling Nanostructures, Crisis Management, and Chimpanzee Communication

Chameleons are renowned for their unique colour-changing abilities and iconic prey-catching mechanism, which involves a highly specialized ballistic tongue capable of remarkable extension and acceleration. This extraordinary process has been a subject of fascination since the seventeenth century. This enthusiasm is understandable; the tongue can be projected up to 2.5 body length with accelerations ranging from 500 to 2590 m.s-2 in 10 to 55 milliseconds, depending on the species.
In this work, we explore the hierarchical structure of the Panther chameleon tongue using a combination of optical, X-ray and electron-based techniques to unravel the uniqueness of the tongue composite tissues from the macroscale to the nanoscale enabling one of the fastest movement in vertebrate.

The ability to combine meaningful words together (syntax) is a key defining feature of human language. The evolutionary roots of syntax (how old is syntax?, where did it come from?) are, however, less clear. One powerful way to begin to answer this question is to investigate the communicative abilities of our closest-living relatives, the chimpanzee, with whom we shared a common ancestor approximately 6 million years ago. In this talk I will review work we have conducted over the last few years investigating the presence of syntax in the communication system of chimpanzees. This work is beginning to suggest that the cognitive building blocks underlying human syntax might be much older and likely evolved, prior to the emergence of language itself.

Covid, Ukraine, Credit Suisse: Die Krisen ziehen an der Schweiz nicht mehr vorbei. Nach den jüngsten Erfahrungen hat der Bund die Organisation der Krisenpolitik neu ausgerichtet. Eine wichtige Rolle kommt dabei der wissenschaftlichen Politikberatung zu. Wie sie künftig in Krisen einbezogen werden soll und wo dabei Probleme auftauchen können, erläutere ich in meiner Präsentation.