Tag: University of Vienna

Paleobotanist Mario Coiro of the Institute of Paleontology at the University of Vienna and colleagues at the University of Montpellier (France) have made an important breakthrough in understanding the origin and geographic distribution of cycads. By combining genetic data with leaf morphological data from both fossil and living species for the first time, the researchers created a phylogenetic tree of these fascinating and endangered plants. The results of the study, which was funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, have now been published in the journal New Phytologist.

Previous studies have shown that the mortality rate of Corona patients hospitalized and requiring oxygen therapy is similar no matter if they are vaccinated or unvaccinated. An international research team led by David Gómez-Varela from the Department for Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Vienna has now disproved these findings in a comprehensive multicontinental analysis published in the high-impact Journal of Medical Virology: The number of deaths of hospitalized patients would have been 22% lower if all unvaccinated, oxygen-dependent individuals had been vaccinated.

In a study conducted in the lab as well as during the COVID-19 lockdowns, participants reported higher levels of tiredness after eight hours of social isolation. The results suggest that low energy may be a basic human response to a lack of social contact. The study conducted at the University of Vienna and published in Psychological Science also showed that this response was affected by social personality traits of the participants.

Over the past fifty years, there have been remarkable claims about the effects of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music. Reports about alleged symptom-alleviating effects of listening to Mozart’s Sonata KV448 in epilepsy attracted a lot of public attention. However, the empirical validity of the underlying scientific evidence has remained unclear. Now, University of Vienna psychologists Sandra Oberleiter and Jakob Pietschnig show in a new study published in the prestigious journal Nature Scientific Reports that there is no evidence for a positive effect of Mozart’s melody on epilepsy.

Acesulfame is a sweetener in sugar-free drinks and foods. As it cannot be metabolised in the human body, the sweetener ends up in wastewater after consumption and remains largely intact even in sewage treatment plants. A new study by the University of Vienna shows that the persistence of the sweetener varies with temperature as the concentration of the sweetener in wastewater varies with the seasons.

The El Niño phenomenon influences the weather in distant regions, as far away as the USA, India or the Mediterranean region. But how exactly these so-called teleconnections actually work has not yet been clarified completely.

Glycolipids, basically “fatty sweet” molecules, are a relatively unknown group of lipids. A new method developed by an Austrian team led by chemist Evelyn Rampler of the University of Vienna has now provided deeper insights into the functioning of certain glycolipids located on the surfaces of stem cells.

Alien floras in regions that were once occupied by the same European power are, on average, more similar to each other compared to outside regions and this similarity increases with the length of time a region was occupied. This is the conclusion of a study by an international team of researchers led by Bernd Lenzner and Franz Essl from the University of Vienna, which was recently published in the scientific journal “Nature Ecology and Evolution”.

Amoebae receive surprising support in defense against viruses: The bacteria they are infected with prevent them from being destroyed by giant viruses. A research team led by microbiologist Matthias Horn from the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science at the University of Vienna have investigated how a virus infection proceeds when the amoebae are simultaneously infected with chlamydia. The research team shows for the first time that intracellular bacteria known as symbionts protect their host against viruses. Amoebae are protists, i.e. single-celled microorganisms with a cell nucleus. Protists play a key role in food webs and ecosystem processes. Consequently, the results of the study suggest that the interaction between symbionts and viruses influence the flow of nutrients in ecosystems. The study is now published in the journal PNAS.

With the help of an acoustic camera that visualizes sound pressure, researchers from the University of Vienna investigated the calls of Asian elephants. The elephants emitted their low frequency “rumbles” mainly through their trunk or through their mouth and trunk simultaneously, and only seldomly through their mouth alone. This is the first study to conclusively demonstrate the combined oral and nasal call emission in a non-human animal. The study has recently been published in the journal “Animals”.

Likely to survive in the oral cavity, bacteria evolved to divide along their longitudinal axis without parting from one another. A research team co-led by environmental cell biologist Silvia Bulgheresi from the University of Vienna and microbial geneticist Frédéric Veyrier from the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) just published their new insights in Nature Communications. In their work, they de-scribed the division mode of these caterpillar-like bacteria and their evolution from a rod-shaped ancestor. They propose to establish Neisseriaceae oral bacteria as new model organisms that could help pinpoint new antimicrobial targets.

Efficient adsorbents for industrial wastewater treatment are important to minimize potential environmental damage. In particular, organic dyes, as a significant group of industrial pollutants, are usually highly water soluble, non-degradable and many are toxic to carcinogenic. Changxia Li and Freddy Kleitz from the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Vienna together with colleagues now presented a new approach to design an innovative composite material, consisting of a nanoporous, ultrathin covalent organic framework (COF) anchored on graphene, that is highly efficient at filtering organic pollutants from water. The study was published in “Angewandte Chemie”.

In a study published in the journal Nature Communications, Andrea Mundl-Petermeier and Sebastian Viehmann of the Department of Lithospheric Research at the University of Vienna have demonstrated that a new geochemical archive – 182Tungsten in banded iron formations – can be used to simultaneously trace both the evolution of the Earth’s mantle and continents throughout Earth’s history. This offers new opportunities to better understand the Precambrian Earth in the future.

Assemblages of tropical non-indigenous species in the Eastern Mediterranean have biological traits that markedly differ from those of native biological communities. This was shown by an international team of scientists led by Jan Steger from the Department of Palaeontology at the University of Vienna.

The relatively narrow human birth canal presumably evolved as a “compromise” between its abilities for parturition, support of the inner organs, and upright walking. But not only the size of the birth canal, also its complex, “twisted” shape is an evolutionary puzzle.

Touch is fundamental to interpersonal communication. Until recently, it was unclear how affectionate touch and physical contact affect the brain activity and heart rhythms of mothers and babies. Developmental psychologists Trinh Nguyen and Stefanie Höhl from the University of Vienna have investigated this question in a recent study.

Extremely premature infants are at a high risk for brain damage. Researchers at the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna have now found possible targets for the early treatment of such damage outside the brain: Bacteria in the gut of premature infants may play a key role. The research team found that the overgrowth of the gastrointestinal tract with the bacterium Klebsiella is associated with an increased presence of certain immune cells and the development of neurological damage in premature babies. The study is now published in journal Cell Host & Microbe.