We often talk about heart and lung health, etc. but we seldom talk about brain health which is undeniably central to all our health. The brain is like any other organ. During our Mental Health Awareness month we actually talk a lot about stress. Stress is often portrayed as having only relatively short lasting psychological impacts, but it also alters the biochemistry happening in your body and especially your brain and therefore actually having also long lasting physiological impacts. So, if you properly take care of it, you will reap the most fulfilling benefits. As the renounced neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Amen [10] said:  When yourRead More →

Today we present two researchers working on the BAMline and µSpot Beamline at BESSY II. Franziska Emmerling is responsible for the Materials Chemistry Department at BAM and heads a large team for structural analysis. Together with her colleague Ana Guilherme Buzanich, she will report on how they experienced the lockdown and are now carrying out their first experiments again. How did the lockdown start for you? Did you have to interrupt an experiment? Franziska: No, we were lucky, our beam time had just ended and we had tons of data that we had to evaluate anyway. I wrote an email to everyone on March 16thRead More →

Since some weeks now, many colleagues have come back to the lab, others continue to work from home. These different working environments will continue to accompany us in the coming weeks. This week, Sophie Spangenberger met (online) with Michael Tovar from the X-ray lab at HZB in Wannsee. You are responsible for the X-ray laboratory in Wannsee. How did you handle the lockdown? Our lab operations are geared to the experiment and, of course, only work when we are there. The instruments run in 365-7-24 mode and may only go into standby mode once before Christmas. With the corona lockdown, we had to close theRead More →