Attempto! 02/2023: Research News in Brief

Intelligent polymeric materials that adapt to movements and changing environmental conditions could be possible in the future thanks to an innovation at the universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen. Dominique Lunter from Pharmaceutical Technology is involved in the development of a polymer material that can change its stiffness and adjust its shape – depending on humidity and temperature. The extremely adaptable polymers could be of interest for robots made of soft materials (soft robotics), such as those used in biomedicine. The polymers are also suitable for skin applications such as patches for controlled drug release through the skin. In a recent study the researchers have experimented with the painkiller Diclofenac in polymer patches. “The trick is that the drug release is controlled by the patch itself by adapting to the moisture in the wound known as wound secretion,” says Lunter.

If supervisory boards include at least one woman, the participation rate in meetings is higher than with an entirely male board, the economist Kerstin Pull has determined in a study. Two or more women on the supervisory board have even been linked to the profitability of a company. Pull and her team analyzed the reports of 44 listed companies on supervisory boards and compared them with the profitability of the companies. In addition, she conducted interviews with 17 members of a supervisory board. “Different perspectives in a supervisory board mean that more alternatives can be weighed up and better decisions can be made,” she explains. In addition, “broader expertise” and a “more productive tone” positively influenced the discussions. Another reason for the positive effect could be that women are often appointed to a supervisory board from outside. “Supervisory board members should control the board of directors. With a view from outside this function can be fulfilled more easily.”

We owe words like “Jaguar” and “Piranha” to the indigenous Tupí-Guaraní language family from South America, of which 40 languages are still spoken today. It originated about 2,550 years ago in the basin of the rivers Tapajós and Xingu, as computational linguist Fabrício Ferraz Gerardi shows for the first time. Together with an international team, he used molecular biological kinship analysis to understand the development geographically and chronologically. The team compared vocabulary for animals and plants. Mutations showed when two related species had split off from a common ancestor – the gene mutations in biological species corresponded to sound shifts or replacements. With the analysis of vocabulary and with algorithms from molecular biology, a family tree could be created. In addition, the team assigned archaeological finds spatially to individual languages, for example the description of ceramics, in order to indirectly draw conclusions about the development of language over time.

Genetic analyses of human bones reach their limits if the DNA is poorly preserved or if the samples may not be destroyed. An alternative is to make comparisons of the structure and shape of certain skeletal parts, which may yield information about family relationships. This has been demonstrated by the palaeoanthropologists Hannes Rathmann and Katerina Harvati, along with their international research team. They analyzed large data sets to determine the extent to which the genetic diversity of people worldwide is reflected in the morphology – i.e. the structure and shape – of skeletal parts. The team obtained the best results when comparing cranial and jaw elements, revealing tiny morphological features such as groove patterns in tooth crowns, the relative size of the tooth tip, the number of roots and wisdom teeth. In future archaeological and forensic investigations, this technique could help to trace the history of a population or to establish kinship profiles.