blue riders on film

Some thoughts on

Münter & Kandinsky
Marcus O. Rosenmüller
Germany 2024

I didn't quite get my act together to catch the Münter & Kandinsky exhibition at the Tate Modern this summer, but I made up for it by watching the movie at Dusseldorf, and I also visited the Macke Haus at Bonn and revisited some of the Blue Rider works at the K20 at Dusseldorf this month. Earlier this year, I saw the Kandinsky and af Klint exhibition and read the book about the women of the Blue Rider, so all in all I feel I have my blue riders lined up reasonably well this year.

So, the film - a bit like the one about Hilde Coppi I saw a day earlier - is pegged to the female protagonist being troubled by Nazi officials, and then reflecting on the twists and turns of her life that brought her to this point. Unlike Coppi, Münter manages to outwit the Nazis in that her stash of Kandinsky paintings remains undiscovered when they raid her house. Looking back from that point, it's a pretty straight telling of the story of Münter's life from the time she signed up for Kandinsky's art course in Munich to the time he ghosted her as we would say now.

I've seen critics moaning that there is too much soap opera in this film and not enough art, but I was reasonably happy with the coverage of the art. The artsy angles of the locations, from the light-flooded landscapes to the hand-painted staircases, come out well, and I felt I did get to relate to Münter's creative process sufficiently. I was also excited to see that she appears to have taken lots of photos as well - will look out for those. Maybe the title is a bit of a misnomer, as Kandinsky spends much of the time withdrawing himself from her attentions, and accordingly we see less of him and also get less than perfect insight into his creative work (ironically, IMDB lists a Russian title for the movie which translates as "Kandinsky and his muse" managing to be both offensive and a misrepresentation of the film). Also, the other artists of the group, Marc, Macke, Klee, Jawlensky, Werefkin only drift by rather fleetingly. So to fix that, one could have reduced the time frame to the time when all of them were alive (until 1914) and the title characters were together. Or have separate biopics for the others. I would be really keen on one covering Macke and Klee's trip to Tunis - but that's obviously another story for another movie. But as a Münter biopic, and in terms of flying the flag for female artists wronged by the arts world, this film does the job.

IMDB

good news

It doesn't happen very often these days, but my latest feature has some very good news to report, so enjoy:

Prophylactic progress against AIDS

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 22, 18 November 2024, Pages R1109-R1111

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

Even 40 years after its discovery, HIV is still a major health problem across the global south. This transmission electron micrograph shows HIV-1 virus particles budding out of an infected H9 cell. (Photo: NIAID/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

cycling with cellos

Some thoughts on
Highway cello
by Kenneth Wilson
City Village Books 2023

This book found me because I am known for cycling around Oxford with a cello on my back, and this author cycled from Hadrian's Wall to Rome with a cello on the back of his bike, which he used for busking in various places along the way. I haven't done that yet, but yes we do seem to have a lot in common in the cycling and cello departments:

• Once upon a time I cycled a similar distance in a similar time (3500 km in 35 days), from Germany around five of the six sides of France's hexagon, and back into Germany, carrying camping equipment but no cello. In my defence, I was learning to play the double bass back then, and Heinrich, our family cello, hadn't been restored yet.
• Since ca. 2004, I have been cycling with cellos around Oxford on a regular basis, first carrying them for the young cellist in the family, and more recently for my own musical adventures. I reckon that those short journeys taken roughly once a week over 20 years must add up to a similar distance as Hadrian's Wall to Rome.
• I have played a very similar kind of repertoire on the cello, including obviously the easier ones of the Bach suites, as well as the Swan and some folk tunes such as Sally gardens. Haven't done busking as such but played some of that outdoors eg in Florence Park during the Plague years.
• I was travelling in France at the same time as he was, but sadly missed him. I went to Nimes and then to the Drome region (see my photos here), must have crossed his route travelling by train from Avignon to Strasbourg.

However, these aren't necessary qualifications for reading the book. As far as I can tell (despite being too close to the subject matter) it is a really charming travelogue and manages to convey aspects of cello and cycling cultures to a lay audience, with other bits like old churches thrown in as well. The author used to be a vicar before he lost his faith, so there are bits about religion and philosophy too. I am surprised that it is self published (with the publisher's name obviously made up for the occasion), as I would have thought that there are quite a few travel publishers out there that would have happily taken it on.

I was pleased to learn about things like warmshowers, crazyguyonabike, and the street performance festival at Chalon sur Saone, which happens annually in July (Chalon dans la rue). Although I had been aware of carbon fibre cellos, it was interesting to read the background story of how they were invented.

Given my parallel experience, there are bound to be things I disagree with. I would never put the cello directly on the bike. I like to think that using my soft body as a shock absorber, the instrument is quite safe on my back, and it's not nearly as heavy as it looks. I also like the fact that it makes me look like a giant on the bike, so hopefully drivers will stay clear of me. And the contraption the author used looks downright dangerous to me.

Also, being a lazy kind of person, I would have avoided all those mountains he's so keen on climbing. I would find myself a nice river and follow its course - there are suitable cycle paths along the Rhine and the Danube, for instance. I find it much more civilised to go with the flow than to sweat on the serpentines. On that note, if he had stayed with the river Saone beyond Chalon and then followed the Rhone, I might have seen him busking in Avignon. (Considering his interest in church history, he really should have gone via Avignon.) Too bad.

troubling history

Some thoughts on

In Liebe, Eure Hilde (From Hilde, with love)
Andreas Dresen; starring Liv Lisa Fries
Germany, 2024

As I'm a massive fan of Babylon Berlin and Charlotte Ritter as played by Liv Lisa Fries, I would have watched anything with Fries in a vaguely pre-1945 role, and was lucky to catch this new film in Germany a few weeks after its release.

In a sense the role of Hilde Coppi is not that far away from Charlotte Ritter, only a couple of years younger and also a secretary, so one could almost read this as a Babylon Berlin sequel in which a romantic summer is interspersed with a rather brutal awakening. Except that Babylon Berlin was fiction and this story is real. And very much underappreciated so far.

I think I had heard the term Rote Kapelle for this network of anti-Nazi resistance activists before, but that's about as far as my knowledge went. (Wikipedia translates it as "red orchestra," but note that a Kapelle is rather a small orchestra as you would employ for a dance event or as a marching band, emphatically not a symphony orchestra.) None of the names rang any bells. The simple explanation: The resistance people who were celebrated (to a degree and not by all) in (western) Germany were christian-conservative nationalists who wanted to save their fatherland from that evil spirit that was bound to drive it over a cliff. Many of the members of the Rote Kapelle, on the other hand, were communists. (Note, however, that the Nazis liked to brand resistance activists with this label to tarnish them as communists - in reality some may have become involved with other motivations, eg humanitarian.) Thus, even though I think many more of them perished than from the July 20 coup attempt or the White Rose student movement, their memory was all but wiped out in the west - but celebrated in the GDR.

The other thing that left me stirred and shaken is that the film's protagonist Hilde Coppi, born in May 1909, is exactly the same age as my paternal grandparents whom I knew well in their later lives. Like them, she saw her world fall apart in her mid twenties, when fascism took over - something I often think about as it's now happening again. Ruth and Richard managed to keep a low profile and survived with luck, whereas Hilde happened to get involved with those communists and shared their fate. With some change of makeup, the same actors could have played my grandparents (in a less eventful movie) - and conversely, with a different set of personal contacts, my grandparents could have ended up in the red orchestra. Very troubling stuff.

Focussing on Hilde Coppi is also a clever trick as it enables the storytelling to avoid the gruesome torture that must have been inflicted on other members of the Rote Kapelle. Due to her rather marginal role and the fact that she was pregnant when she was arrested, she didn't get the worst treatment, and we are left to imagine what may have happened to her husband and his friends.

And then, if you're not sufficiently stirred by the end, there is a special guest for you - Hilde's son, whose birth in prison we witnessed in some detail, speaks an afterword. Now 81, historian Hans Coppi Jr. doesn't specifically talk about the present resurgence of fascism, but we are left to imagine what he thinks of it.

No sign of a UK release date so far - but I guess with all the Nazi history in it, this one must have better chances then most other German films. Might add it to my films not shown list for now, just to be on the safe side.

a violin with a famous name

Pirate luthier adventures continued:

Jumping back to violin number 16),

which needed the fingerboard to be glued back on, and it took me a while to gather the courage for the whole hide glue business, but it worked quite well and hasn't fallen apart yet.

This violin, which I bought for £25, is branded Sebastian Klotz, but sadly not by the Mittenwald Luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name, written as one word, as you see on the label:

The rather posh case (with a hygrometer - but maybe that's more common in Malaysia?) and the rosin are branded skv for Sebastian Klotz violins, I suppose. I hear the Klotz family are still building violins in Mittenwald, maybe they should send their lawyers.

Apart from the fingerboard and a bit of scraping on the bridge, there wasn't much to do on this one, but as I had the tailpin out, I wondered if I could take a photo through the hole, and that turned out quite nicely, so here's the view of the very solid looking skv soundpost.

First impressions: The violin sounds very much like the Stentor student models - good enough for folk but nothing special. I think it's just right for holiday practice so I've taken it to Dusseldorf where it will stay on top of my grandmother's old piano. As such it will stay in my collection so I'd better add the tag of my much neglected "all our instruments" series.

I've now exchanged the photos in my freegle ad for the one at the top of this entry, think people were getting bored with the ones I had for a year and a half, which showed violin 1) before and after restoration.

Previously in the pirate luthier series:

violin 1) is the one my late aunt had since the 1930s, which got me started. After restoring it in November 2022, I played it almost every day for 14 months, until number 5) showed up.

violin 2) is a Stentor student 1 (a very widely used brand of cheap fiddles available everywhere and still being produced). It has a fault that is probably not worth repairing, see the blog entry on number 3) below. After stripping it of some accessories and spares, I am now inclined to keep it in a semi-functional state to try out experimental repairs, i.e. use it as a wooden guinea pig of sorts.

violin 3) came from a folkie friend who moved away. I put the soundpost back in its place and it has now found a new home.

violin 4) is a modern Chinese one which I bought from one musical friend and sold to another, no work needed.

violin 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) is my new favourite and the one I currently play in folk sessions.

violin 6) is the half-sized Lark which was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a new bridge. Good enough for folk I would say. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 8) is the "ladies violin", a 7/8 skylark. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 9) is the one which needed a new bridge and a tailgut and turned out to sound quite lovely on the E string. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 10) is the broken one with traces of multiple repair attempts. I'm still gathering courage to try and fix that one.

violin 11) is the 3/4 sold by JP Guivier & Co Ltd. in the 1950s but may actually be older than that. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 12) is a full-size Lark which a freegle user kindly donated and delivered after seeing my offer. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violins 13) through to 15) I bought locally through gumtree or facebook, nothing special to report.

violin 16) is the Sebastian Klotz branded one described above, sadly not made by the Mittenwald Luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name.

violin 17) is the supersized violin with a very strong sound.

violin 18) is the slightly drunken but nice sounding violin from Poland.

violin 19) is a Stentor studend violin which only needed a little TLC, and within less than a week I had it brushed up and ready to move to our local school. The most intriguing problem it had was that somebody had put in the bridge the wrong way round, with the lower slope under the G string.

brown algae and blue carbon

There is another COP climate summit coming up this week, and to fend off the evil spirits of fossil fuel dependency I've written another climate related feature to appear just ahead of the event. So delegates have something to read when they get bored. This time it's about kelp both as a casualty and as a potential saviour in the climate catastrophe. I'm afraid the choice between these two paths rests very much with us (ie humanity). So judging on current performance in global affairs, not much hope there.

Anyhow, the feature is out now:

Brown algae and blue carbon

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 21, 4 November 2024, Pages R1059-R1061

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

Kelps can capture and sequester carbon on a scale that is significant for climate mitigation. (Photo: freddy an/Pixabay.)

a slightly drunken violin

Pirate luthier adventures continued:

violin number 18)

This is one that I am going to return to the people who have inherited it, as they want to keep it in the family, which is always a good thing. It came from Poland originally, and looks a little bit like my number 1), so could be Markneukirchen perhaps?

It needed a bridge, tailgut, and nut. After a few attempts with tailguts made from the bits of gut string I have lying around, I gave up and bought a pack of five nylon ones.

Inside, the soundpost is in place but leans at a crazy angle. On closer inspection, I realised that the hole for the tailpin is decidedly off centre as well, and the bass bar looks quite rough, all of which left me with the impression that the maker was perhaps a little bit drunk, or couldn't quite get their fiddle straight.

However, my preliminary setup with random old strings revealed that the instrument sounded quite nice, so the owners agreed to invest in a new set of strings, after which it sounded even better. Especially at Baroque pitch which I initially used because one of the pegs refused to stick at modern pitch. Compared to many of the fiddles I've handled, it has a warmer sound at the top and nothing boxy about the lower end, so all good as far as I can tell.

It came with an interesting but somewhat damaged old bow, which I'll try to fix up next.

In other pirate luthier news, I have picked up a donation of 19 dead cello bows earlier this week, and delivered violins 15) and 19) to the local secondary school which was looking for instruments for a violin club, providing access to violin playing to children who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity.

PS to see some professional luthiers at work, see this lovely photo gallery. I believe this is the workshop which has internal windows to the RAM's little museum, so when we visited the museum back in the old days we could watch the luthiers at work. I thought the museum had closed permanently, as the gate was always locked when I came by, but on checking up I find it's open on Fridays only. Need to revisit - hoping the luthiers don't take the Fridays off ...

Previously in the pirate luthier series:

violin 1) is the one my late aunt had since the 1930s, which got me started. After restoring it in November 2022, I played it almost every day for 14 months, until number 5) showed up.

violin 2) is a Stentor student 1 (a very widely used brand of cheap fiddles available everywhere and still being produced). It has a fault that is probably not worth repairing, see the blog entry on number 3) below. After stripping it of some accessories and spares, I am now inclined to keep it in a semi-functional state to try out experimental repairs, i.e. use it as a wooden guinea pig of sorts.

violin 3) came from a folkie friend who moved away. I put the soundpost back in its place and it has now found a new home.

violin 4) is a modern Chinese one which I bought from one musical friend and sold to another, no work needed.

violin 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) is my new favourite and the one I currently play in folk sessions.

violin 6) is the half-sized Lark which was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a new bridge. Good enough for folk I would say. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 8) is the "ladies violin", a 7/8 skylark. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 9) is the one which needed a new bridge and a tailgut and turned out to sound quite lovely on the E string. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 10) is the broken one with traces of multiple repair attempts. I'm still gathering courage to try and fix that one.

violin 11) is the 3/4 sold by JP Guivier & Co Ltd. in the 1950s but may actually be older than that. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 12) is a full-size Lark which a freegle user kindly donated and delivered after seeing my offer. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violins 13) through to 15) I bought locally through gumtree or facebook, nothing special to report.

violin 16) is branded Sebastian Klotz, but sadly not by the Mittenwald Luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name. This one needs a serious repair, may write more about it when I've done it and found out whether it was worth it.

violin 17) is the supersized violin with a very strong sound.

violin 18) is the slightly drunken violin described above.

violin 19) is a Stentor studend violin which only arrived last Sunday, and within less than a week I had it brushed up and ready to move to our local school. The most intriguing problem it had was that somebody had put in the bridge the wrong way round, with the lower slope under the G string.

star struck

History of astronomy typically begins with the ancient civilisations and the ways stargazing changed their view of the world. The book "Starborn" by Roberto Trotta goes back further. The author explores the question how humans evolved under a starry sky and whether we would have turned out different under a permanent cloud cover. Some of the answers are mindboggling yet convincing.

Read all about it in my latest essay review:

Stars in their eyes

Chemistry & Industry Volume 88, Issue 10, October 2024, Page 35

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I'm happy to send a PDF on request.

Here's a snippet:

More intriguing still, Trotta recounts a hypothesis that argues in favour of a shared human experience of observing the stars dating back more than 70,000 years ago. The Pleiades, as we know them today, are six stars, but many cultures from Ancient Greeks through to Australian Aborigines associate these stars with a legend of seven sisters, and one of them disappearing. With modern telescopes, astronomers can see the seventh sister, too close to one of the others to be distinguishable by the naked eye. They also see a few more, so there is no explanation for the number seven. Calculating back the movements, however, they have found that around 100,000 years ago, an average human eye would have seen seven Pleiades. Thus the myth of the seventh sister lost could be the oldest evidence of human observation of the night sky, as well as just about the only thing that humanity has preserved from the time before the expansion out of Africa.

I don't think the title captures the content of the book very well - it makes me think of how our very atoms have come from stardust, whereas the main gist of the book is how our minds have been shaped by the sight of the firmament. Hence the title of this entry.

flapping pterosaurs

Today's issue of Current Biology is a special theme issue on physics and biology, so there's lots of exciting stuff there from this particular interdisciplinary intersection. My contribution looks at the biomechanics of animals of the deep past, including one of the first species to crawl around on the sea floor as well as the very impressive pterosaurs, which were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight. As some pterosaurs grew to sizes much larger than today's biggest flying birds, researchers have some explaining to do here.

Modelling moves

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 20, 21 October 2024, Pages R947-R950

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(NB it appears to be open access right now, possibly because of the special section, and possibly time limited, but in any case it will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

Investigations of the bone structure of different pterosaur species suggest some evolved to meet the mechanical demands of soaring flight, whereas others were optimised for flapping. (Image: © Terryl Whitlatch.)

all about the gaze

Some thoughts on

Dans la ville de Sylvia (In the city of Sylvia)
José Luis Guerín, starring Pilar López de Ayala
France, 2007

When I researched the adventures of my great-grandparents in Belle Epoque Strasbourg (1901-1908) I started following the #Strasbourg tag on tumblr and mastodon, and via tumblr I discovered this movie which is set in central Strasbourg (not many movies are, actually, I'd struggle to name another one?!). Took me a while to get hold of it, but this week I got lucky and found a DVD in the library of the Maison Francaise.

So, in Strasbourg, we follow the footsteps of a slightly clumsy young artist who returns to the city in search of a young woman he met there six years earlier. He spends three days looking intensely at a number of women in the streets and in a cafe, stalks one of them (Pilar López de Ayala, who played an obsessive lover herself in Juana la Loca), but eventually has to admit defeat. The conversations of the people he observes in the cafes are strangely muted, so we are left with what is essentially an Eric Rohmer film without the dialogue. Just the glances.

And the glances are getting a bit uncomfortable in a male gaze kind of way. The searchlight of the artist's eyes rests on the young women a little longer than would be socially acceptable, and we as audience become complicit in this intrusive male gaze. I don't think that the sketches he draws are a viable excuse these days. I was left wondering what kind of discussions the male director and female cinematographer (Natasha Braier) had about this at the time, and whether they would see it the same way today. The stalking bit in the middle is explicitly discussed in words, but the gaze isn't. However, it is alluded to in the presence of advertising displays which also appear to take part in the network of gaze connections. A recurring graffity tag reading "je t'aime" also appears to comment on the obsession.

It is a shame, in a way, that the young artist doesn't pay more attention to the lovely city that surrounds him, which also happens to be a model of sustainable transport. We do get to see a lot of the modern tram system (handy device for the cinematographer to reflect or hide people), and there are bikes everywhere. In a very refreshing contrast to most movies, I don't recall seeing any cars in this one. The tumblr where I first saw this movie mentioned is a blog that matches up stills from films with an online map of the locations. Would be fun to revisit Strasbourg and follow the trail of 7 locations listed, without staring too much at all the elusive Sylvias out there.

Still from the stalking sequence, where an ad display looks on. (source)

PS after consulting IMDB on other films shot in Strasbourg, these might be of interest:

Tous les soleils (2011)

Baden Baden (2016)

quite a few films listed in IMDB with Strasbourg as filming location are actually meant to show Paris, including Amelie. Not sure about Truffaut's last one Vivement Dimanche, will have to investigate.

intertwined

My new book, exploring how all life on Earth is connected to everything else, is out today:

Intertwined
From Insects to Icebergs
by Michael Gross
Johns Hopkins University Press
15. October 2024
424 pages
ISBN 9781421449975
Hardcover RRP £27.50 / $32.95

It can now be ordered from the publisher's website or from wherever else you get your books (eg from Oxford's very own Blackwells). I understand that an audiobook version is also in the making, slightly scary thought, but as long as I don't have to do the reading out loud, it's all good.

I prepared a magazine feature based on the introduction of the book, which came out yesterday in The Scotsman magazine. Here's a snippet:

I have found and made many connections over the years and have broadened my interests from the physical sciences into ecology and environment issues. Increasingly, I became aware that ecology is all about how in the living world everything is connected to everything else. Beyond the predator-prey relations of the food web, there are multiple ways in which species shape their environment and create opportunities for others. And this web of connections operates across a vast range of different scales from the molecular interactions (related to my background in biochemistry) to global cycles of important chemical elements like nitrogen and carbon. For instance, microscopically small cyanobacteria were responsible for giving our planet an atmosphere rich in oxygen.

Ecology is a relatively young concept, with the term coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866. Many of these crucial connections are only beginning to be explored by science, although human activities have already started to destroy them. For instance, whales, sea birds, migrating fish like salmon, and bears are all part of a global pump that transports nutrients uphill, against the flow direction dictated by gravity and the hydrological cycle. Scientists only discovered this connection within the last few years. By this time, its capacity to cycle nutrients was already severely reduced, not least by the industrialised whaling of the 20th century, which was only stopped just in time to avert extinction of the species targeted. Hydroelectric dams blocking salmon runs and the decimation of big beasts like bears by hunters and habitat loss also helped to disrupt this nutrient pump.

And here's the table of contents:

Introduction: Everything is connected
Chapter 1. Plants and their little helpers
Chapter 2. Fantastic animals
Chapter 3. Insects rule the world
Chapter 4. Looking after our forests
Chapter 5. This time, the asteroid is us
Chapter 6. Save our seas
Chapter 7. Living with animals
Chapter 8. Listen to nature
Chapter 9. Animals shaping the environment
Chapter 10. Life in the times of climate change
Chapter 11. Our shared burden of disease
Chapter 12. The Anthropocene and beyond

all things weird and wonderful

ooops, I have a lot of catching up to do in my book-keeping of German pieces, so you'll find a vast range of weird and wonderful topics below. I'll just start with the latest and see how far I get ...

Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften: Pharmazeutika als Umweltproblem
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 10, October 2024, Pages 65-66
restricted access via Wiley Online Library
related content in English: Drugging the biosphere

Ausgeforscht: Stadtluft macht hemmungslos
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 9, September 2024, Page 112
free to read via Wiley Online Library
a sketch about flies mating across species barriers when exposed to polluted air

Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften: Neue Wege zu künstlichen Zellen
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 7-8, July-August 2024, Pages 68-69
restricted access via Wiley Online Library
a feature about new routes towards artificial cells

Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften: Von Muscheln lernen
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 5, May 2024, Pages 66-67
restricted access via Wiley Online Library
related content in English: Learning from bivalves

Ausgeforscht: Der Mensch als Kaffee-Biosensor
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 5, May 2024, Pages
restricted access via Wiley Online Library
a sketch about a novel electronic coffee-testing device which still requires a human as part of the setup

Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften: Enzyme gegen die Plastikflut
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 3, March 2024, Pages 74-75
free to read via Wiley Online Library
related content in English: Can we end plastic pollution?

Ausgeforscht: Altern abgeschafft?
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 3, March 2024, Page 98
restricted access via Wiley Online Library
a sketch about the latest immortality treatments - slightly more serious treatment in English: Forever young

Ausgeforscht: Und ewig tropft der Stein
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 2, February 2024, Page 114
restricted access via Wiley Online Library
a sketch about the medical uses of stalactite water (aka moon milk)

Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften: Vielfätige Gifte
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 1, January 2024, Pages 70-71
free to read via Wiley Online Library
related content in English: The venom menace

Ausgeforscht: Planet der Dinosaurier
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 1, January 2024, Pages
free to read via Wiley Online Library
a sketch about the finding that life on Earth was more readily detectable for extraterrestrial scientists in the time of the dinosaurs than it is today. So if we proceed to discover lots of exoplanets inhabited by dinosaurs we know why.

Not directly linked to my articles, but as I have been a member of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) for 38 years now and my dad was awarded the golden pin badge for 50 years membership, I kind of feel we've been part of its 75 year history, commemorated with this cover in June this year. I was first contacted about writing regularly for the magazine in the summer of 1999, so that's a silver jubilee too.

----------

pieces for 2023 yet to be completed ...

Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 71, Issue 2, May 2023, Pages
free to read via Wiley Online Library
related content in English: