“Show Us Your Research Videos!” Contest Winners Announced

10 July 2023, by Newsroom editorial office

Photo: Universität Hamburg/ STEM

There were 5 winners in the Show Us Your Videos contest.

Making research visible in the truest sense of the word—under this motto the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences held a research video contest. Now the winners have been announced.

Exciting spiders and rubber fingers wrapping presents

In the Department of Biology the winners were Alfonso Aceves-Aparicio and Pablo Narezo-Guzman from the behavioral biology section. Using impressive high-speed shots, they showed how the Australian spider Euryopis umbilicata, the superb ant-eater spider, kills its much larger and defensive prey. It has an 85-percent success rate with its 2-phase attack, making it one of the world’s most successful predators.

Alexey Stepanyuk from the Institute of Technical and Macromolecular Chemistry won first place in chemistry with his video. It shows a soft rubber finger developed in a moulding process in the research group headed by Dr. Werner Pauer. It was developed for robots and required the production of a suitable gripping base for a 3D printer. In the prize-winning video, a robot wraps small Christmas presents using a universal gripper equipped with the rubber fingers.

The birth of coral reefs and communicating robots

The winning video in the Department of Earth System Sciences looks at ecosystems especially endangered by climate change. In her video, Sina Simona Pinter from the subject group Theoretical Oceanography explains the evolution of coral reefs, which offer protection to a multitude of flora and fauna. She also makes clear how an internal wave can influence the bio-geochemistry of water columns so as to hinder the emergence of coral reefs.

In the prize-winning video from the Department of Informatics, viewers get to know NICO, the Neuro-Inspired COmpanion. The video by Dr. Matthias Kerzel, Erik Strahl, and Franziska Schmidt gives a glimpse into this humanoid robot platform in the field of neuro-robotics and into human-robot interaction as developed in the research group Knowledge Technology headed by Prof. Stefan Wermter. Among other things, the system can communicate and learn together with humans using facial expressions, gestures, and generated language.

Innovative identification of DNA molecules in the fight against cancer

With the innovative laser-scan procedure BIOREAD, DNA molecules can be identified like barcodes for the purpose of biomedical applications, for example, to monitor cancer. Franziska Esmek explains how exactly in her prize-winning video for the Department of Physics. The animated video illustrates how DNA threads in samples are marked using fluorescence, elongated, and pushed into a channel in which laser scanners collect valuable information.

The 5 prize-winning videos were chosen by a jury of representatives from the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences. They provide exciting, vivid insight into current research projects. See the faculty’s research page for an overview of all the videos.