06/26/2025 How does a cell membrane form without metabolism? Or conversely, how does metabolism arise without a cell membrane? This classic chicken-and-egg problem is addressed in a recent study published in Nature Physics by researchers from LMU professor Dieter Braun’s team. They have demonstrated a possible mechanism for metabolic processes without cell membranes in water-filled pores.

06/20/2025 By now a beloved tradition, the 2025 edition of the annual PhD Days of the ORIGINS excellence cluster took place in Kufstein, Austria. Over three days, 19 young physicists came together to present their research, dive into interdisciplinary discussions about their respective fields, and explore the stunning Austrian countryside.

06/18/2025 Physicist and ORIGINS spokesperson Prof. Stephan Paul from the Department of Physics at the TUM School of Natural Sciences has been awarded the prestigious Distinguished Fellowship by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The award recognizes Paul's outstanding scientific contributions in the field of experimental hadron and particle physics.

06/11/2025 In a new study, the laboratory of ORIGINS scientist Prof. Dieter Braun at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) has uncovered an unexpected form of molecular collaboration between the fundamental components of life. The researchers found that amino acids – simple, abundant molecules on early Earth – can actively promote the polymerization of RNA under mild, prebiotic conditions. This finding challenges long-held assumptions about the “RNA world” at the origin of life and suggests that life may have started through a more balanced interplay between RNA and amino…

05/22/2025 The Cluster of Excellence “From the Origin of the Universe to the First Building Blocks of Life”, ORIGINS Cluster for short, will start its new funding period on 1 January 2026. This was de-cided today by the Excellence Commission under the leadership of the German Research Foun-dation (DFG). The interdisciplinary research network investigates the origin and development of the Universe, from the Big Bang to the emergence of life.

05/08/2025 An international team, including ORIGINS researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has discovered a new island of asymmetric nuclear fission on the chart of nuclides. A narrow range of krypton isotopes (Z=36) drives a mode of asymmetric nuclear fission for nuclei in the region of mercury isotopes (Z=80). The results improve our understanding of the origin of elements in the Universe, as well as processes in terrestrial energy production and reactor safety.

05/05/2025 Biological patterns are essential for many processes of life. During cell division, for example, the distribution of certain proteins in the cell determines the location where the parent cell splits. An unanswered question hitherto has been how bacteria manage to keep pattern formation stable even though the protein composition in the cell can fluctuate due to changing environmental conditions. A team led by LMU biophysicist and ORIGINS scientist Professor Erwin Frey and Suckjoon Jun, Professor at the University of California, San Diego, has found the solution: One of the…

04/23/2025 Scientists from the ORIGINS Cluster of Excellence are among the thousands of researchers worldwide who have been awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. This "Oscar of Science" honors the experimental collaborations ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb for their high-precision testing of modern theories of particle physics using data from the LHC Run-2 at CERN. ORIGINS researchers from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and the Max Planck Institute for Physics (MPP) participated.

04/11/2025 The international KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has once again surpassed its own achievements. The latest data, recently published in Science, establish an upper limit of 8 x $10^{-37}$ kg (or in scientific language 0.45 eV/$c^2$) for the neutrino mass. With this result, KATRIN, which measures neutrino mass in the laboratory using a model-independent method, has once again set a world record. The KATRIN team of the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS and the Collaborative Research Center 1258 at the Technical…

04/02/2025 The expansion rate of the universe, expressed by the Hubble constant (H₀), remains one of the most discussed quantities in cosmology. Measurements based on nearby objects yield a higher value than those derived from observations of the early universe - a discrepancy known as the "Hubble tension." ORIGINS researchers at MPA have now presented a new, independent determination of H₀ using Type II supernovae. The resulting value, H₀ = 74.9 ± 1.9 km/s/Mpc, is consistent with other local measurements.