Over geological times, biological crises and diversification events have fashioned the evolutionary history of plants and animals. Palaeontologists usually interpret the evolutionary success of a lineage and its demise in direct relation to environmental variations, including its food web and climate changes.
The evolutionary history of vertebrates began, at the latest, during the early Cambrian (c. 520 Myr) with the first occurrence of laterally flattened soft-bodied organisms known as chordates, possessing a notochord (the forerunner of the vertebral column) but devoid of backbone and jaw.
Cephalopods (Class Cephalopoda, Phylum Mollusca) are amongst the most diverse, intelligent, and rapidly evolving marine invertebrates that have explored a multitude of evolutionary pathways since their entry point more than 500 myr ago.
Meeting the growing need in Critical Raw Materials (CRM) is one of the greatest challenges for the next decades in EU and beyond. Highly flexible, rapid and reliable measurement techniques are needed to enhance our capacity of pollutant-free CRM exploration, exploitation and recycling in various environments.
Geothermal energy as a renewable, continuously available source of energy can help reducing our climate impact and increasing energy security. Shallow, closed-loop systems provide a source for heating in combination with heat pumps.
Cetaceans are the largest group of mammals that transitioned from land to sea. Their long evolutionary history produced a wide variety of whales, dolphins, and porpoises, characterized by a number of different types of predation and ecological niches.
NWE has to reduce CO2 emission. One major source of CO2 is the production of electricity and heat by burning fossil fuels, which could be vastly replaced by using deep geothermal energy (DGE).
Ever since they first made the transition to life on land around 350 million years ago, a wide range of different lineages of tetrapods have reinvaded aquatic ecosystems.
