Missed out on the first days of our Advent Calendar Quiz? Make sure to join in right now and celebrate the winter in a traditional German way! Put your knowledge to the test every day up until 24 December on our Facebook page. You can participate even if you do not have a Facebook account. Just click on the link and answer the question behind the door. There are great prizes to be won!

Our brains are highly active when we sleep. Researchers in various fields are studying sleep in a bid to better understand what affects our sleep at night so that sleep disorders can be treated.

Imagine you are dead tired but still find it impossible to fall asleep – this is something that many people around the world experience on a regular basis. To help them, scientists in Dortmund are exploring ways of stimulating the brain.

A hydrologist from India, Rohini Kumar works at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ in Leipzig. He explains why he is keen to carry on researching in Germany.

That is the number of European countries from which a team of researchers from Germany and the USA has studied climate data. Their findings were very surprising: though climate change will hardly increase electricity consumption overall, it will do so to a very large extent in individual countries.