The Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma plays a major role in research by Nordic astronomers, and in the education of new astronomers. It has been doing this for more than 30 years, and it will to continue to do so. Together with the University of Turku in Finland, Aarhus University has just taken over the observatory, which was otherwise under threat of closure.

Kidney diseases, atherosclerosis, colon cancer, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and neurological disorders are five global health problems that the first five research projects in the Open Discovery Innovation Network (ODIN) are now addressing. In the projects, researchers from Aarhus University and the pharmaceutical industry are working together in full openness to generate new knowledge and new tools that can be used to develop new drugs.

The groundbreaking open research collaboration, so far between Aarhus University and nine pharmaceutical and biotech companies, ODIN, is now up and running, and the researchers are ready to embark on their first joint projects aiming at fostering the development of new drugs throughout the world. The platform is completely open with the goal that all knowledge and results will be shared within the network and made available to the public free of charge.

Researchers at the Department of Biology at Aarhus University and the Natural History Museum in Aarhus have now shown that cow pads contain DNA from the entire community of insects inhabiting the dung.

Researchers from Aarhus and Copenhagen universities have shown that environmental DNA - the method of analysing DNA from an environmental sample to find out which organisms live in the area - works on a large scale. In a three-year project, they have used the method to map the biodiversity of the sea around Qatar based on DNA purified from seawater.

Associate Professor Bjørn Panyella Pedersen from the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Aarhus University receives an ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council for research in plant growth. The amount awarded is EUR 2.0 million and runs over five years.

Over the next four years, a major new EU project will examine how noise from shipping affects the marine environment and identify solutions to make ships quieter. Project SATURN has participants from ten countries, and researchers from AU will play a key role.

Peter Henriksen, senior researcher at the Department of Bioscience will take up the position as the new head of WATEC on 1 December 2020. The research centre was founded in 2017, and is now among the research elite, with close collaboration relations near and far. The new head of the centre is looking forward to being in charge of the centre, which works on key societal challenges.

The sperm whale is the world's largest toothed predator, and they consume as many fish and squid as the entire global fishing industry. However, we have not, until recently, understood how such large predators find their food in the deep ocean. By putting a data logger on the tip of the nose of a sperm whale, researchers from Aarhus University have gained the first insight into the world of the prey a sperm whale is seeking out, and they can show that sperm whales hunt with the help of a long-distance sonar.