The daily report issued by the East German border police on March 14, 1953, reported that a soldier named Hans-Joachim S., from the town of Ballenstedt, had deserted across the border strip to West Germany at about 7:00 p.m. the previous day, taking his weapon with him. The document says the flight “could not be prevented by the patrol commander using his firearm.”

As witnesses to centuries of climate history, very old trees supply geoscience researchers with insight into the weather during bygone eras. Mandy Freund, a graduate of Freie Universität, used tree rings to reconstruct the European climate of the past in her master’s thesis.

Clad in white lab coats, with protective goggles over their eyes, a group of seventh graders watch eagerly as a shelled egg slowly squeezes through an opening in a bottle, as if propelled by magic, after they have cooled the vessel with ice water. The potential junior scientists engage in lively discussion of what physical effect could be behind this.