Parisa Kakaee volunteered at an orphanage in Tehran as a teenager. While she was there, she saw children who hardly ever got a hug, but instead faced verbal attacks. “Bastard!” was yelled out at the little ones. “That made a big impression on me,” says Kakaee, now 35. An Iranian native, Kakaee has made it her life’s work to help those weaker than she. She has lived in Berlin for two years and is now studying at Freie Universität in the European Master in Childhood Studies and Children’s Rights program.

Life forms with a nervous system and an immune system can recall experiences of stress such as a past illness. This memory allows the organism to protect itself when facing the same event repeatedly – in the case of illness, for example, by developing antibodies. But do organisms that lack a nervous system, such as plants, fungi, or bacteria, also have some memory of stress? That is the topic now being pursued by ecologists, molecular biologists, and biochemists within Collaborative Research Center 973, which was established in July 2012.

When Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in early September, almost 36 million people watched. The speech was a big political event on the social network Twitter, generating more than 52,700 “tweets” per minute. No doubt about it: The U.S. President is a thrilling speaker. But what is it, exactly, about his speeches that affects the audience? That is what scholars on an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Languages of Emotion cluster aim to find out.