At least since the extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner jumped from a height of nearly 40 kilometers to the Earth, in October 2012, the entire world has known the term “stratosphere.” It is the layer of the Earth’s atmosphere at a height of between 15 and 50 kilometers above the globe, where the air is extremely thin and outer space is close at hand. Researchers in Berlin have been interested in what is going on up there since before the record-setting jump, though. The German Research Foundation (DFG) recently approved an additional 2.27 million euros for the “SHARP” research program, which deals with the topic of “Stratospheric Change and Its Role for Climate Prediction” and is being coordinated by Freie Universität Berlin. The goal is to better understand what is happening in this layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, in order to develop effective strategies for combating climate change on that basis.

It must have been the early 1970s. Reinhold Leinfelder was still a schoolboy, and he had an unusual hobby: frogs, newts, salamanders, and toads. There were a lot of them in the woods to the west of Augsburg, near his home – but from one day to the next, they simply vanished. A golf course had been built in the neighborhood, and the fertilizer used for the green had destabilized local lakes.

Ehrhard Behrends simply can’t stop – or at least, he doesn’t want to. Popularizing mathematics has become so dear to the heart of Behrends (66), a professor at Freie Universität, that he has postponed retiring. Although it should be said that “retirement” is one word whose probability of combination with Behrends’s name is so low as to approach zero.