Plants can adapt to changing light conditions. This is made possible by photoreceptors that sense light at different wavelengths and translate it into signals – the language of cells. A group of biologists from Freie Universität Berlin and Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf have jointly studied how the light signals affect the green “power plants” in the plant cells, the chloroplasts.

This is no longer a vague vision of the future, but instead a practical method developed by researchers at Freie Universität and scientists from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In one study, they used the method to show that the U.S. Midwest has the highest photosynthetic activity of any region on Earth.

Abbreviations like “LOL” and “HDL” (for hab’ dich lieb, or “love ya”) and the Like button – all of them are things that Anna Metzler has seen for several hours a day recently. Metzler, a psychologist, is doing research on the behavior of teens and young people on the social network for her dissertation at Freie Universität Berlin under the working title You and Facebook, and that includes using Internet jargon and abbreviations like LOL (“laughing out loud”) and HDL.