University of Potsdam

Dynamic nutrient competition (de-)stabilizes photosymbiosis

ABSTRACT Photosymbioses between heterotrophic hosts and phototrophic symbionts are critical to productivity in oligotrophic aquatic ecosystems. The ecological success of this relationship is rooted in the efficient metabolic exchange between symbiotic partners, yet this nutrition...

Different prompts – different online learning behavior? Investigating generic, specific, and adaptive specific prompts

Purpose In digital learning environments, learners need to regulate their learning, yet many do not engage in effective self-regulated learning strategies. Prompts can scaffold these processes, but their effectiveness may depend on their specificity and alignment with learners’ o...

Between the Lines: Decoding Signaling Differences in Public and Private Sector Job Advertisements

ABSTRACT To compete in the “war for talent,” public sector employers must demonstrate advantages over private employers. While public service motivation (PSM) predicts sector preference, scholars disagree on whether public employers (can) effectively signal PSM in job advertiseme...

Active hazardous slow faults drive drainage evolution in the Atacama Desert

This is a preprint of manuscript soon to be sumbitted to a peer-review journal. The Atacama Desert of the Central Andean forearc is the driest non-polar region on Earth, where extremely low erosion rates preserve geomorphic markers over Myr timescales. Between 19°S and 20°S, subt...

Modular Triethylene Glycol Decouples Antimicrobial Potency from Cytotoxicity in Membrane-Active Drugs

Abstract Cationic membrane-active drugs are an important focus of antibiotic research, yet their potential is often limited by poor selectivity. Here, we establish steric protection of cations by modular triethylene glycol as a chemical design framework to decouple antimicrobial...

Synthesis, Cytotoxicity, and Mechanistic Evaluation of Thiazolium-Based Gold(I) Bis- N -Heterocyclic Carbene Complexes

Abstract Imidazole- and benzimidazole-based Au(I) N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) complexes show great potency as anticancer agents. However, other NHC scaffolds are only sparsely explored. Four gold(I) NHC complexes featuring thiazolium-based ligands (NHCthia) with varying N-substi...

Recurrence lacunarity of spatial data

Abstract Quantifying the structure and heterogeneity of complex spatial patterns remains a key challenge in spatial data analysis. Recurrence plots (RPs) offer a powerful method for visualizing the recurrent spatial patterns in such data. To quantify the structure of spatial recu...

Optimal Low-Rank Posterior Covariance Approximation in Linear Gaussian Inverse Problems on Hilbert Spaces

Abstract. For linear inverse problems with Gaussian priors and Gaussian observation noise, the posterior is Gaussian, with mean and covariance determined by the conditioning formula. The covariance is the central object for uncertainty quantification, as it encodes the variabilit...

Challenges in reconstructing seasonally driven landslide motion from optical satellite data: insights from the Del Medio catchment, NW Argentina

Optical satellite images are a valuable resource for studying slow-moving landslides from space. However, monitoring displacement through pairwise image correlation and time-series inversion presents several challenges, including the impact of seasonality on measurement accuracy....

Nutrition and health status in the follow-up of the risks and benefits of a vegan diet (RBVD) study

Abstract To examine health risks and benefits of a vegan diet, the RBVD study was conducted in 2017 and followed up in 2021. The present paper evaluated dietary nutrient intake and status together with systemic cardiometabolic health-related biomarkers and examinations among vega...

Positive scalar curvature with point singularities

We show that in every dimension n≥8, there exists a smooth closed manifold Mn that does not admit a smooth positive scalar curvature (psc) metric, but M admits an L∞-metric that is smooth and has psc outside a singular set of codimension ≥8. This provides counterexamples to a con...

Primary school pre-service teachers' ability to understand and use dashboard data and associations with their data literacy knowledge, beliefs and experience

Teacher dashboards can support instructional decision-making, but teachers often struggle to interpret dashboard data. This study examines pre-service teachers' situation-specific skills for using dashboards, including perceiving relevant data, interpreting information, and makin...

Chirality enhances diffusion in disordered environments

Chirality, a systematic rotational bias in the motion of a particle, arises in a wide range of physical and biological systems, from charged colloids in magnetic fields to swimming bacteria near surfaces. While its effects in homogeneous environments are well understood, the inte...

Uncertainties of GRACE/GRACE-FO Satellite Gravimetry Data and Thereof Derived Products

Abstract Inter-satellite ranging by space gravimetry missions, such as from the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission and its successor mission GRACE Follow-On, has been established to observe mass variations in the Earth system from space globally. A complex pr...

A global mitochondrial genomic atlas illuminates freshwater microeukaryote diversity

Abstract Environmental genomics has transformed our view of the microbial world, yet progress remains largely prokaryote-centric. Among microbial eukaryotes, inconsistent marker choice and limited species-level resolution blunt diversity estimates and hinder cross-study synthesis...

Coherent Vibrational Wave Packet Motion in Er Cry4a Proteins Monitors the Redox State of the Flavin Chromophore

Abstract Cryptochromes are blue-light-sensitive flavoproteins that play central roles in biological function. In European robin (Erithacus rubecula) ErCry4a proteins, optical excitation of their flavin chromophore forms a long-lived radical pair through a sequence of electron-tra...

AICO: Feature significance tests for supervised learning

Machine learning is central to modern science, industry, and policy, yet its predictive power often comes at the cost of transparency: We rarely know which input features drive a model’s predictions. Without such understanding, researchers cannot draw reliable conclusions, practi...

FREE ACTIONS OF POLYNOMIAL GROWTH LIE GROUPS AND CLASSIFIABLE C*-ALGEBRAS

Abstract We show that any free action of a connected Lie group of polynomial growth on a finite dimensional locally compact space has finite tube dimension. This is shown to imply that the associated crossed product C*-algebra has finite nuclear dimension. As an application we sh...

Parametric Study of the Torus Instability Threshold

Abstract The torus instability of an arched current channel has been suggested to initiate and drive major solar and stellar eruptions. Its threshold, given by the critical decay index of the equilibrium external poloidal field (the so-called strapping field) at the position of t...

Free g-dimonoids are determined by their endomorphism semigroups

Abstract The problem of determinability for free algebras in a given variety was formulated by B.I. Plotkin in his lectures on universal algebraic geometry. It was solved for free groups by E. Formanek, and for free semigroups and free monoids by G. Mashevitsky and B.M. Schein. W...