insightLMU, issue 2, 2011

Waiting for the Big One. Many of the world’s megacities are located on the boundaries between two tectonic plates. Using computer simulations, seismologist Heiner Igel and his team are trying to estimate the shaking of future earthquakes in these urbanized areas.

A blueprint for a civil society. Martin Zimmermann’s work brings the Greek polis of Antiquity to life, and illuminates the enormous impact that cities had on the civilization of the Ancient World.

"Behind every window lurks a story." Modern urban films deal not with cities but the people who live in them. Isolation, lack of communication and the world of work are their major concerns, says film scholar Fabienne Liptay.

Anthropologist Eveline Dürr studies the culture of the slums, life in the shadow of waste dumps – and how terms referring to dirt take on xenophobic connotations.

Metropolitan Tokyo is the largest built-up area in the world. How does such an urban machine work? How does it deal with its own inevitable decay? Japanologist Evelyn Schulz has been studying how residents use its urban spaces and cope with the attendant risks.

What's inside:

* The Mega-Megacity
* Waste, want and other woes
* Babylonian complications
* Pergamon the prototypical
* On the brink

The logic of exploitation, risk-taking, and optimism in the face of disaster: Christof Mauch and his colleagues at the Rachel Carson Center study how the environment continues to impact culture and society.

Life most probably evolved from a "primordial soup". Biophysicist Dieter Braun wants to reconstruct in the laboratory the conditions that made biological evolution possible.

The job goes to the best candidate? Undoubtedly, qualifications should determine the choice. Should. Often, however, irrelevant criteria also play a role, according to social psychologist Maria Agthe. And sometimes in quite unexpected ways.

What's inside:

* The Power of Nature
* Followers of Humboldt
* Global postgrads converge on ProArt
* A dal dal bus ride through Africa