Deep into the darkness

Circadian clocks—those internal timers that help us wake up, sleep, and eat at the right times—are everywhere in nature. But what if even bacteria, the simplest forms of life, also kept time?
In our lab, we study Bacillus subtilis, a common soil bacterium, and we’ve discovered that it follows a 24-hour rhythm—just like humans! These daily cycles continue even if we lock our bacteria in a bunker and show surprising similarities to biological clocks in plants and animals.
To dive deeper, we've developed special systems that let us grow bacteria continuously under tightly controlled conditions. Using advanced techniques like transcriptomics and metabolomics (think: reading all their genes and chemicals over time), we're beginning to understand how bacteria organize their lives around time.
Our work challenges the idea that circadian clocks are only for complex life and shows that even humble microbes might have a strong sense of “when.”

Dark matter is believed to make up most of the universe's mass, yet it has never been directly detected. From cosmic observations, we know that it interacts gravitationally. Interactions via other forces might be possible, but the true nature of dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in physics.

Scientists around the world are conducting a wide range of experiments to uncover its secrets, and CRESST is at the forefront of this field. In this talk, we will explore how and why CRESST uses crystals cooled to near absolute zero temperatures to capture the faintest signals from potential dark matter interactions. We will take a deep dive into the cutting edge of physics and discuss how this approach may help us solve one of the universe's greatest puzzles.