12 New Research Aircraft 20 August 2012 | The research aircraft HALO is officially put into operation during an event in Oberpfaffenhofen. Prof. Andreas Wahner, head of the Scientific Advisory Committee for HALO, is in attendance. The first of six flights in the TACTS mission starts after the event. Three measuring instruments from Jülich are part of the mission recording the concentration of important greenhouse gases and their exchange in the atmosphere (see ‘Above the Clouds – No Limits in Climate Research’, p. 63). Bolstered Energy Research 29 August 2012 | Forschungszentrum Jülich coordinates the Helmholtz Energy Materials Characterization Platform (HEMCP), for which it receives project funding to the tune of € 6.5 million from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The six research institutions involved in HEMCP will study innovative materials for efficient energy conversion technologies and new options for energy storage – drawing primarily on methods that will provide information on structural, electronic, and chemical properties under operating conditions. Start of Long-Term Test 6 September 2012 | Jülich researchers put into operation a new 20 kW demonstration system for combined heat and power units with solid oxide fuel cells. These systems can produce electricity and heat for residential and industrial buildings with considerably higher overall efficiency than large power stations. They will initially be operated con- tinuously at a constant output for several thousand hours, followed by dynamic tests with load changes. Semiconductors Turned Magnets 14 October 2012 | In Nature Materials, an international team including physicists from Forschungszentrum Jülich publish an article that answers the question of how mag- netism emerges in gallium manganese arsenide at low tem- peratures. They examined the semiconductor with an innova- tive method at the world’s most powerful synchrotron facility in Japan. This method could also help to identify materials that are semiconducting and magnetic at room temperature and therefore interesting for future information technology.