The acronym behind the project’s name refers to foreign information manipulation and interference, a term that has increasingly replaced the narrower notion of disinformation in European security discourse. FIMI encompasses coordinated efforts by external actors to distort the information environment, whether through fabricated narratives, manipulated media, coordinated inauthentic behavior, or targeted influence operations. Unlike simple falsehoods, these campaigns are often strategic, adaptive, and designed to exploit societal fault lines. Countering them requires more than fact-checking; it demands technical systems capable of detecting coordinated activity at scale, assessing the provenance and integrity of content, and supporting human analysts who must make rapid judgments under pressure. It is precisely this complex ecosystem of tools and practices that FIMI-RESIST intends to put to the test.

The timing of the initiative reflects a disinformation landscape that is changing faster than the defenses built to contain it. Generative artificial intelligence has dramatically lowered the barriers to producing synthetic text, images, audio, and video, allowing manipulated media to be created cheaply and scaled rapidly across platforms and languages. At the same time, the AI systems that people increasingly rely on to find and assess information, including search assistants and conversational agents, have themselves become targets for manipulation. An adversary who can poison the data or outputs of such systems can reach audiences indirectly, bypassing the traditional defenses of newsrooms and fact-checking organizations. These shifting threat vectors form the backdrop against which the project’s evaluation framework will be constructed.

What distinguishes FIMI-RESIST from earlier efforts is its deliberate refusal to build yet another stand-alone tool. The European Union has already funded a broad range of research projects and software solutions aimed at detecting and mitigating disinformation, but these have typically been developed in isolation, each with its own assumptions, datasets, and evaluation metrics. The result is a fragmented landscape in which it is nearly impossible to compare performance or determine which approaches are suited to which problems. The project addresses this gap by establishing a shared evaluation and harmonization framework: a common set of criteria and benchmarks against which twenty existing European tools will be assessed. The objective is to generate robust, comparable evidence about which methods perform best for specific users, operational settings, and threat scenarios.

The scientific foundation for this assessment draws on the coordinating group’s particular expertise. The XplaiNLP Research Group at Mainz combines natural language processing with explainable artificial intelligence and robust information processing, fields that are central to modern content analysis. Natural language processing provides the computational machinery for analyzing text at scale, identifying narrative patterns, and tracing how claims spread across networks. Explainable AI addresses a persistent weakness of automated systems: the tendency of machine learning models to function as opaque black boxes whose judgments cannot be easily scrutinized. In a domain where decisions can affect freedom of expression and media pluralism, the ability to explain why a system flagged a piece of content is not a luxury but a requirement. Robust information processing, meanwhile, concerns the resilience of these systems against adversarial attempts to deceive or evade them.

A central focus of the project is practical application rather than laboratory performance. Working with journalists, fact checkers, security stakeholders, and civil society organizations, the consortium will assess how effectively existing tools can be integrated into day-to-day workflows. This user-centered approach recognizes a common failure mode in security technology: a system that performs well on benchmark datasets may prove unusable in a busy newsroom or a crisis-response setting, where time constraints, language diversity, and the sheer volume of content create conditions that benchmarks rarely capture. By testing tools in realistic operational contexts, the project aims to identify not only which systems detect manipulation effectively, but also where gaps remain as AI-driven threats continue to evolve.

The consortium assembled for this task spans a deliberately wide range of competencies and geographies. Alongside the coordinating group at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, it includes the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies in Slovakia led by Dr. Jakub Šimko, the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas in Greece represented by Dr. Symeon Papadopoulos, and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands under Professor Richard Rogers. The technology and industry side is represented by Logically/INSIKT, operating in the United Kingdom and Spain, Factiverse from Norway, Exorde Labs from France, Cyfluence Research Center from Germany, and Gretchen AI, also from Germany, which participates as an associated partner. Media and civil society perspectives come from Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster, and VoxUkraine, an organization with direct experience of operating in an information environment shaped by war and foreign interference.

The inclusion of Ukrainian and media partners underscores the stakes involved. Ukraine has become, in effect, a live testing ground for foreign information manipulation at scale, and organizations like VoxUkraine bring firsthand knowledge of what interference campaigns look like in practice. Deutsche Welle contributes decades of experience in international journalism and in monitoring disinformation across languages and regions. Civil society and security stakeholders round out the picture, ensuring that the evaluation framework reflects the needs of those who defend democratic discourse rather than purely academic metrics. The project has also drawn political support, with Alexandra Geese, a Member of the European Parliament, backing the initiative, and contributions at its kickoff from Saman Nazari of Alliance4Europe and Sandra Fiene of the European Commission, alongside policy and project officers Ilona von Bethlenfalvy and Alberto Domini.

Beyond its technical evaluations, FIMI-RESIST is designed to leave a durable institutional footprint. The project will establish a help desk, a European hub, and a program of training offerings to ensure that validated methods and results remain accessible to practitioners after the funding period ends. This sustainability component reflects a lesson learned from previous research projects, whose tools and findings often faded from view once grant support concluded. By building infrastructure for continued knowledge transfer, the consortium hopes to convert its thirty months of work into a lasting European capability rather than a one-time report.

The findings are also intended to feed directly into the European regulatory debate. The Digital Services Act, which imposes obligations on large online platforms to address systemic risks including disinformation; the AI Act, which establishes rules for artificial intelligence systems including transparency requirements; and the European Media Freedom Act, which protects pluralism and independence in the media landscape, together form a regulatory architecture whose effectiveness depends on an accurate understanding of which countermeasures succeed in practice. By supplying rigorous comparative evidence, FIMI-RESIST aims to inform how these frameworks are implemented and refined. In an era when the integrity of the information environment has become a matter of democratic security, knowing which defenses actually hold is perhaps the most valuable intelligence Europe can produce.

Subject of Research: Evaluation of European countermeasures against foreign information manipulation and interference

Article Title: Disinformation and influence operations: Which countermeasures actually work?

Article References: Disinformation and influence operations: Which countermeasures actually work?. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: disinformation, FIMI, FIMI-RESIST, Horizon Europe, natural language processing, explainable AI, generative AI, fact-checking, Digital Services Act, media freedom, influence operations, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

The German Research Foundation, known as the DFG, is supporting the venture with approximately 1.8 million euros over six years. The Emmy Noether Program is one of the most prestigious funding instruments available to early-career researchers in Germany, designed to allow outstanding scientists to build their own independent research groups and qualify for a university teaching career. For Farnworth, the award provides not only financial security but also the freedom to assemble a dedicated team and pursue a long-term scientific vision without the constraints that often accompany more narrowly defined project grants.

Farnworth arrived in Mainz on August 1, 2026, and his group is based at the Institute of Developmental Biology and Neurobiology, where he works in close proximity to the Neural Circuits Lab. The group is additionally affiliated with the Focus Program Translational Neurosciences and the Institute of Pathophysiology, giving it access to a broad network of neuroscientific expertise. The team he is assembling will consist of one postdoctoral researcher, two doctoral researchers, and a part-time technical assistant, a configuration typical of an Emmy Noether group and large enough to combine genetic experimentation, single-cell molecular analysis, and advanced imaging within a single laboratory.

The central question driving the new group is deceptively simple: why are some neural circuits far more evolutionarily flexible than others? Within a single brain, neighboring structures can follow dramatically different evolutionary trajectories. One region may be extensively remodeled across lineages, with new cell types appearing, cell numbers expanding or contracting, and connectivity patterns shifting, while another region remains essentially unchanged over vast stretches of evolutionary time. Understanding what makes a neural circuit conservative or permissive to change would illuminate a fundamental principle of how brains evolve, with implications reaching far beyond insects.

To tackle this question, Farnworth focuses on two well-characterized regions of the insect brain. The first is the mushroom bodies, paired structures best known for their roles in learning and memory, particularly in the context of olfactory association. The second is the central complex, a midline-spanning network of neuropils that serves as the insect’s navigation and orientation hub, integrating sensory information to control walking, turning, and spatial orientation. Over the course of insect evolution, these two regions have diverged sharply in their histories. Mushroom bodies have been extensively remodeled in different groups of insects, reflecting adaptations to widely varying lifestyles, whereas the central complex has remained comparatively conserved, preserving a recognizable ground plan across lineages.

Farnworth’s hypothesis is that the answer to this contrast may lie in development. During the development of an insect, many thousands of nerve cells and millions of connections arise from a comparatively small number of neural stem cells. Specific developmental programs determine which cell types are formed, how many cells of each type are produced, and which connections they establish with one another. We want to understand how these programs change over the course of evolution and how these changes allow neural circuits to adapt to different lifestyles and environmental conditions, Farnworth explains. If the developmental programs governing the mushroom bodies are inherently more modular or more tolerant of variation than those governing the central complex, that could explain why one structure has been free to diversify while the other has been locked in place.

Testing this idea requires a comparative framework, and the group has selected four insect species that together span a wide swath of the insect evolutionary tree: the common fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum, the clonal raider ant Ooceraea biroi, and the Indianmeal moth Plodia interpunctella. Each species represents a distinct lineage, and each brings a different lifestyle to the comparison. The fruit fly is the canonical genetic model with a compact brain; the beetle represents holometabolous insects with a different larval development; the clonal raider ant offers a social species in which brain regions involved in learning and communication have adapted to colony life; and the moth adds a lineage with sophisticated olfactory-driven behaviors. By comparing homologous brain structures across these species, the researchers can distinguish features that have been conserved from those that have changed.

Methodologically, the project combines single-cell analyses, genetic tools, and high-resolution imaging. Single-cell approaches allow the team to catalog which cell types are present in each brain region of each species, effectively producing molecular census lists that can be compared across lineages. Genetic methods make it possible to trace the lineages of neural stem cells and to manipulate developmental programs experimentally, revealing how changes in stem cell behavior translate into changes in adult circuitry. High-resolution imaging, meanwhile, documents the anatomy of the resulting circuits, from the positions of cell bodies to the fine structure of the connections they form. Together, these techniques allow the researchers to determine which components of neural circuits have been conserved over evolutionary time and where changes have occurred in cell types, cell numbers, or connectivity.

The work exemplifies an approach often described as neuro-evo-devo, the intersection of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and developmental biology. Rather than studying a single model organism in isolation, this framework treats development as the mechanism through which evolutionary change is enacted. Mutations do not reshape adult brains directly; they alter developmental programs, and it is these altered programs that produce different cell types, different cell numbers, and different wiring patterns in the next generation. By reading the developmental programs of multiple species and comparing their outputs, researchers can reconstruct how evolutionary transformations in the brain actually happened, and potentially predict which kinds of changes are easy for evolution to make and which are difficult.

For Farnworth, the move to Mainz represents the culmination of a research trajectory that has taken him through several of Europe’s leading institutions. He has been studying the evolution and development of the insect brain since his doctoral research. At the University of Göttingen, he investigated the development of the central complex in fruit flies and red flour beetles, gaining firsthand experience with the comparative approach that now anchors his independent program. Most recently, at the University of Bristol, he studied the evolution of neural circuits in butterflies, extending his comparisons to a lineage in which visual and cognitive adaptations are especially pronounced. JGU provides an excellent research environment for my neuro-evo-devo approach, which seeks to understand brain evolution through its development, Farnworth says. This combination of strong developmental and evolutionary biology is rare. JGU also offers excellent core facilities, particularly in imaging. With the Emmy Noether funding now secured and the group taking shape in Mainz, the coming six years promise to shed new light on one of neuroscience’s deepest questions: how the tiny brains of insects are built, and why evolution has rewritten some parts of their blueprint while leaving others untouched for hundreds of millions of years.

Subject of Research: Evolution and development of neural circuits in the insect brain

Article Title: Evolutionary neurobiologist Max Farnworth joins JGU from Bristol with Emmy Noether Funding

Article References: Evolutionary neurobiologist Max Farnworth joins JGU from Bristol with Emmy Noether Funding. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: neuroscience, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, insect brain, Emmy Noether Program, DFG, mushroom bodies, central complex, neural circuits, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, single-cell analysis, neuro-evo-devo

Carbonate deposits form naturally in Roman aqueducts as calcium carbonate precipitates from the flowing water, building up layer upon layer on the walls and floor of the channel. Because the chemistry and temperature of the water change over time, the deposits develop distinct banding patterns that can be read much like tree rings. The Mainz team extracted samples of this carbonate rock from ten locations along the entire course of the Nîmes aqueduct and subjected the layers to isotope analysis, allowing them to reconstruct variations in water source, flow volume and maintenance quality across the monument’s working life. The result is an unusually fine-grained history of water management in the western Roman Empire, written in stone by the water itself.

The deepest layers in the samples tell a story that begins with a crisis. At the base of the cores lies a carbonate layer about two centimeters thick, capped by a thin layer of clay. Both were deposited during the aqueduct’s first eleven years of operation, and their composition points to a drought affecting the western Mediterranean, an episode also recorded by the Roman historian Tacitus. The dry spell apparently reduced the flow of the original spring source enough to threaten the city’s supply. The response was decisive: after eleven years, the carbonate record shows that a different type of water entered the channel, indicating that an additional water source had been tapped to guarantee sufficient flow. This intervention correlates with structural modifications still visible today on the Pont du Gard, where the sidewalls were raised, reinforced and partially buttressed to accommodate a higher water level.

For the next century, the aqueduct functioned reliably, but around 150 AD the carbonate layers became significantly thinner, signaling a marked drop in the water level in the channel. According to Sürmelihindi, about half of the water supplying the city was diverted to irrigate fields, and the sheer volume involved suggests that this was an authorized withdrawal rather than clandestine siphoning. Such an arrangement, she notes, would likely have been possible only for highly influential individuals with the power to negotiate a formal reduction of the urban supply. The fact that the city apparently tolerated the loss without complaint also implies that Nîmes did not have a critical need for the full volume of water at that time. For roughly a hundred years afterward, the aqueduct continued to operate flawlessly, albeit delivering a reduced flow to the urban fountains, baths and distribution network.

The tone of the archive changes dramatically in the mid-third century. From that point onward, the color and composition of the carbonate shift: the deposits become more porous and begin to incorporate clay and sand, classic signs that the channel was no longer being properly maintained. This deterioration coincides with a period of great economic and political turmoil across many parts of the Roman Empire, an era of usurpations, invasions and fiscal collapse that historians call the third-century crisis. The carbonate record, in other words, mirrors the condition of the city itself, documenting a gradual loss of the administrative capacity and civic wealth that had kept the aqueduct in good repair for two hundred years.

Then comes the abrupt end. Around 270 AD, carbonate deposition stops entirely in the samples taken near the city: the urban water supply was completely cut off. Crucially, however, the rural sections of the aqueduct show continuous carbonate deposition through this same period, revealing that owners of vast estates upstream were diverting the water for their own use. The channel had not failed physically; it had simply stopped serving the city. The researchers interpret this pattern as evidence that something happened to the population of Nîmes, leaving too few urban consumers to justify maintaining the supply or defending it against private appropriation.

The prime suspect is the Plague of Cyprian, the pandemic named after the bishop of Carthage who described its ravages, which swept the Roman Empire roughly between 250 and 270 AD. The disease is primarily documented in North Africa and in Rome, where it claimed many lives, but very little is known about its impact in Western Europe. Study co-author Professor Andrew Wilson of the University of Oxford has suggested that the plague may also have posed a serious problem in southern France, and the carbonate evidence from Nîmes lends weight to that hypothesis. If the epidemic killed or displaced much of the city’s population, survivors may have abandoned the urban center for the countryside, a pattern of urban contraction that archaeologists have observed at many sites in southern France during this period. Some of those cities shrank following barbarian invasions, but others declined for reasons that remain unexplained.

Supporting evidence comes from an unexpected quarter. The city of Cahors, located about 300 kilometers west of Nîmes, was also in crisis at the same time, a fact that Passchier and Sürmelihindi established through their earlier study of local carbonate deposits in that city’s aqueduct. Two independent aqueduct archives, hundreds of kilometers apart, recording urban breakdown at the same moment, strengthen the case that a region-wide catastrophe such as the Plague of Cyprian, rather than purely local misfortune, lay behind the abandonment of urban water systems in Gaul.

Perhaps the most striking finding is what happened after the city lost its water. In the rural stretches of the aqueduct, the channel continued to be exploited for another 140 years, well into the fifth century. People drilled holes into the sidewalls to extract water for agriculture, a practice betrayed today by massive limescale deposits on the exterior of the conduit, formed by water leaking from these informal taps. As Passchier points out, the city could easily have repaired the aqueduct during those 140 years had there been the will and the population to do so. Apparently, however, the decline in population density and urban wealth was permanent. The famous bridge and its channel stood ready to serve, but the city that had built them never came back to claim the water, leaving the carbonate crust of the Pont du Gard aqueduct as a silent witness to one of antiquity’s most consequential pandemics.

Subject of Research: Reconstruction of the operational history of the Roman aqueduct of Nîmes from carbonate deposits and its link to the Plague of Cyprian

Article Title: Was Nîmes depopulated by the Plague of Cyprian?

Article References: Was Nîmes depopulated by the Plague of Cyprian?. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Nîmes aqueduct, Pont du Gard, Plague of Cyprian, Roman water management, carbonate deposits, isotope analysis, Geoarchaeology, third-century crisis, ancient urban decline, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Roman Empire, aqueduct maintenance

Geothermal energy represents a vital pathway in the transition from fossil fuels to carbon-neutral energy sources. However, one of the significant challenges affecting its widespread acceptance and deployment is the potential for induced seismicity—low-magnitude earthquakes triggered by human interventions such as fluid injection and extraction. The TRIGGER project addresses this challenge by investigating how the injection of cold water into hot rock formations causes thermal stress that alters rock properties like permeability and mechanical strength. These changes subsequently influence the behavior of the geothermal reservoir, including fluid flow and fracture propagation.

The research initiative involves a multidisciplinary consortium of expert groups at Mainz University, including the Volcano Seismology group led by Professor Miriam Christina Reiss, who coordinates the project. Collaborators include teams specializing in Tectonics and Structural Geology, Geodynamics, and Metamorphic Processes. The project also partners with external institutions such as the Institute for Geothermal Resource Management (igem) in Bingen, Ruhr University Bochum, and Microstructure and Pores GmbH (MaP) in Aachen. This collaboration ensures a comprehensive approach, integrating seismology, rock mechanics, geochemistry, and computational modeling to unravel the complexities of geothermal reservoir dynamics.

At the core of TRIGGER’s research lies a fundamental question: how do substantial temperature gradients between injected cold water and native hot rock lead to fracture formation and evolution? This is crucial as fractures control permeability, the parameter dictating how efficiently thermal water can be extracted and reinjected. Understanding fracture dynamics under thermally induced stress changes also sheds light on the mechanisms that might trigger microseismic events, often undetected but potentially cumulative and impactful over time.

Geothermal reservoirs commonly lie deep underground, often beyond 1,500 meters, where temperatures escalates approximately 3 degrees Celsius per 100 meters of depth, or even 5 degrees Celsius per 100 meters in highly active regions such as the Upper Rhine Graben rift system. This pronounced geothermal gradient presents valuable energy that can be harnessed cost-effectively. However, efficient exploitation demands precise knowledge of how thermal contractions and expansions influence rock integrity during cyclic fluid injections, often resulting in temperature fluctuations exceeding 100 degrees Celsius within the reservoir.

Experimentally, the TRIGGER team is conducting elaborate laboratory tests on core samples retrieved from depths of up to 3 kilometers. These samples undergo controlled thermal, mechanical, structural, and chemical analyses to document changes induced by simulated geothermal conditions. Specialized deformation experiments involve injecting cold fluids into preheated rock samples, monitoring in real-time the onset and progression of fracturing using an array of sensitive sensors. Such meticulous characterization at the microstructural level allows researchers to quantify alterations in permeability and mechanical strength under thermal stress.

Complementing these laboratory efforts, complex computer models replicate the physical experiments and extend them to scenarios beyond laboratory constraints. These simulations allow exploration of wider parameter spaces, including variations in rock composition, temperature gradients, and fluid injection rates. This dual approach—integrating empirical data with numerical modeling—enables an unprecedented understanding of geothermal reservoir behavior over longer timescales and greater spatial dimensions, which is otherwise impossible to achieve solely through field studies.

A crucial outcome anticipated from TRIGGER is the identification of long-term impacts of thermal cycling on fracture networks and fluid- rock interactions. This knowledge could inform engineering strategies to optimize injection temperatures and schedules, maximizing heat extraction while mitigating induced seismicity risk. Such insights could pave the way for safer, more efficient geothermal operations, fostering greater public acceptance and facilitating smoother integration into national energy portfolios.

Public perception plays a decisive role in the adoption of geothermal technology. Historically, concerns about earthquakes linked to geothermal activity have hampered development efforts. TRIGGER seeks not only to advance scientific understanding but also to provide empirical evidence that supports responsible geothermal exploitation, thereby strengthening public trust. Germany’s geothermal infrastructure, exemplified by the Insheim power plant supplying renewable electricity for a decade, stands to greatly benefit from this enhanced knowledge base.

The regional specificity of geothermal systems adds complexity to this research. For instance, the Upper Rhine Graben is known for its distinctive tectonic setting and elevated geothermal gradient, making it an ideal natural laboratory. The TRIGGER project’s location at Mainz University situates it strategically close to this geologically active region, enriching the relevance and applicability of its findings. Adjacent initiatives in Rhineland-Palatinate further underscore the growing commitment to geothermal energy, with projects underway in Speyer and Wörth am Rhein.

Professor Miriam Christina Reiss, a rising figure in volcano seismology and geothermal geophysics, brings expertise that bridges fundamental earthquake science and applied geothermal research. Her academic journey—from an interdisciplinary background in English and Physics to doctorate-level seismological research—coupled with international experience at Yale University, fuels this innovative project’s success. Reiss’s vision encompasses not only unravelling the subsurface processes that govern geothermal systems but also translating these insights into actionable strategies for sustainable energy production.

As the TRIGGER project progresses, it is expected to deliver a holistic framework describing thermal fracture generation and evolution within geothermal reservoirs. Such frameworks will integrate microstructural observations, deformation mechanics, fluid dynamics, and seismicity patterns to inform geothermal engineering practices. Ultimately, this could revolutionize how geothermal reservoirs are managed, enhancing energy yields while minimizing environmental impacts.

The stakes extend beyond Germany; the methodologies and findings developed in TRIGGER could serve as a template for geothermal projects worldwide, particularly in regions with similar geological settings. By pushing the envelope in understanding thermally induced rock behavior, TRIGGER positions itself at the forefront of efforts to unlock the full potential of geothermal energy, aligning with global goals for clean, resilient, and sustainable energy systems.

In a world grappling with climate change and energy insecurity, engineering breakthroughs such as those anticipated from the TRIGGER project are indispensable. They fuse scientific rigor with practical urgency, offering hope for a future where earth’s internal heat can be accessed effectively and safely. This endeavor encapsulates the spirit of modern geosciences, blending advanced experimental techniques, computational prowess, and collaborative innovation to steward terrestrial resources responsibly.

Subject of Research: Thermal fracture formation and permeability changes in deep geothermal reservoirs induced by temperature fluctuations.

Article Title: Advancing Geothermal Energy: Unraveling Thermally Induced Fracture Dynamics in Deep Reservoirs

News Publication Date: April 2025

Image Credits: Valentin Koßmann / TRIGGER

Keywords: Geothermal energy, induced seismicity, thermal stress, fracture formation, permeability, deep reservoirs, Upper Rhine Graben, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, geothermal modeling, rock mechanics, microstructural analysis, geothermal sustainability