In a preparatory seminar in the week before the competition, the participants were able to hone their theoretical and practical skills in the chemistry laboratory at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and at the Kerschensteiner Kolleg at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

In Zurich, things got serious: two five-hour exams were held at ETH Zurich: A theory exam and a practical exam had to be solved. In these, the participants had to complete challenging tasks from the fields of inorganic, physical and organic chemistry. In the laboratory, they were faced with tasks such as determining the iron content of an unknown ore sample and successfully carrying out two organic syntheses.

The German team finished in 17th place overall, to which Niklas Küstner contributed with his bronze medal.

The calculation of all possible light rays in real time, as they occur in video games or virtual reality, for example, requires enormous computing and storage capacities. It is therefore necessary to find faster and more efficient algorithms for ray tracing.

Jonathan Hähne developed such an algorithm in his Jugend-Forscht project "Real-time ray tracing on adaptively sampled distance fields" . Compared to conventional software, the prototype he developed for real-time ray tracing software is better at correctly mapping curves, among other things.

In 2020, the national Jugend forscht competition unfortunately had to be canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, Jonathan Hähne, plus-MINT student from Louisenlund, was only able to enter his project in the national Jugend forscht competition in 2021. As he was already a student at the Technical University of Munich at the time, he competed for the state of Bavaria.

This is what happened to Marit Kock and Mariella Benkenstein, who not only won the special Energy Transition 2021 prize with their research project "Environmentally friendly storage using redox flow technology", but were also motivated to put their idea into practice and set up their own company.

Mariella Benkenstein and Marit Kock came across the so-called redox flow battery while searching for a low-cost, high-capacity electricity storage system. It consists of two tanks with liquid electrolytes that are separated by a semi-permeable membrane. Today, vanadium solutions are usually used for redox flow batteries. The young researchers were looking for an environmentally friendly and inexpensive alternative and built a battery based on dissolved carbon dioxide in water. This process proved to be usable in principle. In practice, however, it was difficult to implement because the electrolyte has to be under constant pressure. Only then does the carbon dioxide remain dissolved. Since then, the two have continued their research and are working on a commercial implementation of their idea.

Marie-Louise Rulf examined the spectra of four very distant objects in space that were recorded with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). She asked herself whether these objects were galaxies or supermassive dark stars. Dark stars are not ordinary stars, but objects that feed their light from the radiation of dark matter. The objects sighted were probably already shining 400 million years after the Big Bang. To clarify her research question, the young researcher modeled her own galaxy spectra and compared them with the spectra of dark stars and with the JWST spectral images of the objects. As a result, her hypothesis about the dark stars could not be confirmed beyond doubt on the basis of the current data.