Engineering & Computer Science
Dr Fei Hu – Virtual Reality and Robot-Based Rehabilitation for Post-Stroke Recovery
Stroke survivors often lose some of their motor functions, and recovery can be a long and expensive process. By integrating virtual reality, robot, and motion capture technology, a low-cost solution can be developed that is more effective and accessible than current...
Dr Romeel Davé – Putting the Universe in a Computer
Galaxy formation theorist Dr Romeel Davé and his team at the University of the Western Cape use high-performance supercomputer simulations to answer basic questions about the evolution of galaxies and our visible Universe. Humans have always been mesmerised by the...
Professor Wenxuan Zhong – New Statistics for Smelling Out Disease
Cutting-edge scientific techniques are generating a wealth of details about biological systems. This information could enable the rapid detection of disease and toxic substances, and provide insights into the mechanisms behind complex diseases. However, teasing out...
Professor Julio Collado-Vides – Putting Life in Context
How do you determine important scientific links when you are flooded by new publications each day? Professor Julio Collado-Vides and his team at the National University of Mexico appear to have the answer. Whether it be letters or ideograms, standardised street signs...
Professor Richard Miles – Hypersonic Laser Tagging: A New Way of Understanding Fluid Mechanics
Fluid mechanics is the study of the flows within liquids, gases and plasmas, and the forces that act upon them. Applications involving fluid mechanics are vast, ranging from chemical engineering to astrophysics, and so an accurate understanding is essential for future...
Professor Amnon Besser – Mapping P-adic Spaces with Height Pairings
Professor Amnon Besser of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and his colleagues are exploring p-adic numbers – one of the most difficult areas of number theory – in order to solve long-standing open problems bridging several fields of mathematics. Solving Unsolvable...
The Highest Energy Li-ion Battery: Unlocking the Potential of the Silicon Anode and Nickel-rich NMC Cathode
Over the past decade, lithium-ion batteries have become essential to the portable electronics industry, and more recently have been championed as the transportation power source of the future. However, if electric vehicles are to gain widespread commercial success,...
Outcomes of the 2017 Global Research Council meeting co-hosted by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
Comprising the heads of research funding agencies worldwide, the Global Research Council (GRC) is an organisation dedicated to fostering multilateral research and collaboration across continents to benefit both developing and developed nations. The GRC holds annual...
Dr Michael D. Bryant | Dr Benito R. Fernández – Mixing Analogue And Digital Computers: The Future is Hybrid
Differential equations are used to model and describe systems across the whole of science and technology. Current computer designs limit our ability to solve very large systems of differential equations. However, a combination of analogue and digital computing might...
The STEM Education Coalition
The STEM Education Coalition was founded more than 15 years ago with a mission to raise awareness in the U.S. Congress, the administration, and on the state level about the critical role that STEM education plays in enabling the U.S. to remain the economic and...
Dr William Ray – Using Computer Graphics to Visualise the Invisible
Biophysicist Dr William Ray and colleagues at The Ohio State University and the Battelle Center for Mathematical Medicine at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, develop novel approaches to graphically visualise what happens to...
Smartnanotox
Continuum Dynamics Inc. – Catching the Wind: Understanding the Dynamics of Renewable Energy
As renewable energy sources such as wind, wave, and solar become more ubiquitous, the importance of understanding the detailed mechanisms of their operation is essential. In particular, with a dynamic and turbulent energy source like wind, an accurate way of modelling...
Professor Ning Pan – The Scientific and Mathematical World of Textiles
Textiles, including rope and yarn, are often thought of as functional and convenient materials for us to dress in, suspend swings from (in our more youthful days), or to safely secure items during transport. However, behind such critical applications is a complex...
Professor Xiaodong Zhang – Algorithmic Acceleration of Computing Performance
The endless quest for making faster, more powerful computers is not just about investing in advanced hardware. By developing more efficient algorithms, Professor Xiaodong Zhang’s work has successfully revolutionised the design of fundamental computer components. By...
Dr Jekan Thangavelautham – Designing Devices for Exploring Space and Investigating Climate Change
Dr Jekan Thanga and his team at Arizona State University are developing new and sustainable solutions for low-cost space and extreme environment exploration. His team operates robots and sensor-networks for quantifying the effects of global warming on the Greenland...
Dr Bart Wakker – Using the Hubble Telescope to Investigate the Universe’s Hidden Baryons
Astronomer Dr Bart Wakker and his colleagues use the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to gather data on hidden baryonic matter and the composition of the Universe. Getting Closer to Far, Far Away From the era of Galileo and Copernicus up until now, our knowledge of...
Dr Andrew G. Conly – Mining Carbon to Decrease the Carbon Footprint
Mineralogist and geologist Dr Andrew Conly and his colleagues at the Lakehead University Mineralogy and Experimental Laboratory at Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, help to keep high tech companies environmentally friendly and ‘green’ by identifying minable sources of, of...
Spirometry 360: Asthma Management Gets an Upgrade
Dr Jim Stout and his multidisciplinary team at the University of Washington are on a mission to improve asthma care. Through novel training schemes, quality improvement methods and research into health disparities, these researchers are determined to reduce...
Sigma Xi: The Scientific Research Honor Society
Founded in 1886 at Cornell University, Sigma Xi is an international community of scientists and engineers dedicated to promoting excellence in research, enhancing public engagement with science, and fostering the next generation of researchers. Here, we have had the...
Soapbox Science
Soapbox Science was founded as a public outreach platform for promoting women scientists and their research. Now in its seventh year, Soapbox Science takes female scientists out of the lab and onto the streets, to talk to the passing, unsuspecting public about...
The European Southern Observatory
The European Southern Observatory (ESO), is an intergovernmental organisation that facilitates astronomy and astrophysics research. Since its creation in 1962, ESO has provided scientists with the world’s most powerful ground-based telescopes in its host state of...
Dr Scott Hsu and Dr F. Douglas Witherspoon – Plasma guns fire into the race for fusion
Dr. Scott Hsu is a fusion physics research scientist interested in obtaining cost efficient, clean energy for the world. His work, pursued with Dr. F. Douglas Witherspoon and others, focuses on plasma-implosion research for an alternate-fusion approach. Dissected view...
Dr Edward Kansa – Computational Method Cures The Curse Of Dimensionality
Dr Edward Kansa, winner of a George Green medal, has worked for decades on a fuller application of smooth radial basis functions with wide applicability in engineering, computer science, and physics – the powerful Kansa method. The Kansa method for engineers...
Thomas J. Royston, PhD – The Audible Human Project: Hearing What The Body Has To Say
Professor Tom Royston is applying his expertise in the fields of acoustics and engineering to diagnostic medicine by developing the Audible Human Project, which aims to use sound to detect disease and injury within the body, particularly in the complex structure of...
The Square Kilometre Array: The World’s Largest Radio Telescope
Comprising thousands of radio dishes and up to a million antennae, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the world’s largest radio telescope. Referred to as the next generation of radio telescope, this instrument will be tens of times more sensitive and hundreds of...
Kimberly Kowal Arcand – Somewhere, Outside The Rainbow
NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory orbits high above the earth, beaming back images of the high-energy universe impossible to obtain from the ground. Bringing this data to the world is Kimberly Arcand, Visualisation Lead for the project. Here we go into detail on some...
Dr Merritt N. Deeter – Measuring How The Earth Exhales
Atmospheric Scientist Dr Merritt Deeter at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado and his colleagues work with satellite data from NASA to measure levels of carbon monoxide and other pollutants released into the atmosphere around the...
Dr David Eaton – Hydraulic Fracture Monitoring And Induced Microseismicity In Western Canada
Dr David Eaton is a geoscientist interested in the impact of human industrial activities on geological phenomena. His research has focused on better understanding geomechanical deformations and resulting microseismic events that are stimulated by hydraulic fracturing...
Dr Karen Bemis, Dr Darrell Jackson, Dr Guangyu Xu – The Last Unexplored Places On Earth
It takes a multidisciplinary approach involving physics, chemistry, biology and geology to uncover the mysteries of the least explored and understood places on Earth. A blind sighted look into the ocean depths Earth is a water world. Although oceans cover 71% of its...
Professor René Laprise – Predicting Climate Change Impacts: Regional Climate Modelling Is A Critical Tool
Professor René Laprise at the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal, seeks to improve our climate modelling capabilities and our understanding of climate change through the use of Regional Climate Modelling (RCM). He is...
Breezometer – One, Two, Three, Breathe
Air pollution has been a growing world problem, amplified by the ever increasing number of people and their consumption patterns. Now, technological progress and big data have merged to enable environmental scientists and engineers at BreezoMeter to address the...