Physical Sciences & Mathematics
Count Down To The Future
At the NASA Ames Research Center in California, the next generation of space biologists are working to understand the effects of long duration space flight on model organisms, and are developing ways to protect the health of future astronauts. The human body has...
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...
Professor Peter Santschi – Cleaning Up a Catastrophe
Professor Peter Santschi and his team at Texas A&M University are dedicated to investigating the consequences of the release of radioactive substances into the environment. Incorrect storage of nuclear waste or power plant accidents can cause radioactive material...
Dr Kirk Peterson – In Silico Chemistry: Modelling the Reactions of Heavy Elements
Is it possible for computational modelling to become sufficiently accurate as to replace experiments? This is one of the many questions that Dr Kirk Peterson and his team at Washington State University are working towards answering. As a world-leader in developing...
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...
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
Dr Robert Mutel – Creating Radio Maps of the Universe
For thousands of years, humans have been fascinated by what lies beyond our own planet. One of the ways to study the most distant objects in our universe is using radio telescopes. By studying radiation emitted in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum,...
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 Jeffrey Forbes – Exploring How the Lower Atmosphere Influences Space Weather
Professor Jeffrey Forbes and his team at the University of Colorado use data from multiple satellites and global modelling to determine how terrestrial weather affects the near-Earth space environment. When we think of the weather, we think of the wind and rain and...
Professor Jim Kasting – Pinning Down the Habitable Zones of Different Stars
One of life’s greatest mysteries is whether or not we are alone in the Universe. One way to find planets that could support life is by working out whether they lie in the ‘habitable zone’ of their parent star – a distance at which liquid water might exist on the...
Five New Particles Discovered at CERN
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed. Featuring a 27-kilometre ring containing superconducting magnets, the LHC can accelerate protons to almost the speed of light, forcing proton beams travelling in...
Professor Darryn W. Waugh – The Polar Vortex: Meshing and Stripping the Gears of the Atmosphere
Earth’s atmosphere is composed of multiple interlocked rotating parcels of air. At the poles, rotating vortices form an important part of this system. Climate scientist Professor Darryn Waugh of Johns Hopkins University investigates how polar vortices interact with...
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...
Professor Vassilis Angelopoulos – From THEMIS to ELFIN: Exploring Near Earth Space
Dr Vassilis Angelopoulos and his colleagues at the UCLA Earth Planetary and Space Sciences Department in California study the interaction of solar radiation with the Earth’s magnetosphere using multiple NASA research satellites. Their aim is to protect our...
Dr Jian Du-Caines – Protecting the Earth by Predicting Space Weather
Atmospheric physicist Dr Jian Du-Caines at the University of Louisville and her colleagues explore the interactions between Earth’s atmosphere and near Earth space to better predict space weather that can adversely affect life on Earth. Everyone Talks About the...
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...
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...
Professor Yongkang Xue – Anthropogenic Contributions To The Sahel Mega-Droughts
Geography and climatology researcher Professor Yongkang Xue at the University of California, Los Angeles, has shown for the first time, in a series of studies using multi-model efforts, that the Sahel region 30-year long droughts are partly a result of human activity...
Dr Tony Lui – Investigating Plasma Storms And Substorms In Our Near-Earth Backyard
Space physicist Dr Tony Lui has spent four decades increasing our understanding of the mechanisms behind the magnetic disturbances and interactions of space plasma surrounding our home planet. Plasma, a ubiquitous state of matter In the calm and comfort of a...
Dark Is The New Black
Eighty-four percent of the matter in the universe is made of something we cannot see, cannot detect, can only guess at based on the gravitational shadows it leaves in the visible universe. Sounds crazy? Welcome to the world of dark matter, where teams of researchers...
Professor Urs Schaltegger – Using Radioisotopes In Volcanic Crystals To Measure The Age Of The Earth
Professor Urs Schaltegger, with his colleagues in the Isotope Geochemistry Group at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, analyse isotopes of Uranium and Lead found in crystals of the mineral zircon to determine the age of geologic deposits. They use this data to...
Dr Joyce Penner – The Ice Cloud And Climate Puzzle
Figuring out how the highest clouds in the sky behave means understanding how ice forms at high altitude. This is especially true when trying to quantify the impact of human activity on their formation and how it affects climate change. To improve our understanding,...
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...