MORE ARTICLES YOU MAY LIKE
Distinguished Professor Michael Zhdanov | Mapping Magma and Drilling for Oil: New Methods for Geophysical Modelling
Geophysicists use a variety of different methods to peer beneath the Earth’s surface. Seismic activity, gravitational fields , and magnetic fields each offer their own windows into the world underground, but, in isolation, are incapable of giving us the full picture. Combining data from distinct geophysical surveys, however, is its own challenge. For a number of years, a team of researchers led by Professor Michael Zhdanov has worked to develop a mathematical framework capable of generating detailed geophysical models from multiphysics data.
Through application to modelling magma chambers underneath Yellowstone and searching for oil deposits in the Barents Sea, they demonstrate that their approach can produce robust and accurate predictions
Dr Yurii V. Geletii – Professor Craig L. Hill | Redox Buffers: Self-Regulating Catalysts for Chemical Oxidation
Chemical reactions often demand precise control over their operating conditions to proceed efficiently. While chemists routinely use pH buffers to stabilise acidity levels, far less attention has been directed towards stabilising the electrochemical potential of solutions during oxidation–reduction reactions.
At Emory University, Dr Xinlin Lu, Dr Yurii Geletii, and Prof Craig Hill have pioneered a catalytic system that not only drives chemical reactions, but also acts as its own redox buffer. By automatically maintaining conditions optimal for electron transfers while converting malodorous thiols into odourless compounds, this innovation points to a new generation of catalysts that adjust themselves, delivering both efficiency and environmental benefits.
Dr Marie-Lou Gaucher | Unravelling Necrotic Enteritis in Poultry: The Quest for an Effective Vaccine
Avian necrotic enteritis (NE) is one of the most significant intestinal diseases affecting poultry worldwide, particularly broiler chickens. It causes major economic losses due to reduced growth rates, poor feed efficiency, and high mortality. The disease is caused by the bacterium Clostridium perfringens, specifically pathogenic type G strains. Dr Marie-Lou Gaucher from the Université de Montréal and her collaborators have been relentlessly studying ways to develop an effective vaccine against C. perfringens. Their promising findings may lead to innovative vaccination strategies and new methods to manage NE in poultry flocks.
Dr Kenric Nelson | Modelling the Extreme: A New Technique for Training Risk-Aware Artificial Intelligence
Category 5 hurricanes, financial crashes, and global pandemics are just a few examples of rare events whose high risks necessitate understanding and mitigation. Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) could go a long way towards improving our ability to model and mitigate the impacts of such extreme events, but current training methods are often unable to deal effectively with outliers in data – which is exactly what extreme events are. If outliers are present in training data, they skew the AI’s expectations, but if they’re omitted entirely, models will wrongly assume they never occur. To address this shortcoming, the Photrek team, led by Dr Kenric Nelson, has developed a new training technique to design more robust AI systems that can cope with rare, extreme events.