Tech

Can computers solve the logistical nightmare of planning English football fixtures?

Professor Graham Kendall from the School of Computer Science at The University of Nottingham believes they can. He has devised a special software programme for the Christmas and New Year fixtures which automatically takes into account detailed criteria laid down by the football authorities and reduces travel distances for clubs and fans.

Tracking down new active agents for cancer or malaria treatment could soon become easier - thanks to a computer program with which researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund aim to facilitate the search for suitable pharmaceutical substances. The program, which is called Scaffold Hunter, acts as a tool for navigating chemical space. It generates maps of chemically-related structures and links them to biological activity, that is, to their potential to bind to proteins, in particular medically relevant proteins.

An innovative program that cut cardiac deaths by 73 percent by linking coronary artery disease patients and teams of pharmacists, nurses, primary care doctors, and cardiologists with an electronic health record also kept the patients healthy two years after they left the program by keeping them in touch with their care givers electronically, according to a randomized study by Kaiser Permanente published in The American Journal of Managed Care.

Computational biologists at Carnegie Mellon University have developed an analytical technique to detect the multiple genetic variations that contribute to complex disease syndromes such as diabetes, asthma and cancer, which are characterized by multiple clinical and molecular traits.

More accurate global weather forecasts and a better understanding of climate change are a possibility following new research by engineers at Queen's University Belfast's Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT).

The ECIT team has developed a high performance electronic device - known as a dual polarized Frequency Selective Surface filter - that is to be used in future European Space Agency (ESA) missions.

BOULDER, Colo. – Raising prospects for building a practical quantum computer, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated sustained, reliable information processing operations on electrically charged atoms (ions). The new work, described in the August 6 issue of Science Express,* overcomes significant hurdles in scaling up ion-trapping technology from small demonstrations to larger quantum processors.

Scientists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and Harvard University have opened a new toolbox for building nanoscale structures out of DNA, using complex twisting and curving shapes. In the journal Science they report a series of experiments in which they folded DNA, like origami, into three dimensional objects including a beachball-shaped wireframe capsule just 50 nanometers in diameter.

Washington, DC - (August 6, 2009) – The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has completed a successful flight test of the fuel cell powered XFC (eXperimental Fuel Cell) unmanned aerial system (UAS). During the June 2 flight test, the XFC UAS was airborne for more than six hours. NRL's Chemistry and Tactical Electronic Warfare Divisions are developing the XFC UAS as an expendable, long endurance platform for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR).

Satellite imagery over the last two days has shown Typhoon Morakot to be a monster, and over the last two days, NASA satellites have confirmed the typhoon doubled its size!

So much for high energy physics in 2009. CERN 's Large Hadron Collider is taking a cautious approach, in marked contrast to the rather silly statement by Lyn Evans two years ago, who said they "will commission the machine to full energy in one go" to make up for the two years of delays they had already incurred by 2007.

A process that cleans wastewater and generates electricity can also remove 90 percent of salt from brackish water or seawater, according to an international team of researchers from China and the U.S.

WASHINGTON –Monographs addressing individual mandates, tax exclusion and a public plan option were released today by the American College of Physicians (ACP). The new policy papers are:

On a 104-degree Friday in July when sunlight bathed campus, doctoral student Dio Placencia sat before a noisy vacuum chamber in the Chemical Sciences Building trying to advance the renewable energy revolution.

As a University of Arizona (UA) professor, Neal R. Armstrong's research group, Placencia conducts research aimed at creating a thin, flexible organic solar cell that could power a tent or keep a car charged between trips to work and back home again.

Nationally, about ten percent of women in the US are recalled for a second mammogram after an abnormality is detected on the first one. However, the use of digital breast tomosynthesis and full-field digital mammography combined may be associated with a substantial decrease in recall rate, according to a study performed at UPMC in Pittsburgh, PA. Some researchers believe that digital breast tomosynthesis depicts the breast tissue in a way which may allow radiologists to identify some tumors which could be missed with standard two-dimensional mammography.

Noninvasive imaging (MRI) may aid physicians in the early diagnosis, staging and treatment of diabetes, according to a study performed at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. This is the first study of its kind to apply noninvasive imaging techniques to diabetes research.