University News
£1.3 Million Funding for University Project to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Research at The University of Nottingham into new energy-saving technologies has received funding from a major national investment program aimed at drastically cutting emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
The G8 Summit has put global climate change firmly on the political agenda and raised public awareness of the issue. In the UK, significant work is already underway to tackle the main cause of climate change — carbon dioxide emissions
The four-year TARBASE (Technology Assessment for Radically Improving the Built Asset Base) project, involving experts in the University’s School for the Built Environment, has been awarded £1.3 million (US$2.3 million) from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Carbon Trust. It comes as part of the trust’s ambitious drive to cut carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 — a substantial step towards the Government’s overall target of a 60 per cent reduction by 2050.
More energy efficient building materials and energy-saving devices are gradually being introduced into new buildings that are being constructed but TARBASE is focusing on ways to reduce the emissions of most of current UK buildings that will still be standing in 2030.
The project, which also involves academics at Heriot-Watt, Ulster and Surrey universities, is focusing on the greater use of combined heat and power (CHP) in buildings, the use of building fabric materials with improved insulating properties and the use of building-integrated renewable energy technologies.
Looking at different types of buildings, it will assess the effectiveness of a range of technologies in terms of cost, ease of installation, social acceptability and carbon performance.
The research at Nottingham is centered on renewable energies, energy production and energy storage technologies.
The project will look at efficient ways of generating energy, for example, by using ground source heat, which uses the constant temperature underground to power heating or cooling systems, and developing solutions for storing energy for future use through batteries or by converting it to hydrogen gas.
One of the biggest challenges that face the researchers is how to develop devices that are practical for use in the home and convincing homeowners of the value of investing in energy-saving technology.
The research is being carried out using a number of test-bed facilities at Nottingham’s University Park campus. The academics are currently in discussions with companies, professional bodies and housing associations in the city over plans to assess carbon-saving technology.
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UTD Scientist Wins $2.1 Million in Grants To Study Communication Among Bacteria
A scientist at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) has won federal funding of US$2.1 million for studies of how bacterial cells communicate with each other – fundamental research that could lead to the development of new methods to halt the spread of deadly infectious diseases.
Dr. Juan E. González, associate professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UTD, received monies from two federal agencies – a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant in the amount of $1.5 million over five years and a National Science Foundation (NSF) award for $600,000 over three years.
“When bacteria invade a host, they are capable of doing something remarkable – coordinating their behavior, which allows them to act as a group,” said González, who also serves as associate dean for graduate studies for UTD’s School of Natural Sciences & Mathematics. “This is achieved through cell-to-cell communication, or signaling. If we can understand precisely how bacteria communicate, we theoretically could control and manipulate such organisms, including blocking pathogens from multiplying or, conversely, promoting the growth of beneficial microorganisms.”
According to González, bacteria are known to communicate by chemical means – one cell excretes a chemical while others sense and respond to it. The ability of bacteria to communicate and coordinate behavior is known as “quorum sensing.”
González’s grant from the NIH will fund research of ‘autoinducers” – signaling molecules that enable bacterial cells to act in a coordinated fashion to overcome the defenses of a host. His NSF grant will permit the study of a different type of bacterially produced signal molecules, exopolysaccarides, which can facilitate bacterial invasion of a host and increase the chances of bacterial survival in a hostile environment.
González conducts his research in a laboratory on UTD’s campus, where he is assisted in his studies by four undergraduate and seven graduate students. He also teaches courses at the university in “Molecular Biology,” “Medical Microbiology,” “Parasites and Symbionts” and “Global Epidemics.”
González joined UTD in 1996 as an assistant professor and was appointed associate professor in 2002. He earned a B.S. degree in microbiology and public health from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. degree in microbiology and molecular genetics from the University of California, Los Angeles. González was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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UC Berkeley, Yahoo Team To Research New Internet Technologies
The University of California, Berkeley, is teaming up with Yahoo Research Labs to launch a new laboratory to explore innovations in areas such as Internet search technology, social media and mobile media.
The founding director of the Yahoo Research Labs-Berkeley, which opens at a location near campus in August, will be Marc Davis, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS), where he is the director of the school's cutting-edge "Garage Cinema Research" group that focuses on creating the technology and applications that will enable daily media consumers to become daily media producers. Davis is also a co-founder of UC Berkeley's interdisciplinary Center for New Media.
Yahoo Research Labs-Berkeley is a first-of-its-kind partnership between a top public university and a leading Internet company to conduct research and explore new technologies that will support and reinforce key areas of Internet growth. One area will be search technology. Another will be social media, such as photos, video, music, audio and text, that are obtained from personal, public or community sources and then shared, referenced or remixed in ways that help foster social relations. Yet another area will be mobile media, involving mobile devices such as camera phones.
The partnership offers Yahoo access to UC Berkeley's intellectual capital, leadership and innovation, and provides UC Berkeley the ability to do new kinds of research with Yahoo and its hundreds of millions of users on a massive scale generally unavailable in academic settings, Davis said.
An added bonus, he said, is that UC Berkeley's lab researchers will be able to work simultaneously with Yahoo's product experts.
He predicted that the collaboration will help establish UC Berkeley as the global leader in academic research at the intersection of media, technology and people.
Plans call for involving other UC Berkeley faculty and students too, as the partnership selects specific research projects and moves forward.
Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice president for search and the marketplace, said the collaboration offers great opportunities to expand the scope of the company's research into social media, mobile media and search technology.
An advisory committee of Yahoo and UC Berkeley representatives will oversee the partnership. The UC Berkeley Industry Alliances Office will oversee the administrative components of the agreement for faculty, students and staff.
The partnership is initially set to operate for five years.
Davis will be on leave for the next academic year while running the lab.
Dana Bostrom, associate director of the Industry Alliances Office, characterized Yahoo Research Labs-Berkeley as of one of various types of collaborations that UC Berkeley has undertaken with industrial partners. Bostrom noted that Yahoo's investment in a facility near campus is unusual, and demonstrates a strong desire for collaboration.
The framework of the UC Berkeley and Yahoo pact gives all parties certain rights to intellectual property developed in the lab, and "provides an exclusive, time-limited option so that Yahoo will have first crack at what is developed in the new research facility," she said.
Bostrom said that most intellectual property developed at the lab will be shared jointly between UC Berkeley and Yahoo.
The university has a wide range of research interests and capabilities, she said, and the partnership does not preclude UC Berkeley from entering into new agreements with other companies. But Bostrom said UC Berkeley is eager to work with companies that value interactions with its faculty and students, and sees such collaborations as important in extending its missions of education and public service.
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UCLA Chemists Create Nano Valve
UCLA chemists have created the first nano valve that can be opened and closed at will to trap and release molecules. The discovery, federally funded by the National Science Foundation, will be published July 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"This paper demonstrates unequivocally that the machine works," said Jeffrey I. Zink, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, and a member of the research team. "With the nano valve, we can trap and release molecules on demand. We are able to control molecules at the nano scale.
"The valve is like a mechanical system that we can control like a water faucet," said UCLA graduate student Thoi Nguyen, lead author on the paper. "Trapping the molecule inside and shutting the valve tightly was a challenge. The first valves we produced leaked slightly."
This nano valve consists of moving parts — switchable rotaxane molecules that resemble linear motors designed by California NanoSystems Institute director Fraser Stoddart's team — attached to a tiny piece of glass (porous silica), which measures about 500 nanometers, and which Nguyen is currently reducing in size. Tiny pores in the glass are only a few nanometers in size.
"It's big enough to let molecules in and out, but small enough so that the switchable rotaxane molecules can block the hole," Zink said.
The valve is uniquely designed so one end attaches to the opening of the hole that will be blocked and unblocked, and the other end has the switchable rotaxanes whose movable component blocks the hole in the down position and leaves it open in the up position. The researchers used chemical energy involving a single electron as the power supply to open and shut the valve, and a luminescent molecule that allows them to tell from emitted light whether a molecule is trapped or has been released.
Switchable rotaxanes are molecules composed of a dumbbell component with two stations between which a ring component can be made to move back and forth in a linear fashion. Stoddart, who holds UCLA's Fred Kavli Chair in nanosystems sciences, has already shown how these switchable rotaxanes can be used in molecular electronics. Stoddart's team is now adapting them for use in the construction of artificial molecular machinery.
"The fact that we can take a bistable molecule that behaves as a switch in a silicon-based electronic device at the nanoscale level and fabricate it differently to work as part of a nano valve on porous silica is something I find really satisfying about this piece of research," Stoddart, said. "It shows that these little pieces of molecular machinery are highly adaptable and resourceful, and means that we can move around in the nanoworld with the same molecular tool kit and adapt it to different needs on demand."
In future research, they will test how large a hole they can block, to see whether they can get larger molecules, like enzymes, inside the container; they are optimistic.
The research team also includes Hsian-Rong Tseng, a former postdoctoral scholar in chemistry who is now an assistant professor of molecular and medical pharmacology in UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine; Paul Celestre, a former undergraduate student in Stoddart's laboratory; Amar Flood, a former UCLA researcher in Stoddart's supramolecular chemistry group who is now an assistant professor of chemistry at Indiana University; and Yi Liu, a former UCLA graduate student who is now a postdoctoral scholar at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla.
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Primate Virus Jumps Species Barrier to Humans for the First Time in Asia
Scientists have identified the first reported case in Asia of primate-to-human transmission of simian foamy virus (SFV), a retrovirus found in macaques and other primates that so far has not been shown to cause disease in humans. The transmission of the virus from a monkey to a human took place at a monkey temple in Bali, Indonesia, the researchers report in the July issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
Even though this particular virus jumping to humans may not prove dangerous, the scientists warn that the dense human and primate populations in Asia could lead to other primate-borne viruses jumping the species barrier and causing human disease.
Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel is the lead author of the study and a research scientist in the Division of International Programs at the Washington National Primate Research Center.
Jones-Engel and her co-authors also argue for more research on diverse contexts of human-primate contact. The vast majority of previous viral transmission research focused on bushmeat hunting and consumption, a practice in which local residents hunt monkeys for food. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS in humans, is believed to have originated as simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), and jumped the species barrier to humans when African bushmeat hunters came into contact with blood from infected animals.
Though bushmeat hunting and consumption may be a significant factor in viral transmission in Africa, Jones-Engel says, people in Asia have many other contexts in which they come into contact with primates, including animal markets, primate pet ownership, urban performing primates, and zoos. In addition, monkeys are significant symbols in both Buddhism and Hinduism, and monkey temples -- places of religious worship that have become refuges for populations of primates -- are common throughout much of South and Southeast Asia. In these areas, protected macaque populations have thrived alongside dense human settlement for centuries.
On the island of Bali alone, there are more than 40 such temples, which are frequented by tourists from around the world. About 700,000 international tourists visit the island's four main monkey temples every year. Temple workers and people who live near the temples also have a great deal of contact with monkeys at the religious sites.
For this study, the researchers tested blood samples from 82 people who work in or around a temple in Bali, as well as samples from macaques in the area. They found antibodies for simian foamy virus in the blood of one 47-year-old farmer who visited the temple every day. They confirmed the tests by performing a DNA analysis of the man's blood, and found that the SFV strain he carried was the same strain found in the temple's macaques. The man denied owning a monkey as a pet, or hunting monkeys for food. He had been bitten once and scratched more than once by the temple's macaques.
Researchers still don't know the long-term effects of SFV on humans -- there are about 40 known cases of people being infected, through laboratory or zoo contact, or through bushmeat hunting in Africa. There are no known cases of human disease yet.
However, Jones-Engel and her fellow researchers warn that there are other primate viruses known to be harmful that could jump the species barrier. They don't want people to be afraid of coming in contact with macaques or other primates, but they do urge people to be cautious and careful when interacting with monkeys. Feeding the animals, or even carrying food into a temple, can greatly increase the risk of a bite or scratch, which can lead to transmission of infection. Visitors occasionally engage in other risky behavior, such as touching animals or trying to hold baby monkeys. Limiting such behavior can reduce the risk of bites and scratches.
Limiting dangerous contact between primates and humans can have other benefits, as well, such as reducing the transmission of human infections to monkeys. Human measles, for instance, can cause disease in monkeys and can even kill them. Other primate species have already seen significant population losses because of infection by human illnesses.
Also participating in the study were researchers at the University of Toronto; Udayana University in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia; the University of Notre Dame; the Southern Research Institute, Frederick, Md.; and the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, San Antonio, Texas.
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New Supercomputer to Help Reveal Cosmic Mysteries
Call it the "Big Bang in a Box." Columbia University physicists have a new tool to study the earliest moments of our universe.
A new supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is capable of determining the properties of a state of matter that may hold the key to the Big Bang.
The supercomputer, which resembles a row of tall bookcases, can perform 10 trillion calculations per second in an effort to study the environment thought to have existed during the first moments after the Big Bang.
Columbia researchers working at the laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), have already succeeded in creating a form of hot dense matter whose properties are consistent with the so-called quark-gluon plasma -- the elusive primordial matter scientists have sought to understand for years.
Working in tandem with the RHIC, the supercomputer, dubbed QCDOC, is expected to play a key part in reducing the list of cosmic mysteries. Powerful telescopes, intricate laboratory probes, and cutting-edge computer and mathematical analyses are being utilized to turn abstract concepts into subjects that can be precisely studied within the relatively small confines of a computer.
QCDOC is ultra-fast, harnessing the power of 12,288 individual computers. Each processor is constructed on a single silicon chip, so QCDOC is essentially 12,288 interconnected chips. A smaller supercomputer, about the size of two large book cases and housed in Columbia's Pupin Hall, came online in the spring and will carry out similar calculations.
The $5 million BNL computer, part of the RIKEN (The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research of Japan)/BNL Research Center, took five years to design and build, and will allow environmental conditions surrounding the collision of heavy ions to be maintained as a computer model -- something currently impossible at the collider itself -- explained Norman Christ, Ephraim Gildor Professor of Computational Theoretical Physics at Columbia.
Together with Associate Professor of Physics Robert Mawhinney and others, Christ is leading Columbia's involvement in the project. The computer was designed and built by Columbia University, Brookhaven Lab, IBM, RIKEN and the University of Edinburgh.
Related to this effort, QCDOC will be used for calculations in quantum chromodynamics -- the physics theory that describes the interactions of subatomic quarks and gluons. In particular, physicists hope to understand the reason for the existence of six types of quarks -- subatomic particles thought to be elemental and indivisible, and of intense interest in the field of particle physics. The purpose of high-energy particle physics, as opposed to high-energy nuclear physics, is to understand the properties and states of these basic building blocks of matter.
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UTD Names French VP of Development, Peña to Focus On External Relations, Marketing and Communications
In a move University of Texas at Dallas President Dr. David Daniel said signaled a “significant ramp-up in UTD’s fundraising efforts,” the university appointed Marjie Young French, a development professional with more than a decade of major fundraising experience, as vice president of development, effective Aug. 1.
French currently is associate dean and director of development at UTD’s Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. She was hired by the school last January, primarily to help raise the $100 million in private funds the university has pledged to come up with as part of an economic-development partnership known as “Project Emmitt” and involving Texas Instruments, the State of Texas and the University of Texas System. Under Project Emmitt, announced in 2003, UTD is scheduled to receive a total of as much as $300 million.
With her promotion, French’s responsibilities will expand to include all of the university’s fundraising efforts except research grants, including responsibility for raising the $100 million in matching money for Project Emmitt. French will report directly to Daniel but will work closely with the university’s deans and program directors, as well as with officials at the Jonsson School.
University development currently is part of the Office of Advancement and Government Affairs, headed by UTD Vice President Carlos Peña. Peña will continue as a vice president and member of President Daniel’s Cabinet, but after Aug. 1 he will focus on external relations, including government affairs, as well as marketing and communications.
Daniel said this change is designed not only to strengthen fundraising, but also to allow Peña more time to develop even stronger relationships and programs with UTD’s stakeholders in the community.
French will be UTD’s first vice president of development, a position Daniel said he was creating to “initiate a major push to raise private money in support of the goals and mission” of the university.
David called French a “highly experienced fundraiser” and said her appointment as vice president of development was a “reflection of our commitment to raise private money and to create a program for private giving.”
The president added that UTD and other universities increasingly have to “rely on private giving to support their missions.”
French, who was assistant dean for development and outreach at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture prior to joining UTD, said she was “very excited about The University of Texas at Dallas and its philanthropic potential” and that she looked “forward to creating a goal-oriented team that will galvanize the resources of the entire campus community.
Previously, as associate director of development, French managed the highly successful Dallas major gift program for U. T. Austin’s $1.6-billion “We’re Texas” campaign. Additionally, she supervised development programs at the University of Houston Honors College and the University of Houston Gerald Hines College of Architecture during U. H.’s $350-million creative partnership campaign. French’s accomplishments also include coordinating the $7-million gift to name the Gerald Hines College of Architecture at U. H. and supervising the fundraising that led to the creation of The Real Estate Finance Center at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business.
French received her B.A. from the University of St. Thomas in Houston and is a native Texan.
