Category: Research in Edinburgh
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Secrets in the genome: mysteries of the cryptobyotes
Would you believe it if you were told that there are organisms that can exist and function perfectly well in the near absence of water? Perhaps not. All our lives, we are taught how water is the basis of all life forms. Not only does it drive many chemical reactions, it also acts as an…
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Exoplanet data: a new frontier?
June 19th, 2017 – The Kepler space telescope, quietly searching for a twin to Earth, has scanned the light of thousands of stars for the signature dimming of light, indicating planets traversing their surface via orbit. Eight years on and NASA has released the final data from the original Kepler mission, comprising 219 verified planet…
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How super are supercomputers?
What are supercomputers? How important are they and how similar are they to our personal computers? Weronika Filinger is an HPC Application Developer at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) at the University of Edinburgh, and she was involved in creating the content of a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on Supercomputing or High Performance…
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Science on a summer’s evening 2017: Chemistry’s role in recovering metals from “urban mines”
When we think about metals like iron and gold or aluminium and zinc, we think of them as familiar and part of our everyday lives and therefore, to some extent, we take them for granted. But what if we spoke about metals such as dysprosium or gadolinium? These metals are as much a part of…
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The West Antarctic Ice Sheet: ancient origins and present-day relevance
One century after the excruciating expedition of endurance led by Sir Ernest Shackleton across the entire Antarctic continent, a new era of heroic Antarctic exploration may have dawned. A team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh and Northumbria University have ventured to West Antarctica to complete a new study. The group set out to…