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Content about Europe

August 19, 2015

High-energy cosmic beams hit the Earth’s outer atmosphere, which in turn scatters these rays into a shower of particle decays. A team of CERN openlab summer students has used a recent ‘webfest’ event held at CERN to build a distributed network of simple devices to detect particle decays which are not otherwise visible to the naked eye.

August 12, 2015

The Earth sciences, like geology, oceanography, and astronomy, generate vast quantities of data. The vision of the EarthServer project is to offer researchers ‘big Earth data at your fingertips’, so that they can access and manipulate enormous data sets with just a few mouse clicks.

August 5, 2015

From the flow of air past an airplane’s wing down to the movement of electrons around individual atoms, supercomputers can be used to simulate materials at diverse scales. Different scales provide different levels of information, but little is known about how these levels are connected. Peter Coveney of University College London has been spearheading a long-term program that seeks to relate the behavior of atoms and molecules to properties at the macroscale.

July 29, 2015

At the recent ISC High Performance event in Frankfurt, Germany, the new TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers was announced. Shaheen XC40, a Cray system in Saudi Arabia, is now ranked as the world’s seventh fastest supercomputer, and is the first supercomputer from the Middle East to crack the top 10.

July 29, 2015

The search for intelligent life in the universe continues. Astronomers are using DiRAC and Piz Daint supercomputers to learn how stellar winds change radio signals emitted from exoplanets so radio telescopes know how to listen.

July 22, 2015

When hunting neutrinos, a more powerful particle beam increases the chance of seeing neutrinos interact. Fermilab scientists recently set a new world record for high-energy neutrino experiments with a sustained 521-kilowatt beam, and will soon achieve beam power over 1 megawatt.

July 22, 2015

Discover a musical performance from the Montreux Jazz Festival that was created by converting data collected from CERN's Large Hadron Collider into musical notes.

July 15, 2015

The Virtual Imaging Platform (VIP), a science gateway designed to provide access to grid computing and storage resources for medical imaging simulation, is helping scientists based in Sweden research new ways of monitoring the progress of multiple sclerosis.

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) makes it possible.

July 8, 2015

Last month, the European Commission signed a €13m (~$14.5m) contract with the networking organization GÉANT to expand connectivity in the Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries. It will interconnect the national research and education networks in the EaP partner countries, and will integrate them into the pan-European GÉANT network.

July 1, 2015

The Merlin smartphone app has the solution to your bird watching mysteries. Now, Merlin Bird Photo ID takes it one step farther, identifying birds from uploaded photos. Crowd sourcing and artificial intelligence come together to answer a frequently asked question: What bird is that?

July 1, 2015

Historypin sits at the intersection of data visualization and crowdsourcing. Take your standard Google map. Add in a dash of grandma’s old photo album. Stir in some memories from the library archives. Season with a pinch of museum curation, and you’ve got a digital history book.

July 1, 2015

Last week, CERN hosted an event to discuss ongoing efforts to develop a ‘European open science cloud’. The aim of this work is to bring public research organizations and e‐infrastructures together with commercial cloud-computing suppliers to build a common platform offering a range of services to Europe’s research communities.

July 1, 2015

Last week, CERN hosted an event to discuss ongoing efforts to develop a ‘European open science cloud’. The aim of this work is to bring public research organizations and e‐infrastructures together with commercial cloud-computing suppliers to build a common platform offering a range of services to Europe’s research communities.

June 24, 2015

Scientists have collected wildlife audio samples for many years, and there are many databases of these sounds in existence. BioAcoustica distinguishes itself through tight integration with a cyberinfrastructure for performing analyses.

June 24, 2015

The iridescent shimmer found on the inside of seashells and the outside of pearls is caused by an extremely strong and resilient substance called nacre. Biomaterials such as nacre are highly organized at the nanoscale, so by studying this organization it may be possible to elucidate the source of their remarkable mechanical performance, which often outstrips synthetic analogues.

June 17, 2015

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is the research arm of the HathiTrust, and provides computational know-how for humanities scholars. With secure access to copyright-protected works, HTRC helps scholars see patterns across decades of literature. 

June 17, 2015

The Living Heart project unites the most advanced science and computational tools to model the cardio-vascular system. Doing so will greatly improve the efficacy of medical therapies and open the way to personalized medicine. 

June 10, 2015

Sergio Andreozzi outlines EGI’s vision for the Open Science Commons. He argues that this new approach to governing shared scientific resources has the potential to help to shape research policies and maximize scientific outputs.

June 10, 2015

Musical collaboration over the internet has been perennially plagued by delay and bad audio; co-performances have been largely a product of smoke and mirrors.

Overcoming the problems of distance, Internet2 and LoLa technology have set a new standard in video conferencing, allowing broader access to high-level musical and educational opportunities.

June 10, 2015

That’s the nano-sculpture there, riding atop a human hair. Courtesy Jonty Hurwitz. Click for larger image.  
June 10, 2015

Astronomers have used US National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) supercomputers to confirm a prediction made in 2010. They found a supernova and a new way of reading the stars.

June 3, 2015

A wheeling Milky Way or dancing aurora borealis inspires awe and broadens perspective when viewed across the chronological scales time-lapse videos afford. The trouble is it takes a lot of time to construct these videos. But in the smartphone age, the power of collected photographs enables a more collaborative method.

May 27, 2015

Last week, iSGTW attended the EGI Conference 2015 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Open science was a major theme at the event, with both the European Science Cloud and EGI's vision for the Open Science Commons featuring as major topics of discussion.

May 20, 2015

Discover how the DNANANO project has been using the Curie supercomputer — a PRACE tier-0 system — to help design nanocages for targeted drug delivery.

Simulating one of these nanocages for just 100 nanoseconds would take nearly a decade on a normal workstation. However, by accessing PRACE resources, the research group was able to carry out multiple simulations of this kind in less than thirty days.

May 20, 2015

At the recent Internet2 Global Summit iSGTW sat down with George Komatsoulis to talk about the state of distributed research and the NIH Commons, a scalable virtual environment to provide high-performance computing and data storage for bio-medical research. When implemented, the Commons will create a marketplace for digital bio-medical resources, driving down costs and democratizing access.