The collapse of the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago precipitated an economic crisis in Finland but by sheer determination and a focus on innovation, the country prevailed and even saw home-grown companies like Nokia dominate the world stage for innovation and technological advancement.

But like the rest of Europe today, Finland too is coping with a tough economy and rising unemployment.

For Huuskonen, a counsellor and adviser to the director general in Finland’s Department of Enterprise and Innovation, innovation will be critical to weathering this latest storm.

“The Finnish State is very interested in creating innovation, especially in situations now where there are economic issues arising, unemployment and so forth. We believe in investing in innovation and it will create better opportunities for growth in the future.

 Open Innovation 2.0 - Interview with Mikko Huuskonen from the Finnish government

Recalling the economic crisis of the 1990s that Finland faced and overcame, Huuskonen said: “Innovation was crucial, and especially with Nokia.

“While we don’t expect success like that to happen again, we believe that working and constantly investing in innovation will create new possibilities and maybe one day we will be seeing other global successes.”

Huuskonen said that in terms of open innovation, the opportunity exists to move innovation from an abstract concept to a practical reality in most economies.

“It’s about how people communicate with each other and share innovation. Coming from a small country, depending on global communications and connections is crucial for us.”

More on Open Innovation 2.0:

Interview with DG CONNECT's Bror Salmelin (video)

Intel’s Martin Curley: we will need two Earths to support human life (video)

SolarPrint and Intel demo energy harvesting device at innovation event

Innovation about execution, not just invention, says EIT’s Alexander von Gabain

Dr Stephen Hawking says world needs a more sustainable trajectory

Peake will be the first UK astronaut in space for more than 20 years. Helen Sharman was the first Briton in space when she took part in a Russian scientific space mission known as Project Juno to the Mir space station in 1991.

A former helicopter pilot in the British Army Air Corps, Peake is set to blast off for the International Space Station in 2015 as part of Expedition 46/47. The flight is expected to take place in November 2015 from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The ESA confirmed today that Peake will be the first British citizen to live and work on the space station.

According to the UK Space Agency, Peake is one of six astronauts to have been picked for the 2015 mission out of 8,000 hopefuls.

Speaking at the Science Museum in London today, Peake expressed his excitement. "This is another important mission for Europe and in particular a wonderful opportunity for European science, industry and education to benefit from microgravity research," he said.

Peake joined the European Astronaut Corps in 2009 and since then has been training to work on the space station.

After he graduated from basic astronaut training in November 2010, he continued training to increase his skills in weightlessness, including working in spacesuits.

In 2011, he took part in the ESA's CAVES training, which aims to simulate space exploration during a week-long stay underground. The goal of such training is to mimic elements of spaceflight such as a lack of a day and night cycle and sensory deprivation.

Then, in 2012, Peake spent almost two weeks in an underwater base off the coast of Florida as part of NASA's NEEMO mission. The course focused on asteroid exploration involving communication delays with ground control and working on a simulated asteroid.

David Willetts, the UK's science and universities minister, said that Peake would become a "powerful" role model for young people.

The UK Space Agency now invests stg£240m per year in the ESA's space programme.

Salmelin, who specialises in innovation systems for the commission, said the quadruple helix of open innovation – universities, businesses, government and citizens – has the potential to offer quicker and more realistic outcomes than traditional research processes which have been confined to labs.

He said it is all about economics and speed to commercialisation. “Innovation is about creating value where the offer meets demand.

The economics of innovation

Open Innovation 2.0 - Interview with Bror Salmelin from the European Commission  

“Open innovation requires active participation on the part of citizens so entrepreneurs can quickly discover if a product will be a success or not. Traditional innovation was all about trying to anticipate what people want.

“What we want is quadruple helix innovation, meaning that the public can be involved in innovation from the beginning in real-world settings.

“Entrepreneurs can fail fast with the things that don’t work and if they are likely to be successful, they can scale really fast successfully.

“It’s about productivity for successes and the speed of those successes,” Salmelin said.

More on Open Innovation 2.0:

Interview with DG CONNECT’s Bror Salmelin (video)

Intel’s Martin Curley: we will need two Earths to support human life (video)

SolarPrint and Intel demo energy harvesting device at innovation event

Innovation about execution, not just invention, says EIT’s Alexander von Gabain

Dr Stephen Hawking says world needs a more sustainable trajectory

The research on the new metal alloy was carried out as part of an Enterprise Ireland-supported innovation partnership between UL and the medical devices company Cook Medical.

When medical devices, such as stents, are placed in the body, this procedure usually happens with the help of some kind of medical imaging, such as X-ray fluoroscopy, so a surgeon can clearly see where the device is being placed.

According to the researchers, materials that are currently used to make such medical devices do not show up very well under X-ray.

"An ideal solution is a device that is fully visible under the X-ray, but the alloy would have to be developed based on the currently approved alloys for medical devices," said Dr Syed Tofail, a researcher at UL’s Materials and Surface Science Institute.

Up to now, he said many companies have used gold or platinum to modify existing alloys and improve X-ray visibility - but this can be costly.

"We have identified a number of alloying elements that will make these devices as visible as those where platinum has been added to enhance the visibility, but at a significantly reduced cost," said Tofail.

Shay Lavelle, a product development engineer at Cook Medical, said tests on a prototype wire of the new alloy have shown that it has the potential to be used in some of the company’s products.

"The fact that the raw materials are more viable than the platinum-added solutions also means that the commercialisation potential of this newly developed alloy is very high," he said.

Cook Medical’s Irish factory is based at the National Technology Park in Limerick and employs almost 800 people.

Finnegan, who is assistant city manager (acting), told the Open Innovation 2.0 conference at Dublin Castle that the city’s leaders intend to make the city a beacon for smart cities around the world, where energy efficiency, merged with greater connectivity and innovation, will enhance the quality of life and the economy of the city.

“A city government in today’s world isn’t just about providing services like refuse collection, etc, it’s also today about facilitating a collaborative leadership of key stakeholders that can make difference in how the economy and society of a city operates.”

He cited the design of what is now O’Connell Street in the 19^th century, which today continues to fulfil its purpose as a traffic artery as an example of the kind of forward-thinking that should permeate all strands of city governance.

Open data is the key to the future of a smart city

Open Innovation 2.0 - Interview with Dublin City Council’s Peter Finnegan  

“The Creative Dublin Alliance aims to create an open city region that can act as an economic engine for Ireland and the go-place for innovative minds and investment.

“‘Open’ is a keyword in that vision. The fuel will be releasing open data into the innovation space.”

Finnegan said the city is already being utilised by tech giants IBM and Intel as a testbed for future technologies in terms of energy efficiency and smart transport.

One example is a big data project where in collaboration with IBM researchers, Dublin City Council is now able to
combine data streaming in from an array of sources – bus timetables, inductive-loop traffic detectors, closed-circuit television cameras and GPS updates that each of the city’s 1,000 buses transmit every 20 seconds.

Traffic controllers can now see the current status of the entire bus network at glance and rapidly spot areas of the network that are experiencing delays. This data then gives them an opportunity to identify the cause of the delay as it emerges before it moves further downstream. This approach can now accelerate the decision-making process to clear congestions more swiftly.

“Our roadmap is designed to think in a disruptive way, to take actions and challenge current obstacles and look at building how Dublin might be shaped and work in the future.”

He said that at the heart of Dublin’s innovation master plan is the idea of a digital maturity scorecard that can be used to compare the city with other cities

“The plan is to develop the Dublin as a future city. We are open for digital.

“The only way that will work is to think of innovation not as an academic concept but something that has to be translated into a reality for people’s lives.”

More on Open Innovation 2.0:

Intel’s Martin Curley: we will need two Earths to support human life (video)

SolarPrint and Intel demo energy harvesting device at innovation event

Innovation about execution, not just invention, says EIT’s Alexander von Gabain

Dr Stephen Hawking says world needs a more sustainable trajectory

Curley, who was speaking at the Open Innovation 2.0 conference at Dublin Castle today, said that at the current pace the Earth is consuming 1.3 times its current resources.

He said this presents a massive challenge in terms of creating better models of energy consumption, for example.

“We need to enter an era of mass collaboration,” he said.

“If you look at innovation – 20 or 30 years ago most innovation came from brilliant scientists.

“But not all the smart people in the world work in universities or corporations.”

A new era where the pace of innovation is a matter of survival

Open Innovation 2.0 - Interview with Intel’s Martin Curley  

Much of the sentiment at the Open Innovation 2.0 conference centred around the idea of a quadruple helix ecosystem – combining research from universities, businesses, governments and citizens.

Curley said that technology is transforming traditional industries and cited the book publishing industry, the music industry and retail as industries that have been transformed irrevocably.

“We are in a new era,” he said, citing the drift of change that transformed the smartphone industry with Nokia now competing with Android and Apple.

“Intel is working hard to create a fourth competing ecosystem.”

Curley also outlined the swift growth of Intel Labs, which has grown to 40 labs worldwide and 4,500 professionals in just under four years.

To give a sense of the speed of change, Curley said the role of universities is changing.

“The role of the university is changing, where once it was about students and research but now it is about entrepreneurial value creation.

“Open innovation will be critical because when we all work together we can drive spectacular results.”

More on Open Innovation 2.0:

SolarPrint and Intel demo energy harvesting device at innovation event

Innovation about execution, not just invention, says EIT’s Alexander von Gabain

Dr Stephen Hawking says world needs a more sustainable trajectory

Von Gabain boasts a distinguished career in biotechnology. Equipped with a PhD in genetics, he completed a stint at Stanford University, followed by a professorship at the renowned Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. In the 1990s, he was appointed chair of microbiology at the University of Vienna at the Campus Vienna Biocenter, where he helped build the public-private partnership of the Vienna Biocenter/IMP (institute of Molecular Pathology). In 1998, he founded biotech company Intercell AG, which was successfully floated on the Vienna Stock Exchange in 2005. One might expect him to be celebrated among his fellow academics in Vienna. Not so, said Von Gabain, who is serving as a keynote speaker at the Open Innovation 2.0 conference in Dublin Castle.

“I was busy building successful biotech companies on campus, but it took more than a decade before any of my academic colleagues thought to ask if I would teach their students how I built my companies. I was treated by my colleagues like I was a fallen woman, like I had gone to the dark side,” he said. “I think the situation has improved, but there is still that fear among many academics in Europe who think that entrepreneurship is something that should be kept separate from universities and their ivory towers.”

This mindset is in stark contrast with the US, he said, and just one of the impediments that means Europe lags well behind the US when it comes to innovation and, in particular, the lucrative and growing biotech industry (biotech is broadly defined as “technological applications that uses biological systems”). The biotech industry is estimated to have a combined value of about €300bn in the US, compared to around €30bn in Europe and, according to von Gabain, the annual investment in European biotech in the form of venture capital, public listings, private investment and business angels is about one-third that in the US, where it stands at around €13bn.

Yet biotech is viewed as one of the innovation areas with the greatest market potential of all. The OECD estimates that biotechnology could contribute up to 2.7pc of GDP in the OECD by 2030, and itself admits this is probably conservative. On the island of Ireland, the sector employs more than 4,000 people, according to recent figures from InterTrade Ireland.

European Institute of Innovation and Technology

Other impediments include outdated tax systems and lack of understanding by politicians, von Gabain said. These are the areas that the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), of which he is chair, is trying to tackle. An agency of the European Union based in Budapest, Hungary, it was established in 2008 and became operational in 2010. In 2012, the chair was handed over to the outspoken von Gabain, who, despite his varied business interests, today dedicates much of his time to the cause.

“I do this EIT job largely as a private donation. I get €20,000 a year and I spend about three days a week on this. I’m donating this back to Europe because I was lucky enough to be treated well during my career, and I want to give something back to young people,” he said. “I believe in Europe.”

According to von Gabain, the EIT is not a research institute but rather a “high impact innovation investment fund” of the EU, trying to foster greater entrepreneurship out of research universities.

Knowledge and Innovation Communities

It does this through setting up Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) – ecosystems which bring together what von Gabain describes as the three corners of the knowledge triangle - research, education and business, with entrepreneurship at its centre. This dynamic, while long operating in the US, is “underutilised” in Europe, he said.

Three KICs are already in existence in the areas of green energy, health and ageing, and climate change mitigation. These are not simply physical locations, but networks of researchers and industry partners.

“We are seeding these KICs with 25pc EIT funding and they have to counter-fund themselves with 75pc, and that seems to work. The KICs have already seen 30 strong start-ups spun out from research,” he said. “So we have invested about €300m and we have a counter financing of  €1.2bn from private partners, and we have brought together people across Europe to breed ecosystems of innovation.”

Von Gabain is quick to point out that each KIC is run by a CEO and follows a business plan, and so differ significantly from other initiatives that simply support research through research grants.

Under the new Horizon 2020 research programme, which is due to be approved by the end of 2013, the EC is proposing to increase EIT funding to €2.8bn between 2014-2020, something von Gabain said will allow it to support hundreds of innovative start-ups, and encourage students into entrepreneurship programmes in parallel with their engineering or scientific studies.

EIT’s intent is probably best exemplified by its governing board, which includes not just the heads of universities and research institutes – like Ireland’s own Patrick Prendergast, provost of Trinity College Dublin - but many from the private sector, like von Gabain himself, Jeroen van der Veer, former CEO of Dutch Shell, and former Skype director Linnar Viik. This is all about bringing the technologies and inventions to market.

A distinguished biotech heritage

Europe has a distinguished heritage when it comes to biotech, von Gabain said. A relatively young sector, of the two pivotal discoveries which forged the foundations for modern biotech in the Seventies, Cohen/Boyer’s ‘recombinant DNA technology’ was invented in Stanford University in the US, while the other, Kohler/Milstein’s ‘monoclonal antibody’, emanated from Cambridge University in the UK. Much of today’s modern pharmaceutical industry is built on these two key technologies.

However, even back then, there were signs of the problems that would continue to stifle Europe’s biotech sector. In 1973, Stanford University quickly saw the benefit of paying to patent the revolutionary technology, and has made a “very nice return”, said von Gabain. However, just two years later, when George Kohler and Cesar Milstein approached the then-dean of Cambridge University with their discovery, he refused to spend any of the university’s budget on patenting.

Things have since moved on, but it is a salutary reminder, said von Gabain, and perhaps partly explains why the US still leads the way.

Most university campuses in Europe do not have all the players of the innovation sector at the table. “If you go to Boston, San Francisco, Washington, as a student you will find lawyers that can tell you how to do a contract with a venture capital firm, you will find venture capitalists and business angels, you will find people who have previously been working in big pharma who can help you when writing a business plan. We do not have the ecosystem of all the players smartly clustered together anywhere in Europe.”

There are exceptions, he said, pointing to campuses in Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, and in Munich and Stockholm, but even these do not compare with the Boston/MIT area or the Bay area of San Francisco.

The second impediment is an academic world that is not exposing students to the opportunities to take what they are studying in their masters and PhDs and carry it forward through entrepreneurship, he said. Changing that dynamic is a key part of the EIT mission.

Modernising financial rules

An impediment that should, in principle, be easier to shift is that of the financial rules in many European countries, including Ireland, which do not make it attractive to take the risks involved in starting biotech companies. Von Gabain estimates that a new vaccine, for example, can take up to 10 years to develop, with plenty of failures along the way. “There’s never a product launched that helps people that costs less than €200m or €300m. Innovation takes time, is risky and needs investment,” he said.

Many European countries’ taxation systems compare very unfavourably to the US when it comes to encouraging this kind of risky entrepreneurship. He has been burnt by the Austrian system himself.

He set up his most successful biotech company Intercell AG in Vienna back in 1998, bringing 20 or so “brave” young people along with him, and offering them a large part of his founder shares in share options. When the company went public in 2005, and they wanted to convert their options into real shares, they were immediately met with a barrier. They were informed by the Austrian authorities that within 24 hours they had to pay the taxes on the virtual gains of the shares, which had risen in value from €1 per share to €21 per share.

“They didn’t have the funds to pay, so they all lost their shares, which for me as a founder was a disaster,” he said. “It’s stupid. If you ask me, such taxation rules come from people who have never built up a business, people who cannot see the bravery of going into a young risky biotech, which is a kind of smart lottery.”

Things are not so different here in Ireland, according to Anna Scally, tax partner with KPMG. “If as part of their employment a person purchases share options in the company priced at the market value of the share when the option is granted, he or she is subject to income tax on the increase in share value when they exercise the option to acquire the shares in future.”

“This may well mean that the individual must sell some of the shares acquired to meet their personal income tax liability triggered by exercise if they do not have other funds,” she said.

Attracting European venture capital

In Europe, the tax systems tend also to be less friendly to venture capitalists, according to von Gabain. Good business practice in the best venture capitalist firms sees the partner take a small percentage share in the investment out of their personal monies. “Those investing into VC funds like to see the VC partner take a personal risk, too. It’s just good business practice,” he said.

Yet in many European countries, that personal investment has to be taken from their income after tax. It is one of the many elements that will disincentivise venture capital firms from investing in Europe, he said. In addition, many venture capital firms have been having trouble getting investment into new funds since the financial crisis, and some are about to leave Europe, von Gabain said.

He cited the example of a major biotech fund in Europe, TVM Capital, which was unable to close its latest fund in Europe, and subsequently moved to Canada. It is crucial that European countries adapt their policies to ensure attractiveness to these investors, he said.

There has to be a change in mindset throughout the whole value chain, and one of the aims of the EIT is to help do that, he said. “Once the politicians see the success of the KICs, they will hopefully work to remove these impediments.”

Above all, he said, it is about changing the mindsets within Europe’s educational institutions, from kindergarten to fourth level. “We all talk about innovation. What is it? It’s not discovery, it’s not invention, it’s not translation. Innovation is actually bringing the concept back to the people, so that it changes societal reality.”

It is a concept that von Gabain believes has been grasped by academia in Ireland. Recent visits to the country have left him hugely impressed. “Probably because you had such a crisis, you seem to understand here that innovation is the way out of your troubles, and you are activating this more than in the past”.

“I’m optimistic that this will mean more innovative companies growing out of Ireland, not just the big international guys coming to build their headquarters here.”

Alexander von Gabain will be addressing the Open Innovation 2.0 conference, which takes place today and tomorrow at Dublin Castle.

A version of this interview first appeared in the Sunday Times on 19 May

When you look at the sea, what do you see? Possibly not too much from the surface, but from a chemist's perspective the organisms that live in and around the sea - from the coast to the deep - are a potential treasure trove of weird, wonderful and maybe even clinically useful molecules. And Dr Margaret Rae is looking for them.

She and her colleagues in the Beaufort Marine Biodiscovery Project plumb the depths and comb the beaches for marine life in the search for 'bioactive' molecules that could be of use for tackling microbes, inflammation, human diseases and maybe even cancer on dry land.

Have chemistry degree, will travel

Rae didn't start out as a marine researcher, though. Her background is squarely in chemistry, and her initial degree from University College Dublin has been a passport to various types of jobs, including analysing water quality, working on eco-friendly electronics, a PhD in Portugal on the chemistry of fullerenes, troubleshooting software and hardware in the chemical industry and setting up a quality system for adult human stem cell use at the Regenerative Medicine Institute in Galway.

But eventually chemistry research lured her back into the lab, and she became involved in the Marine Institute's biodiscovery programme, a €7.23m initiative that involves Queen's University Belfast (QUB), University College Cork and NUI Galway, where Rae is now a research fellow at the Ryan Institute. “Ireland has huge coastline and a seabed area 10 times that of the island itself - the programme seeks to explore the biodiversity within our marine national assets,” she explains.

The goal? To find bioactives, or molecules that have a biological effect in an organism, such as a human, animal or plant. “Normally, what we want is a specific effect,” says Rae. “So we will be looking for something that will kill harmful bacteria or cancer cells, or perhaps that has anti-inflammatory effects and maybe can help to prevent neurodegeneration.”

To the sea

But why go looking in the marine for such chemical usefulness? In part it's a numbers game, according to Rae. “In terms of evolution and differences and metabolic pathways, there's a greater diversity in the marine than on the terrestrial part of Earth,” she says. “And because of this diversity, the likelihood of encountering compounds that are unknown on land would be much higher.”

Some types of organisms are well known as particularly rich chests of potentially interesting chemicals. They include sponges, seaweeds, microbes, echinoderms (such as sea stars), cnidarians (sea anemones, corals, hydra) and many more, and Rae and her colleagues collect them from the shore through to the deep - though she admits her sea legs are not that used to expeditions on the open seas. She recently spent three weeks aboard the RV Celtic Explorer, and while she relished the chance to go, three weeks of seasickness was hard to stomach.

“It's something anybody working in the marine environment has to put up with,” she says. “But overall it's a great opportunity to get on the Celtic Explorer - when I was training as a chemist I never thought that I would be getting out and doing these things.”

Back on the beach, there are also interesting molecules to be found, and Rae works with taxonomist Dr Svenja Heesch to harvest seaweed specimens. “It really puts you in touch with nature,” says Rae, who is struck by the colours when she's out on the beach. “For bench scientists like myself in a lab, you get used to that clinical sterile-looking laboratory and then you go out in the field - the first thing that hits me is the colour, the lovely blues and greens and yellows and oranges and browns. It really is something really different.”

She also enjoys the start-to-finish cycle of discovering an active molecule: “I can go out there and get my samples whether on the coast or out at sea, then I can do an entire workup on those specimens from collection through to extraction right up to partitioning, fractioning, trying to find and isolate the bioactives,” she says.  

With such an elaborate workup it's really necessary to keep track of everything and Rae works with another colleague, Dr Helka Folch at QUB, to ensure that all the data generated by all biodiscovery scientists - all the specimens, their locations, habitats, extractions, fractions, and bioassay results are stored and can be queried at any time. “Helka is guardian over the database, a gargantuan task,” says Rae.

Bioactive hits

So far, Rae and her colleagues have identified several interesting bioactives from marine species. “We have found around 10 extracts that would have some form of anti-cancer activity, and we are particularly interested in two or three of those, where we are seeing very specific anti-cancer activity,” she says. “We have also found anti-inflammatory activity and within the [Beaufort] partnership we have found anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and some bacterial quorum sensing for extracts and compounds.”

When they find a bioactive of interest the next step is to isolate more of it and work out the molecular structure with Prof Deniz Tasdemir and her team of scientists at NUI Galway. “If it's very interesting and not enough can be sustainably harvested, we follow up and see whether or not the compound could be artificially made in the lab,” says Rae.

And while it can be time consuming work to harvest samples, rush them back to the lab to preserve the potential biomolecules and then comb the extracts for biochemical activity, seeing a positive result keeps the interest stoked, she notes. “When you get that initial 'hit' of a bioactive in an extract, you get really enthusiastic all over again.”

Women Invent Tomorrow is Silicon Republic's year-long campaign to champion the role of women in science, technology, engineering and maths

The Health and Life Science Trade Summit was hosted by HealthXL, the accelerator programme for new ventures in the digital health space that is being run by Startupbootcamp in Dublin.

Patrick was at yesterday's event along with Therese Murray, the president of the Massachusetts Senate, to explore new collaborative opportunities around digital health. They were joined by Pamela Goldberg, CEO of Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, and Dr Susan Windham-Bannister from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center.

Patrick spoke about how everyone should have access to affordable and quality healthcare.

"To deliver on that goal, we must invest in innovative solutions, new technologies and global partnerships," he said.

Murray said that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts recognises the value of early stage innovators to develop healthcare solutions. She said the group was excited to meet the teams based at HealthXL to explore ways of collaborating together.

Seven companies that are pioneering innovations in the digital health space are currently engaged in the HealthXL programme. The accelerator is based in the Trinity Technology and Enterprise Campus at TCD.

The seven teams are an eclectic mix, hailing from Ireland, Canada, Australia, Africa, Finland and the US.

They include the Australian start-up goACT, which is developing software solutions for mental health professionals and their clients, and Ghana start-up ClaimSync, which is pioneering software to automate patients' records and process medical records electronically.

“My neck is sore and my back is sore,” Hadfield told a news conference from Houston, Texas, where he is undergoing medical tests and physiotherapy after his stint aboard the orbiting outpost.

He said he feels like he played a hard game of rugby or full-contact hockey yesterday.

Hadfield, who had served as commander of the International Space Station, also mentioned feeling dizzy and like he’s walking on hot coals because there are no callouses on his feet.

Raffi Kuyumjian, the Canada Space Agency’s chief medical officer and Hadfield’s flight surgeon, said Hadfield is dealing with temporary problems as he readjusts to gravity. They include shuffling his feet when he walks, soreness in his back, difficulty walking around corners and sometimes even bumping into corners.

In a statement, Kuyumjian said Hadfield feels dizzy and finds it challenging to walk up or down stairs. Also, his manual dexterity is a bit off.

Hadfield has also lost some bone density in his hips and back, Kuyumjian said, since those bones lost calcium in weightlessness.

“Astronauts typically lose 1pc of bone density per month while in zero gravity. This is similar, but not as severe, as the osteoporosis that affects the elderly,” said Kuyumjian, who added that Hadfield will likely recover most of that bone density loss in about a year.

Although Hadfield feels like an “old man”, he is in good spirits and is looking forward to the “rejuvenation” process, Kuyumjian said.

While aboard the International Space Station, Hadfield conducted scientific experiments and delighted his social media followers with photos and videos.

Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, provides the Irish team, which is being led by Prof Siobhan Clarke of the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin.

The programme is called ‘DIVERSIFY: Ecology-inspired software diversity for distributed adaptation in CAS (Collaborative Adaptive Systems)’, as it will explore diversity as the foundation for novel software design.  

“We anticipate that the unique DIVERSIFY programme will provide a breakthrough into automated technologies to maintain and evaluate stable systems at runtime,” Lero director Dr Mike Hinchey explained.

The programme brings together leading European researchers from software-intensive distributed systems and ecology in Ireland, France and Norway in order to translate ecological concepts and processes into software design.

“This is a novel and exciting programme which for the first time will use the principles of ecological and evolutionary systems and apply them to software development,” Clarke explained.

“Biodiversity is essential for the robustness and adaptability of ecological and many other systems. The limited amount of diversity in software is a major concern which we aim to address under this programme.”

Dr Hui Song of Trinity College Dublin, who will work on the three-year programme, added: “One of our international partners is the University of Rennes in France, which is a leader in ecological research so this will be a truly multi-disciplinary collaboration.”

The study will involve brain scans of 300 subjects, ages 14-24, to identify how their brains change as they age. The research may also reveal information about the emergence of mental disorders in young adults, BBC News reported.

Ed Bullmore, professor of psychiatry at Cambridge University, told BBC News that MRI scans will provide the researchers with good pictures of how the anatomy of the brain changes over the course of its development.

“We are particularly interested in how the tissue at the centre of the brain, known as white matter, might change over the course of development,” he said.

In basic terms, the white matter of the brain contains nerve fibres that connect to different regions of the brain.

The study by the Cambridge University researchers is expected to reveal gradual changes in the white matter of the subjects as their brains begin to regulate hormone-generated signals, with the result being the subjects gaining control of impulsive behaviours.

The study participants will also take tests to assess their propensity toward risky and impulsive behaviour.

The expectation is that the emergence of more sensible behaviour will correlate with changes in the wiring of the brain’s white matter.

The goal of the study is generate better understanding of teenagers’ brain chemistry and structure, so potential problems can be identified early on, enable more accurate prognosis, and ultimately facilitate the development of better treatments for disorders.

“By building understanding I think we can get away from the idea that mental illness in young people is primarily a moral problem or a random disaster and try and move understanding more toward a rational direction,” BBC News quoted Bullmore as saying.

“Can we think about psychosis, depression and other disorders that arise in adolescence as departures from the normal process of developmental change in the brain?”

MRI scans image via Shutterstock

The company will also provide funding to Heart Children Ireland to develop an information leaflet for parents of children suffering from congenital heart defects.

“Heart-related illnesses impact a high number of the Irish population and access to supportive, helpful and practical information is essential,” the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Frances Fitzgerald, TD, said.  

“Through the funding by Covidien, the Heartbeat Trust and Heart Children Ireland will be better able to support patients, allowing remote patient monitoring through the use of new mobile phone technology,” Fitzgerald said.

The Heartbeat Trust supports research and special services in the Heart Failure Unit in St Vincent’s University Hospital Group, Dublin. Through the funding provided by Covidien, the trust intends to develop its ‘Heart Phone Project’ allowing remote patient monitoring through the use of new mobile phone technology.

“Creating and delivering innovative healthcare solutions is core to our mission statement as a company, and we’re delighted to share the passion of Heartbeat Trust and Heart Children Ireland in helping to improve the health and well-being of people in our communities,” said Donal Balfe, vice-president in charge of manufacturing, respiratory and monitoring solutions at Covidien.

eHealth week runs 13-15 May, and one of the main events is the World of Health IT (WoHIT) – a gathering of 2,500 health and IT professionals on the advancement of health IT in Europe. It takes place in Dublin for the first time this year, to coincide with the High Level eHealth Conference co-organised by the European Commission and the Irish Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

Among a bevy of global e-health experts coming to town is Mark Knickrhem, global managing director of Accenture Health, which is involved with the Spanish trials. Based in Singapore, Knickrhem has a long track record of guiding large provider organisations in clinical change programmes. Prior to Accenture, he was a partner at McKinsey & Company, where he also focused on helping hospitals and physician organisations develop market-focused strategies supported with technology.
 
At a time when countries like Ireland and Spain are struggling to do more with less in their creaking health systems, Knickrhem painted a picture of an efficient and patient-friendly system through the use of technologies that already exist today.

Healthcare and the over-65s

The health system challenge is at its most severe when it comes to the over-65s, said Knickrhem. With our well-documented aging populations, the rising rates of chronic disease, and increasingly expensive treatments, the World Health Organization estimates that by 2015, chronic diseases will account for 64pc of all deaths, a 17pc increase over 2005.

As policy-makers worldwide struggle to deliver better outcomes at lower costs, Knickrhem, and many of his peers, believe that ‘connected-health systems’ - IT-enabled networks that capture all patient data and allow it to be shared - are the key to better, cheaper and more accessible care.

Indeed, RAND Health, the non-profit health policy research organisation, estimates that interoperable electronic medical records (EMRs) could cut between US$142bn and US$370bn from the projected 2018 US healthcare bill of US$4trn.

“The pressure is finally on the industry in all developed, and even developing countries, because of the aging population, and populations gaining weight as they age,” Knickrhem said.” If there’s anything that’s certain in medicine it’s that an older and heavier population is more expensive. And when you have so many people at once coming into the most consuming years of their lives, 60 years plus, then that is putting unbelievable budget pressure on health systems around the world.”

Yet the move to information-based systems has been slow in health compared to other sectors. “I’ve worked in many service industries over the years, telecoms, financial services and others, and there is a pretty good understanding now that service industries compete on information. That’s how they improve and deliver services.

“But there’s been just one industry that since its inception really hasn’t had electronic information at its fingertips. I think health is the last service industry stepping into the digital age.”

The digitisation of healthcare

Knickrhem points to two major trends in the last five to seven years which suggests a seachange. The first is the ‘digitisation’ of health, which is to say the electronic medical record itself (ERM), an integrated piece of software within one organisation, like a hospital system. The other, he said, is what is known as connected health or health information exchange, which involves bringing all the data together from disparate systems – hospitals, clinics, GP offices, even pharmacies - to create one view of the patient.

Both of these trends are most distinct in Asia and Australia, where significant investments are being made in e-health, Knickrhem said, prompting his own move from Los Angeles to Singapore in recent months. Closer to Europe, unsurprisingly, the Scandinavian countries are probably the most advanced. “Countries like Denmark and Finland are strong at the ERM level within organisations, and they are now stepping up to the level of connected health.”

Change of mindset

While the perception is often that concerns over security and data privacy are what has held the digitisation of health data back, Knickrhem said, while it can be an issue, the real barrier has been to change mindsets.

“When you are dealing with highly skilled physicians, this requires behavioural change, asking them to do things differently than they’ve done for years and years. Plus until a few years ago the technology simply wasn’t good enough.”

Now, he said, the technology has finally got to a point where productivity does not have to be impacted, and doctors are getting over the resistance to put technology between them and their patients. What is more, in many countries the pressure is coming from the regulatory bodies and financing agencies (Ministry for Health equivalents).

“They’re saying, ‘If we’re going to continue to pay we want to see output measures and that starts with metrics. They are being asked to report on these things, and of course that is something which is impossible off paper-based records,” Knickrhem said.

Knickrhem is familiar with the system in Ireland, as Accenture has worked on EMR projects with the likes of Tallaght Hospital in Dublin. “Ireland is at the early stages of the journey,” he said. “But the potential savings for a healthcare system like Ireland’s are huge.”

The real win from having digital health information is less about individual cases than about major policy changes based on data, he said, pointing to the major advances that could be made from looking across patient populations, and properly understanding how diseases are being treated at present, and where clinical pathways can be improved. “When you have all the data, there’s a big cost-saving opportunity.”

E-health pilot project

The most exciting development is around data analytics, he said. This brings us back to the e-health pilot being run with Accenture in the Basque country in Spain, where it is helping that region bring all of its clinical data together and beginning to add genomic data, in order to make solid predictions around the care of people who are already ill.

“We’re still years away from being able to predict this in healthy people, but what we’re getting really good at is being able to predict which already sick people are going to get really sick and need hospitalisation if there isn’t an intervention made, and then mobilising the medical system to do something about that.”

The result, he said, is significant savings in costs, and improvements in quality of life of patients who are, for example, 65 and over with multiple chronic conditions, who would need significant hospitalisation in coming years if they were not treated at home or in a doctor’s office in time.

“The data helps the patient tell you when they need intervention and allows you to organise home help teams, including doctors and nurses – specialists that visit them to keep them out of the hospital. We’re finding in some populations an 80pc reduction in the number of hospital days in that very sick group – which is a big user of hospital days. For me this is the real promise of integrated health.”

Enter big data

And this big data approach becomes even more meaningful if you start to add genomic data, said Knickrhem, potentially allowing analysts to comb through the data and identify patients that have a certain genetic background and family history, and certain clinical patterns, such as being at risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

It involves pushing a health system to behave differently. In Valencia, Spain, where similar pilots are being run, incentives are put in for the doctors to treat patients in their homes, thus keeping them out of the hospitals.

“In most health systems, even in Ireland, that would be a challenge right now, even though the system itself would benefit tremendously,” Knickrhem said. “I think this digitisation of healthcare and this big data revolution is going to both help and challenge the organisation of medicine, and the separation of financing and delivery.”

The other challenge will be the willingness and ability to invest. In the US, where such connected health systems are being put in place, the all in health IT costs rise from around 2pc of the overall health budget to the 4-5pc range, he said. So, while that compares favourably with the financial services industry, where that would stand at around 8-9pc, there is a considerable investment involved before the inevitable payback of, for example, reducing hospital days.

Pilots like that in Spain, which is already in the process of being rolled out to 200,000 people, will be key to adoption, he said. “The one thing that I’ve learned in my career in health is that when there is a good idea and you can prove it to scientists, physicians, and nurses, they adopt it very quickly.”

Adoption will ultimately come from necessity, he said, as among clinicians and policy-makers worldwide there is a growing realisation that the aging population coming through the system will either lead to untenable costs, or a level of pressure on waiting times and access to care which would be unacceptable to the population.

“This can and must impact health policy, because given the demographics we simply cannot continue with more of the same.”

A version of this article appeared in the Sunday Times on 12 May

The Minister of State for Research and Innovation, Seán Sherlock, TD, said that in addition to the funding, the Government is making the Professional Diploma in Mathematics for Teaching course available free of charge in locations across Ireland, with specific provision for teachers in Irish-medium schools.

The course covers mathematical content and knowledge, as well as teaching and learning strategies and approaches relevant to the Project Maths syllabi being rolled out in all schools.  

The course will be delivered locally and through online modules. It will consist of a blended learning programme based on a part-time (two-year) university-accredited professional diploma. 

Four hundred places are available in the course this year and the deadline to apply is 24 May.

NUI Galway and the University of Limerick, though their strategic alliance, will provide accreditation, while the course is provided through a consortium led by the National Centre for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching & Learning (NCE-MSTL), based in the University of Limerick.  

Maths teacher image via Shutterstock

Hadfield, who had been commander of the orbiting outpost, Marshburn and Romanenko returned to Earth aboard a Soyuz capsule, which descended by parachute southeast of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, at 8.31am Kazakh time (3.31am GMT).

Ground crew helped Hadfield emerge from the tight confines of the capsule after Marshburn and Romanenko. Once seated in a recliner, Hadfield waved, gave a thumbs-up, and made phone calls to friends and family.

NASA spokesman Josh Byerly said the three astronauts were doing very well, CBC News reported.

The astronauts will now return to their respective homes. Hadfield is from Canada, Marshburn is from the US, and Romanenko is from Russia. They travelled almost 99m kilometres (62m miles) while completing 2,336 orbits of Earth.

The trio arrived at the International Space Station on 21 December and spent 146 days in space, 144 of which were aboard the station, US space agency NASA said. During their time in the space lab, they carried out scientific experiments.

Hadfield also shared photos and videos with his followers on Twitter and Facebook and Google+ during his time in space. He recently shared, as a farewell to his mission aboard the International Space Station, a performance of David Bowie’s Space Oddity.

Today he was back on Twitter, to tweet about his safe return to Earth:

Pavel Vinogradov is now in command of the International Space Station, with flight engineer Chris Cassidy and cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin also still on board. Three additional crew members, including NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, will join them later this month, with their arrival scheduled for 28 May.

Dubbed the European Technology Summit, the event will feature speakers from companies such as Google, IBM, Amazon and Trend Micro, plus speakers from Irish companies, such as the email marketing software provider Newsweaver.

Topics that will be up for discussion on the day are big data, social media in business, cloud and web security, as well as future trends in areas such as robotics.

Speakers will include James Brown, Amazon's business development lead for Ireland and the UK, who will be discussing the technical and business aspects of cloud computing,

Rik Ferguson, vice-president of security research at Trend Micro, will be covering the threats and cyber-criminal activity that the security industry works to combat in the cloud.

Ronan Murphy, it@cork director and CEO of Smarttech, said the summit will give entrepreneurs the opportunity to network with global companies and also to gain insights to help make decisions around technology in their businesses in the coming years.

"Technology is key to competitiveness and operational efficiency and this makes it a critical part of all our businesses," he said.

On the day, there will also be a display of robots that have been created using technology from the VEX Robotics project. The EMC-sponsored project aims to nurture students' interest in the science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects. Some of the robots that have been created by students will be in action at the event.

The European Technology Summit will take place at City Hall in Cork City from 8am on Wednesday, 15 May.

To create the proof-of-concept device, the researchers, who hail from Arizona State University, used nano-scale materials and processes to emit green and red light separated by a wavelength of 97 nanometres. Their findings have been published in the scientific journal Semiconductor Science and Technology.

According to the researchers, the device is much more energy efficient than traditional LEDs as the colours are emitted as lasers, with sharp and specific spectral lines that are narrower than a fraction of a nanometre. This is in comparison to LEDs which emit colours in a broad bandwidth.  

The scientists used a process known as chemical vapour deposition to create a 41 micrometre-long nanosheet made from cadmium sulphide and cadmium selenide powders, using silicon as a substrate.

Prof Cun-Zheng Ning, the lead author of the study, said that semiconductors are traditionally 'grown' together layer by layer, on an atom-scale.

"Since different semiconductor crystals typically have different lattice constants, layer-by-layer growth of different semiconductors will cause defects, stress, and ultimately bad crystals, killing light emission properties."

It is because of this, according to Ning, that current LEDs cannot have different semiconductors within them to generate red, green and blue colours for lighting.  

However, recent developments in the field of nanotechnology mean that structures such as nanowires, nanobelts and nanosheets can be grown to tolerate much larger mismatches of lattice structures.

Ning said that while multi-colour light emission from a single nanowire or nanobelt has been achieved in the past, the researchers have realised lasers at two distinct colours.

"To physically 'put' together several lasers of different colours is too costly to be useful and thus our proof-of concept experiment becomes interesting and potentially important technologically."

He said that such technology could potentially be used for solid-state lighting and full-colour displays.

LED light image via Shutterstock

How do you get a therapeutic agent, like a drug or gene or cell, to where it needs to go in the body? That’s something Prof Sally-Ann Cryan spends a lot of time pondering. Because a new therapy may look fantastic on paper and in the lab, but unless it can get to its site of action in the body at the appropriate dose, it might as well not be there. 

“What I do is translational and molecular pharmaceutics, and that is about enabling the new molecules to get to the clinic, particularly where we are dealing with ‘difficult-to-deliver’ cargoes in the body,” explains Cryan, who is an associate professor of pharmaceutics in the School of Pharmacy at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI). 

Breathing new drugs into life

A graduate of pharmacy from Trinity College Dublin, Cryan had early experience in dispensing to patients with lung conditions and she has asthma herself. Both helped to pique her interest in delivering drugs into the lungs, and this a major theme in her research, which receives support through various funders, including the Irish Research Council and the Health Research Board.

Over the last decade, changes in the drugs and therapies that people are now looking to deliver into the lungs, and the advent of biologic drugs, has opened up new challenges.

“A lot of the current inhalers on the market are delivering small molecule drugs which are extremely potent at that site and that is the way they work, you don’t need a very efficient delivery system,” she explains. “The problem when we come into the new era of biotech molecules is that, for many of them, to be effective they must reach a specific site or target within a particular type of cell. They may also need to get down into the lower part of the lungs, and that’s not easy because of the complex anatomy there.”

The demand has driven a surge of innovation both in engineering new inhalers and also in developing new ways of formulating the drugs and enhancing delivery, says Cryan. She is now working on lung-based delivery platforms for various lung and systemic diseases and current projects in her lab are looking to tackle infection, such as tuberculosis, and inflammation in chronic conditions, such as cystic fibrosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (or COPD).

In many cases, sneaking the therapy into the lungs involves linking the biotech drug to a polymer, or coating it with a polymer capsule to carry it into the lungs and target it to the appropriate site of action. “We look at advanced polymeric systems and we also work with chemists to develop completely new polymers and materials,” says Cryan.

Academia and industry in the mix

In addition to looking at drug delivery in the lungs, Cryan is also an investigator in the Tissue Engineering Research Group at RCSI, led by Prof Fergal O’Brien, where she focuses on how agents, such as growth factors, can be released from scaffolds implanted into the body to help bone to regenerate. She is also working on an academic-industrial EU-funded project with Dr Andreas Heise at Dublin City University to investigate new hydrogels in drug delivery. She also has several industry collaborations, including a long working relationship with Galway-based Aerogen.

Cryan has seen a “seismic change” in how drug-delivery research is now being carried out in Ireland, with a number of new academic Schools of Pharmacy and research clusters, such as the Science Foundation Ireland-funded Irish Drug Delivery Network bringing academia and industry together.

“I work with academics and clinicians who have molecules, proteins or genes or cells they want to have delivered, and I also work with pharmaceutical and medical device companies,” she says. “And the big area now is convergent technology, where you are putting therapeutics together with medical devices and often using a material to enable that. We are at that interface where we can provide the know-how on what material to use, how to put that together and formulate it with a drug molecule so you can target your drug or use your device more effectively.”

Found in translation

But there are still challenges, and Cryan sees the big thrust now in developing more appropriate models to develop drugs for human use.

“There’s a lot that’s getting lost in translation - medicines are getting so far into the development process but then failing when they go into a human, and we are losing them because of models that don’t really mimic humans,” she explains. “But there’s a lot of fundamental research we can do to develop better tissue models, including diseased tissue in vitro. So we are trying to develop three-dimensional models of parts of the lung so we can check for toxicity and efficacy using human cells that can cross-talk to each other as they might in the body. Both in Ireland and on a more global scale you have pharmaceutical scientists, tissue engineers and cell biologists working together to try and come up with these kinds of models.”

Convergent Ireland

Cryan believes Ireland now has the enabling technologies to do well in drug delivery and research to improve translation of therapeutics to the clinic.

“Convergence is the big trend, bringing the aspects together - we have advances in biomedical research where we understand disease and the sites of disease better and we have new therapeutic options emerging to treat them,” she says. “It is about putting those together so we have the right therapeutics with the right materials and the right devices for delivery. Ireland has a lot of expertise in these areas, this is something we should be able to do well.”

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Sherlock was speaking at the opening of the three-day Future Internet Assembly, which started yesterday at Dublin City University's Helix venue.

The Future Internet Assembly is a research community-driven initiative that is supported by more than 150 research projects that have recognised the need to strengthen European activities on the future internet in order to maintain European competitiveness in the global marketplace.

The Dublin event is focusing on how European future internet research and innovation will support EU's competitiveness and enable a new wave of technologies. It was organised by the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG) at Waterford Institute of Technology.

Speaking yesterday, the Minister for Research and Innovation said that political agreement needs to be reached soon between the various European bodies on Horizon 2020.

Running from 2014 to 2020 with an €80bn budget, Horizon 2020 is the successor to the EU's FP7 programme.

“There must be a seamless transit between FP7 and Horizon 2020. It is critical that we get institutional agreement soon," said Sherlock.

He said that he was determined to progress this matter during the Irish Presidency of the EU.

“We do not want to see a hiatus or a vacuum develop," added Sherlock.

Welcome to the Machine weaves interviews and profiles of people who get up close and personal with technology. The conversation ultimately reveals that technology is not just about the latest gadgets or business deals, but what it means to be human.

The film will receive a special screening, which will be followed by a panel discussion, at the Light House Cinema in Smithfield, Dublin, at 7pm on 14 May. It comes as part of eHealth Week, a joint initiative of the Irish Presidency, the EU Commission and HIMSS Europe.

The panel members will discuss and debate the human relationship with technology, how it dominates now and will in the future, and its impact on healthcare.

Broadcaster Aine Lawlor will serve as moderator of the panel that includes Weider; UCD’s Dr Brian Caulfield; Dr Dermot Power, consultant in geriatric medicine at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in Dublin; Avril Daly of Fighting Blindness; and Ann O’Dea, CEO and co-founder of Silicon Republic.

Also at the Light House Cinema on the night will be a team from EKSO Bionics showcasing Ekso.  

Ekso is a wearable, battery-operated bionic exoskeleton that enables patients with lower extremity weakness or paralysis to stand and walk on level surfaces.

The special screening of Welcome to the Machine is free, but tickets are required.

The eclipse in Australia will begin shortly after sunrise before making its way over the Pacific Ocean. Because the moon is very nearly at a point farthest from Earth, it will appear to fully cover the sun, leaving a ring of sunlight known as the ring of fire.

At the peak of this eclipse, the middle of the sun will appear to be missing and the moon will appear smaller than the sun, obscuring up to 95pc of it.

The moon's shadow is set to begin its journey over Australia on its way to eastern Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Gilbert Islands, and then over the Pacific Ocean.

The Slooh Space Camera will be broadcasting a free, real-time view of the annular solar eclipse from Australia. Coverage of the eclipse will begin on 9 May (today) starting at 2.30pm PDT/5.30pm EDT/9.30pm UTC.

Slooh will also broadcast an additional feed of the sun from the Prescott Solar Observatory in Arizona.

Based in Woburn, Massachusetts, Terrafugia announced details of its first flying car prototype called the Transition last year. The two-seater personal aircraft has folding wings and will be capable of driving on roads and motorways and flying in the air using unleaded automotive fuel, according to Terrafugia. The vehicle's first test flight was carried out in March 2012.

The winged flying car is now nearing production, according to Terrafugia, and could be available in 2015. The flying car has a price tag of around US$279,000 and apparently has had more than 100 orders placed for it already.

_{Terrafugia's prototype of its Transition flying car leaves a garage in Massachusetts. Image courtesy of Terrafugia}

As for the company's plans for its next flying car, Terrafugia has started feasibility studies of the TF-X, a four-seater plug-in hybrid-electric flying vehicle.

Unlike the Transition, the TF-X would not need a runway for take-off but would be able to take off vertically from a level clearing of at least 100 feet in diameter. The vehicle would have twin 600 hp electric motor pods.

Terrafugia said the vehicle will be able to recharge its batteries either from its engine or by plugging into electric car charging stations.

Development of the vehicle is expected to take between eight and 12 years, however.

"This is the right time for us to begin thinking about the future of the company beyond Transition development," Terrafugia CEO Carl Dietrich said in a statement.

Learn more about the TF-X in the following video.

The name ‘Irish500’ is derived from the TOP500 project (which has ranked the world’s fastest computers on a biannual basis for the past 20 years) and does not denote the number of systems expected to appear on the list.

Like the TOP500, the Irish500 will rank Ireland’s fastest computers in a performance-based league table using the Linpack performance benchmark. The first list will be published in November this year and will be updated biannually from then on.

An independent committee of computer science researchers will maintain the list, including representatives from Dublin City University, University College Dublin, the College of Computer Training (CCT) and Aalto University, Finland.

“The development of an Irish supercomputer ranking list is a fundamental first step in highlighting the place Ireland occupies in terms of high-performance computing globally,” said CCT’s Dr Brett Becker. “It will help Ireland continue in its role of attracting the highest calibre of companies, people and funding in global IT. It will create quite a few ripples in international terms, since as a country Ireland is punching far above its weight when compared to other countries with much larger populations.”

The fastest computer in the world as of November 2012 is the Titan, located in Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, which has a Linpack performance rate of 17.59 petaflops per second. The fastest computer in Europe and No 5 in the world is IBM’s JUQUEEN at the Jülich Research Centre in Germany, which achieved 4.14 petaflops per second.

The Irish500 project is currently in a public consultation and participation phase and submissions of HPC installations for assessment are welcomed.

Supercomputer image via Dario Lo Presti/Shutterstock

The image combines three images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, taken on 3 May at 1.45pm EDT (6.45pm GMT).

The solar flare peaked at 1.32pm EDT (6.32pm GMT).

This flare is an M5.7-class flare, NASA said, the weakest flares that can still cause some space weather effects on Earth.

Solar flares, according to NASA, are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation can’t pass through the Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans, but flares can be strong enough to affect the layer of the atmosphere in which GPS and communications signals travel, NASA said. This interference can then disrupt telecommunications services.

Here’s a closer look at the solar flare that NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory snapped on 3 May:

The researchers, who are based at CRANN at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), have published their findings in the scientific journal Nano Letters.

Led by CRANN principal investigator Prof Georg Duesberg, the researchers have manufactured a sensor that is composed of a single layer of graphene on a silicon surface.

Often termed the 'wonder material', graphene consists of a sheet of carbon atoms, just one atom thick or about one hundred-thousandth the width of one human hair. It is believed to be 200 times stronger than steel.

Due to its unique properties, scientists are looking into the potential for graphene to be used in sensors to detect even the slightest change in signal.

The researchers at CRANN believe their sensor discovery could have commercial uses in air quality control systems, particularly in car manufacturing, where air quality is impacted by smog, exhaust fumes, odours and dust.

They also suggest that their graphene sensor discovery could lead to the improved detection of bacteria and parasites in drinking water.

Duesberg said the discovery could pave the way for much more functionally advanced and energy-efficient sensors.

"It could vastly improve the monitoring of air and water quality," he said.

Duesberg is one of the researchers involved in the Graphene Flagship project that has been awarded €1bn from the European Commission to explore the commercial potential of graphene over the next 10 years.

Brian Lawlor, a professor of old age psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and a consultant psychiatrist at St James's Hospital in Dublin, is heading up the international consortium, which has been awarded €6m in EU funding by the European Commission's research framework programme FP7. Nine EU countries will be involved in the trials.

The researchers will be carrying out the clinical trials to test whether the licensed drug Nilvadipine, which is already used to control blood pressure in patients, can be used in Alzheimer's patients to help improve memory and functioning, and also slow the rate of progression of the disease.

The research group, known as NILVAD, has recruited the first group of people who have been diagnosed with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease to take part in the trials.

In all, 500 patients will be taking part in the trials at 23 clinical sites involving Ireland, the UK, France, Greece, Sweden, Italy, Hungary, Germany, and the Netherlands.

In Ireland, 100 people will be participating via two hospitals – St Finbarr's Hospital in Cork and St James's Hospital in Dublin.

There have been no new licensed drug treatments for Alzheimer's disease since 2002. Lawlor said this trial, which is not sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, could have huge importance for the future treatment of Alzheimer's disease.

In 2008, he said St James's Hospital worked with the Roskamp Institute in Florida to carry out a safety study for the potential effectiveness of Nilvadipine in those with Alzheimer's.

Following the success of the safety study, the consortium is now proceeding with phase three of the clinical trial.

Size matters. Or, maybe to put it another way, surface area matters to the properties of a material. The greater the surface area, in general the more reactive it can potentially be.

Prof Valeria Nicolosi, ERC research professor at Trinity College Dublin’s School of Chemistry, School of Physics and CRANN, likes to help explain the concept using cheese - yes, the humble block of cheddar you might throw into your supermarket trolley. 

That block has a particular surface area in contact with the outside environment, but cut it in half and you increase the surface area for the same volume of cheese. Dice it up for a party and the surface area increases even more. Chop it up into nanocubes and your surface area for that total volume now soars, explains Nicolosi.

What does this have to do with everyday life - apart from being a handy conversation starter at the party? Nanomaterials with large surface areas have interesting properties, and Nicolosi is looking to harness those properties for more efficient storage of energy.

Thin and flexible

Nicolosi’s work focuses mainly on ‘two-dimensional’ layered materials. Probably the best known of this class is graphene - it was discovered in 2004 when researchers peeled atom-thick layers of carbon from graphite, the cheap stuff in your pencil tip, and the researchers then went on to win a Nobel Prize. 

Graphene, which is like a nanosheet of carbon atoms arranged like chicken wire, soon became celebrated as one of the strongest materials known, and its thinness and enormous surface area opened up exciting new possibilities. Why? Having a thin layer of a material rather than a big block of it is like dealing with a page of a book instead of the whole tome - the properties change, explains Nicolosi.  

“A book is not very flexible, it is mechanically not very robust, you can’t do much with it,” she says. “But if you have one page of that book, you would be able to fold it, wrinkle it and mechanically it will still be there, it is way more robust.”

Kitchen chemistry

But first you need to get those layers. Peeling individual, atom-thick layers from a larger material is a cumbersome and time-consuming process, so Nicolosi and Prof Jonathan Coleman at CRANN developed a deceptively simple way of making literally buckets of ultra-thin layers using what she describes as ‘kitchen chemistry’. The approach uses a soapy solution to exfoliate the two-dimensional layers so that they disperse into the liquid in their billions. “We did that with graphene and we were able to extend it to the other layered materials out in nature,” she explains, adding that she and Coleman are continuing to work together on the materials. “Collaboration is at the heart of science.” 

Layers of success

Nicolosi now has a European Research Council grant to look at how these materials could help improve devices for energy storage. “When you go down to this nanoscale, for the same volume of material you have a lot more surface area and the material will get more reactive, as well,” she explains. 

“And the final applications would be to use these materials for energy storage, to produce batteries and other systems that can store energy more efficiently than other systems on the market.” 

Nicolosi already has preliminary results to show that the materials can withstand a good deal of wear and tear in devices made in the lab, and this augurs well for making light products that go easy on the energy consumption, according to Nicolosi, who last year delivered the RDS/Intel Prize Lecture for Nanoscience. “Given the mechanical robustness of the material you could end up with devices that last much longer than the current devices out there on the market now,” she says. 

From Oxford to Dublin

Originally from Italy, Nicolosi came to Dublin via the University of Oxford, where she was working on nanomaterials. She chose to move to Trinity to be able to access the facilities and collaborate with other researchers in the field, she explains. 

“Being a lecturer in Oxford might be the dream of many other scientists, but for nanoscience, for what I do, Ireland has got a lot to offer,” she says. “The fact that Ireland has recently been ranked sixth for nanoscience in the world and eighth for materials science, that tells you about the quality of science that comes out of this country.”

Women Invent Tomorrow is Silicon Republic's year-long campaign to champion the role of women in science, technology, engineering and maths

Risk Lab: are you feeling lucky? will open to the public tomorrow and the free show is set to run until 23 June at the Science Gallery on Pearse Street.

The theme of the exhibition is about exploring risk, coincidence, probability and chance, while visitors will also be able to engage in live experiments using custom-built slot machines.

Upon entering the gallery, the first thing a visitor will spot is a virtual casino to the right, complete with a roulette wheel and a poker table. Jessica Stanley, a researcher at the Science Gallery, said the idea behind the roulette game is to challenge people's deep-seated perceptions about probability and luck.

A 'Cut your Losses' wall display depicts how casinos make money, showing the profits that are made on games such as roulette.

Take a gamble

Artist Michelle Browne will be hosting a series of live Texas Hold 'Em games at the poker table during the exhibition. She said people will be hooked up to biometric sensors that have been developed by Dublin company Shimmer Research to monitor their physiological responses to risks they are taking during games. These sensors read galvanic skin response – a measure of stress.

"During the games I will be talking to participants about their approach to risk-taking," explained Browne.

Another game that's sure to get plenty of attention from the public is 'Toppling Tower', a large stack of blocks to replicate the game of Jenga. Here, two people will be able to play one another while also wearing biometric sensors.

Niamh O'Mahony from Shimmer Research spoke about how the sensors will measure in real-time people's physiological reactions when they are faced with the possibility of the tower of blocks toppling.

Moving on to 'Don't Burst my Balloon' - this is where people will be able to virtually bet on how much they can inflate a balloon before it pops.

_{Joe Roche, a mediator at Science Gallery, pictured with Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin, co-curator of Risk Lab, at the roulette table}

Live experiments

Stanley explained that visitors can sign-up for live experiments and get a membership card before they head to the upstairs segment of Risk Lab.

There they can sit at slot machines (these are really experiment computers) and play games about risk taking. Interestingly, the data from these experiments will be then fed back to researchers who can learn more about how people make judgments.

Other delights include the 'Scare Booth'. This is where people will step inside a booth enveloped in darkness and their physical responses to risk will be tested.

Psychology researchers at both NUI Galway and Trinity College Dublin (TCD) have helped put the exhibition together, in addition to IBM Research.

Risk Lab is co-curated by the statistician David Spiegelhalter, who is the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University, and RTÉ presenter and maths researcher Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin, who is engaged in a PhD at Trinity College Dublin (TCD).

Spiegelhalter said Risk Lab will give people the opportunity to see risk in a new light.

"The exhibits are really engaging, and with luck will make people appreciate the wonders of uncertainty," he said.

According to Ní Shúilleabháin, the show will bring to life all of the chances and possibilities we meet in our daily lives while also exploring the maths and psychology behind them.

In the following video, both curators give more insight into the exhibition, plus we take you on a tour of the show!

Risk Lab show at Science Gallery 

Colm O’Neill, CEO of BT Ireland, Dr Tony Scott, co-founder of the exhibition, and budding student scientists, joined Kenny at the launch.

To celebrate the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition’s 50^th anniversary, BT is calling on all past entrants, visitors, teachers, judges, partners and supporters to connect with the exhibition again and send their birthday messages and memories of the exhibition via a virtual birthday card, or on Facebook or Twitter. 

A selection of birthday wishes will be projected onto the RDS, Dublin, in January 2014.

BT has created a new digital archive to accompany the birthday card. The archive displays material and iconic moments of the last 49 years of the exhibition. 

In addition to photographs from throughout the decades, the archive also includes indexed exhibition guides, forming a searchable database of students that competed in the programme. 

As part of the launch of the 50^th year of the exhibition, BT Ireland also announced that it will extend its commitment to organising and sponsoring the competition beyond 2014 and until 2016. 

Kenny congratulated everyone involved in the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition.

“The whole country has been impressed by the hard work and ingenuity of all of those who have taken part since the first competition was held in 1965. I always enjoy visiting the exhibition and seeing at first-hand the energy, passion, creativity and fun among the participants,” he said. 

“All of this would not be possible without the continued commitment of BT and the great work of their staff, the students, teachers and parents, who each year demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ireland’s bright future in scientific research and technological innovation is secure.”

O’Neill said that this year is about celebrating past achievements, as well as looking ahead to what BT would like the future to look like. 

“We believe that this exhibition is one of the best forums for engaging schools and the wider public in the critical skills of science, technology, engineering and maths, and are delighted to be a driving force behind it until at least 2016,” he said.

The next BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition will take place in the RDS, Dublin from 8-11 January 2014. The closing date for entries is 2 October 2013.