“Space and earth science are drivers of technical development, and with better instruments and more computing power we hope to realise many more ideas in the future,” says Eskil Varenius from the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at Chalmers University of Technology.
Engineers and medical doctors from a number of institutions in Mexico participate in telemedicine projects with their peers in Asia that enable the exchange knowledge and development of new techniques to help with the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.
Academy Professor Petri Toiviainen’s research team at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, has set out to understand what happens in the brain when listening to music. Their experiments utilize Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and a supercomputer cluster provided by the Finnish research and education network CSC.
“It’s a very exciting time for physicists. The Higgs boson discovery is a milestone for the physics community, and for human understanding of the fundamental laws that govern the Universe. Australian research groups have been part of this for the best part of 25 years,” says Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics Director Prof Geoffrey Taylor.
The Square Kilometre Array, or SKA, is the biggest science project New Zealand has ever been involved in, and it will produce more data than the world has ever seen.
Japanese researchers – together with colleagues from around the world – are analysing data from the Joint ALMA Observatory, located in a remote part of Chile on the Atacama plateau, 5000 meters above sea level. High-speed research networks enable researchers to carry out their studies wherever they are situated, without needing to be at the observatory.
Several research and education networks are breaking new ground in their effort to develop a system for digitizing exams. But still there is a long way to go.
Moroccan and French researchers are using high-speed networks to combine their expertise in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing to produce new thematic maps of
Agadir, Morocco and to monitor this fragile landscape.
The surgeons at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, Korea, are pioneers in minimally invasive surgery. Through live streaming of operations Prof. He-Seong Han and his staff have been able to train hundreds of surgeons across Asia, without need or cost for them to travel to Korea.
Understanding how the environment is altering through ongoing monitoring is key to coping with the effects of climate change. Working with European partners, the Central Asian Institute of Applied Geosciences (CAIAG) in Kyrgyzstan is able to monitor melting glaciers and mitigate the risks to the local population.
Whenever she needed to do an eye examination, seamstress Ana do Nascimento used to wake up before sunrise, take a bus that took two hours to get to downtown Goiânia and spend the entire morning in a public hospital. Today, thanks to ICT, the “examination day” is no more than 30 minutes.
Ross Vennell is a man driven by a challenge. He is a physical oceanographer investigating how we could generate electricity from tidal currents, “a bit like having wind turbines under the water”. New Zealand is one of the best places on the planet to extract energy from the ocean, and Ross is trying to estimate how much power we could actually get from turbines.