Publication date: 2012-02-10
Editorial
This week’s CORDIS Express
features news on ecosystems, future technologies and innovation for
European consumers. According to an EU-funded study, the genetics of
arctic plants are under serious threat from climate change.
Information and communications technology working with open data to
save marine biodiversity. Birds are having a hard time adapting to
climate change. Life on Mars would have to face a very dry
environment. An EU-funded project has developed innovative wrapping
that is sustainable and money-saving for consumers. Unconventional
and cutting-edge technologies are finding a home in the EU’s Future
and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme. Researchers have found
details on how hearing loss and touch sensitivity may be connected.
Finally and Briefly, there’s research proof that people really do
think differently.
News - Top Stories
Take maps of marine
biodiversity and cross-reference them with records of fish catches
and you should get a clear picture of where fish stocks are most at
risk. Doing so could help save the world's oceans, but needs a huge
amount of complex data to be processed and analysed. EU-funded
researchers are solving the problem with an innovative,
inspired-by-nature approach to e-infrastructures and looking at ways
open data initiatives can be integrated. E-infrastructures use grid
and cloud computing to harness the storage, processing and software
functionality of a multitude of distributed resources.
Birds are finding it
increasingly difficult to adapt to Europe's warming climes. That is
the warning from a pan-European group of researchers in a major new
study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study,
which received funding from four different EU-funded projects, brings
together scientists from the Czech Republic, Germany, Spain, France,
the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Over the
past two decades, Europe's climate has been getting steadily warmer,
and set temperatures have shifted northwards by 250 km, making life
unbearable for species of bird and butterfly which thrive in cool
temperatures.
An international team of
researchers has concluded that Mars may have been arid for hundreds
of millions of years, meaning it would have been too hostile for any
form of life to survive on its surface over this period. For 3 years,
the researchers from Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland,
the United Kingdom and the United States have been analysing
individual particles of Martian soil that were gathered as part of a
2008 NASA Phoenix mission to Mars. The Phoenix, a robotic spacecraft
that was sent to explore Mars by an international consortium of
scientists led by NASA, landed on Mars in May 2008.
These articles have been taken from CORDIS
News, a daily news service updated every weekday
lunchtime. For more research and innovation headlines, go to
the CORDIS
News homepage.
Focus on Innovation
An EU-funded team of
researchers has developed a biomaterial from whey protein as well as
a commercially viable method of producing multifunctional films on an
industrial scale. This is steps ahead of the conventional films based
on petrochemicals. The results are an outcome of the WHEYLAYER ('Whey
protein-coated plastic films to replace expensive polymers and
increase recyclability') project, which received more than EUR 2.5
million under the 'Research for the Benefit of SMEs (small and
medium-sized enterprises)', Seventh Framework Programme Capacities
Work Programme of the EU. Industry will benefit immensely from this
latest innovation, because it will help keep their food products safe
from oxygen, moisture, and chemical and biological contamination. The
upshot of this development is that foods will remain fresh for as
long as possible.
Future of Research
Go forth and explore the
frontiers of science and technology! This is the unspoken motto of
the Future and Emerging Technologies programme (FET), which has for
more than 20 years been funding and inspiring researchers across
Europe to lay new foundations for information and communication
technology (ICT). The vanguard researchers of frontier ICT research
don't always come from IT backgrounds or follow the traditional
academic career path. The European Commission's FET programme
encourages unconventional match-ups like chemistry and IT, physics
and optics, biology and data engineering. Researchers funded by FET
are driven by ideas and a sense of purpose which push the boundaries
of science and technology.
Around Europe
A European team of
researchers has discovered that people with a specific form of
inherited hearing loss are more sensitive to low frequency vibration.
Presented in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the findings provide
insight on the association between hearing loss and touch
sensitivity. Specialised skin cells must be tuned to enable a person
to 'feel'. Led by the Germany-based groups Leibniz-Institut für
Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP) and the Max Delbrück Center for
Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch, researchers assessed people
with hereditary DFNA2 hearing loss to get a better perspective on
their sense of touch, and not on their ability to hear.
Top Events
An event entitled 'Advances
in atmospheric science and applications' will take place from 18 to
22 June 2012 in Bruges, Belgium. The event will be an opportunity for
scientists and data users to present first-hand and up-to-date
results from their ongoing research and application development
activities using data from atmospheric instruments on the European
Remote-Sensing Satellite (ERS-2), Environmental Satellite (Envisat),
polar orbiting meteorological satellites (Metop) and European Space
Agency (ESA) Third Party Missions. The conference will be organised
around oral and poster presentations, roundtable discussions and
demonstrations
An event entitled 'ICT Finance
Marketplace investment forum' will take place from 25 to 26 March
2012 in Lisbon, Portugal. It will be a chance for entrepreneurs the
opportunity to showcase their business in front of an international
network of venture capital and corporate investors, strategic
partners and expert advisors. The 'ICT Finance Marketplace' project
is funded by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for
Research and Technological Development. The project's aim is to
improve access to finance for small to medium-sized enterprises
engaged in information and communication technology innovation and
provide entrepreneurs with opportunities to showcase their business
in front of investors.
Calls and Tenders
The EU-supported 'Future
internet core platform' (FI-WARE) project has announced its First
Open Call for New Project Partners. FI-WARE is delivering a new
service infrastructure, building upon generic and reusable building
blocks called 'Generic Enablers' (GEs). A portion of the project
budget has been reserved to fund specific tasks to be carried out by
a new beneficiary or beneficiaries which will join the consortium
after start of the project. These later-joining beneficiaries are
selected by means of a series of competitive open calls.
Partners Service
Bourgogne Innovation from
Dijon, France is offering expertise in knowledge management systems
based on ontologies, databases and business rules for analyses and
simulations of complex systems. The introduction of knowledge like
ontologies into business processes helps enrich automatic processing,
management, data sharing. Potential applications are possible in any
domain in which knowledge can be modellised and applied, such as web
systems, signal processing, engineering, data mining, machine
learning, architecture, archaeology, physics, biology or
nanotechnology. The French researchers have also developed several
software programs that are being marketed.
The CORDIS Partners Service helps you to find research
collaborators in order to benefit from EU or other funding.
You can also search by profile type, programme and/or
country to Find project partners for FP6 and FP7.
Projects Update
The 'Promoting
participation of high-tech research-intensive SMEs in Health' (FIT
FOR HEALTH) project is working to enhance the participation of
European small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in calls for the
Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) 'Health' Theme. FIT FOR HEALTH
offers targeted support measures, covering the entire innovation
pipeline of the Health sector. SMEs and researchers are supported
during all phases of FP7-projects, including consortium building,
proposal writing, grant negotiation, project management and efficient
valorisation of project results. Cooperation between SMEs and
academia is being by dedicated services and tools.
The CORDIS FP6 Find a Project section
offers factsheets and contact details for projects funded
under the Sixth Framework Programme. You can also browse
the FP5 projects section (archived) to see what kinds of
research proposals have been chosen for European funding in
the past.
Finally and Briefly
If you've ever thought that other people think differently from
you, you might right. Well, actually they might be right and you
might be wrong, but how you both reached your conclusions may be the
results of how people process information.
Researchers from the University of London in the UK set out to
study differences in how British and Chinese people recognise people
and the world around them.
