News 2019

Durham researchers named among world's best At Durham we've long had a global reputation for the high standard and impact of our research. Now we're celebrating because five of our researchers have been named among the world's best for the quality and influence of their work. The researchers are investigating the origins of the universe, nature-based answers to climate change, and the make-up of the Earth's crust.

Co-authoring a research paper with an established scientist early in an academic's career leads to significant future benefits for the junior researcher, finds a paper by UCL. This effect is much stronger for early-career researchers affiliated with less prestigious institutions, who are statistically less likely later in their careers to reach the same levels those at the most prestigious institutions will.

Forty-four academics are included in Clarivate's 'Highly Cited Researchers 2019' list, which recognises authors of the most influential research papers around the world. The results are comparable with university peers such as Oxford (55 researchers recognised), Cambridge (53) and Imperial College London (34) and represent an increase since last year, when 41 UCL researchers were recognised.

The effects of climate change are evident worldwide - and carbon capture and storage (CCS) - where CO2 is removed from the output of industrial processes and fossil fuel power plants - or is directly captured from the air - is gaining widespread attention as a potentially critical option for avoiding the dangerous impacts of climate change.

By Christoph Pelzl Since 2016 a team from TU Graz has been working on dependability in the Internet of things. After having achieved remarkable success, the eponymous research project is now going into the second phase. Smart systems are taking over the increasingly complex tasks of our private and professional daily lives.

In today's science and business worlds, it's increasingly common to hear that solving big problems requires a big team. But a new analysis of more than 65 million papers, patents and software projects found that smaller teams produce much more disruptive and innovative research. In a new paper published by Nature , University of Chicago researchers examined 60 years of publications and found that smaller teams were far more likely to introduce new ideas to science and technology, while larger teams more often developed and consolidated existing knowledge.