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17 September 2013 Most people are dissatisfied with having to work in an open plan office, University of Sydney research has found. PhD candidate Jungsoo Kim and Professor Richard de Dear from the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning found many feel open plan offices are disruptive to productivity.

A team of researchers, led by Colorado State University engineering professor John van de Lindt, has spent the last month shaking a four-story building on the world's largest outdoor shake table at the University of California, San Diego, to learn how to make structures with first-floor garages better withstand seismic shocks.

Researchers show reputation concerns can encourage people to act for the public good Appealing to people's desire for a good reputation is more effective than cold, hard cash, researchers at Harvard, Yale, the Federal Trade Commission and the University of California, San Diego, found in a study published June 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Is post-war industrial and pre-fab architecture worth preserving and renovating? To answer this question, architects conducted a three-year pioneering study into the restoration of modern buildings.

Many homes with poor energy efficiency are actually consuming far less energy than predicted, new research has found. The study has implications for national energy-saving policies and the economic viability of thermal retrofit programmes. This challenges the prevailing view that large cuts in energy consumption can be achieved by focusing purely on technical solutions, such as retrofitting homes.

All in one: A new electricity generating building component is being developed.

Excavation of 19,000-year-old hunter-gatherer remains, including a vast camp site, is fuelling a reinterpretation of the greatest fundamental shift in human civilisation - the origins of agriculture.

Some of the earliest evidence of prehistoric architecture has been discovered in the Jordanian desert, providing archaeologists with a new perspective on how humans lived 20,000 years ago. Inside the huts, we found intentionally burnt piles of gazelle horn cores, clumps of red ochre pigment and a cache of hundreds of pierced marine shells." —Dr Lisa Maher Archaeologists working in eastern Jordan have announced the discovery of 20,000-year-old hut structures, the earliest yet found in the Kingdom.

A world-first research project into people's usage of household air-conditioners is now recruiting participants who live in Sydney's inner west. The ARC-funded study is to be led by the eminent Professor Richard de Dear from the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning. The project aims to determine the threshold living room temperature that triggers people to switch on air-conditioning.

Just before Thanksgiving, PG&E work crews finished the hydrostatic pressure testing of gas transmission pipeline 132 near the Stanford campus. Two sections of pipe, called T-30 and T-31, were tested to more than 1.5 times their maximum allowable operating pressure. In the run up to the final test, both pipe sections experienced problems.

Novel use of CT scanning technology has allowed researchers at the University of Bristol to create a four-dimensional picture of how ants build their nests. Ant nests are some of the most remarkable structures in nature. Their relative size is rivalled only by our own skyscrapers but there is no architect or blueprint.

Matthias Kaschube , a lecturer in physics and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University, has published in the Nov. 4 online edition of Science Express results of research into the factors determining development of the brain's neural circuits. He is available to discuss his research with interested members of the news media, and a copy of Kaschube's study is available upon request.

BERKELEY — Ancient Polynesians went from building small-scale temples to constructing monumental, pyramid-shaped temples in just 140 years, not in four or five centuries as previously calculated, according to research led by a University of California, Berkeley, anthropologist and published this week in the print edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The team of neuroscientists and computer experts from the UK, US and Germany compared the way these systems are organised and found that the same networking principles underlie all three. Using data for the large part already in the public domain, including Magnetic Resonance Imaging data from human brains, a map of the nematode's nervous system and a standard computer chip, they examined how the elements in each system are networked together.

In a coordinated effort to further enhance its global perspective in teaching, research and problem solving, Columbia University is establishing the Columbia Global Center/South Asia in Mumbai, India, and the Columbia Global Center/Europe in Paris, France.

An international group of European and US scientists led by the Centre for Plant Integrative Biology at The University of Nottingham have uncovered a fascinating new insight into the unseen side of plant biology - the root. Although less visible than shoots, leaves and flowers, plant roots are critical to our lives.