science wire

A full day workshop dedicated to the challenges ahead for solar shading took place at the R+T 2012 leading world trade fair for solar protection systems, held annually in Stuttgart, Germany.

Best Paper Award at the 20th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays for the Processor Architecture Laboratory team.

Researchers who have recently established their laboratory at the EPFL School of Life Sciences have identified a small RNA molecule that limits the pro-tumoral functions of macrophages.

Professor A. Berne, thesis director, and the whole LTE team, congratulate J. Jaffrain for his thesis on "Experimental quantification of the variability of the raindrop size distribution at small scales".

Chronic pain has a significant impact on the physical, social and emotional functioning of those who suffer from it.

Researchers at the EPFL have identified an important mechanism that could lead to the design of more effective cancer vaccines. Their discovery of a new-found role of the lymphatic system in tumour growth shows how tumours evade detection. Tumour cells present antigens or protein markers on their surfaces which make them identifiable to the host immune system.

Phage Pierces the Host Cell Membrane with the Iron-Loaded Spike. Bacteriophages with contractile tails and the bacterial type VI secretion system have been proposed to use a special protein to create an opening in the host cell membrane during infection.

An unexpected flaw has been detected of a system that is widely used for protection of online transactions.

The book "Remote Sensing Image Processing", edited by Gustavo Camps-Valls (Universitat de València), Devis Tuia ( LASIG laboratory), Luis Gómez-Chova, Sandra Jiménez and Jesús Malo, is now available at Morgan and Claypool publishers. The book deals with Earth observation, which is the field of science concerned with the problem of monitoring and modeling the processes on the Earth surface and their interaction with the atmosphere.

The proliferation of debris orbiting the Earth - primarily jettisoned rocket and satellite components - is an increasingly pressing problem for spacecraft, and it can generate huge costs.

Palmitoylated calnexin is a key component of the ribosome-translocon complex. A third of the human genome encodes N-glycosylated proteins.

Selective neutralization of APP-C99 with monoclonal antibodies reduces the production of Alzheimer's Aβ peptides.

Gaëtan Girardin, researcher in nuclear engineering, gives us the key to understanding nuclear reactor safety.

Mimicking Phosphorylation at Serine 87 Inhibits the Aggregation of Human α-Synuclein and Protects against Its Toxicity in a Rat Model of Parkinson's Disease. Several lines of evidence suggest that phosphorylation of α-synuclein (α-syn) at S87 or S129 may play an important role in regulating its aggregation, fibrillogenesis, Lewy body formation, and neurotoxicity in vivo.

How do you go about setting up a business? Hervé Lebret, start-up specialist and head of the Innogrant program at EPFL, answers a few questions.

Inventors with which type of education generate broader patents? Scientists or Engineers? Marc Gruber's latest paper to be published in Management Science explores the issue. Abstract: Building on the seminal work of Allen (1977), we contribute to the emerging micro-level theory of knowledge recombination by examining how individual-level characteristics of inventors affect the breadth of their technological recombinations.

News and Views The quest for a non-volatile memory technology that offers high storage density, high read and write speeds, and low power consumption has triggered intense research into new materials, mechanisms and device architectures. Among the successful memory technologies to emerge from these efforts have been the atomic switch, the resistive RAM and the magnetic tunnel junction.

Malaria remains a scourge of mankind, and the protozoan parasite responsible for the most virulent form of the disease, Plasmodium falciparum, is developing resistance against even the most recent molecules in the antimalarial arsenal.

A group of Chinese scientists have come to the EPFL to participate in a workshop on the water management of a 1'808'500 km2 catchment basin, 43 times the surface area of Switzerland.

Are you a student, doctoral, post-doctoral, with a diploma from EPFL, from the University of Lausanne, or from any other Swiss university? If you dream of launching your own company, or if you want to get your project off the ground, we give you a hand-up over six months or in only 54 hours.

Targeting Sirtuin 1 to Improve Metabolism: All You Need Is NAD+? (Review) Sirtuin 1 (SIRT1) is an evolutionarily conserved NAD+-dependent deacetylase that is at the pinnacle of metabolic control, all the way from yeast to humans.

Silicon Filaments in Silicon Oxide for Next-Generation Photovoltaics. The group of Christophe Ballif (PV-LAB - Photovoltaics and Thin Film Electronics Laboratory ) demonstrate, on the basis of advanced TEM techniques, a new, mixed phase Si/SiO2 material, which they call filamentous SiOx.

Cultural System or norm circles? An exchange. This article takes the form of a debate between the two authors - Margaret S. Archer (CDH - Centre for Social Ontology ) and - Dave Elder-Vass (Loughborough University, UK) on the social ontology of propositional culture.

Researchers have given pinewood the hardness and smooth touch of precious wood. L'EPFL+ECAL Lab presents the first objects made of this new material in Helsinki today.

News in brief Boris Grot from the Parallel Systems Architecture Laboratory (PARSA) has been published in the last IEEE Micro's special issue; Top Picks from Computer Architecture Conferences. His paper "Kilo-NOC: A Heterogeneous Network-on-Chip Architecture for Scalability and Service Guarantees" has been written with collaborators from the University of Texas, NVIDIA and Carnegie Mellon University.

RNA profiling and ChIP-Sequencing reveal that PTF1a stabilizes pancreas progenitor identity via the control of MNX1/HLXB9 and a network of other transcription factors.

A guide to analysis of mouse energy metabolism.

The group of Carl Petersen (LSENS - Laboratoire de traitement sensoriel ) investigated the impact of thalamus on ongoing cortical activity in the awake, behaving mouse.

Sustained expression of PGC-1α in the rat nigrostriatal system selectively impairs dopaminergic function.

Large-Scale Simulations of a-Si:H: The Origin of Midgap States Revisited. Large-scale classical and quantum simulations are used to generate a-Si:H structures.

A cobalt complex redox shuttle for dye-sensitized solar cells with high open-circuit potentials. Dye-sensitized solar cells are a promising alternative to traditional inorganic semiconductor-based solar cells.

Modelling cholera epidemics: the role of waterways, human mobility and sanitation.

Jean-Louis Scartezzini, head of EPFL's Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory, is passionate about Minergie—a Swiss label for energy consumption in buildings and the most widely applied building energy standard in the world with almost 20,000 buildings.

Rather than just fixing corroding concrete infrastructure, Professor Eugen Brühwiler and his team of engineers have shown that it can be improved using ultra-high performance fiber reinforced concrete.

Babak Falsafi, Pascal Fua and Emre Telatar have been elevated to IEEE Fellows this year. This brings the number of IC professors who are IEEE Fellows to ten, a quarter of the faculty.

EPFL mathematicians have shown that the risk of extreme climate events is largely underestimated. They are developing a model for better understanding the impact of climate change.

Live-Cell dSTORM of Cellular DNA Based on Direct DNA Labeling. Super-resolution (SR) fluorescence imaging relies on specially adapted microscopes and analysis software, but equally important are the fluorescent probes used to label biological proteins and molecules of interest.

PARK9-associated ATP13A2 localizes to intracellular acidic vesicles and regulates cation homeostasis and neuronal integrity.

Benzothiazinones Are Suicide Inhibitors of Mycobacterial Decaprenylphosphoryl-β-d-ribofuranose 2′-Oxidase DprE1.

Using a heating system, physicists have succeeded for the first time in preventing the development of instabilities in an efficient alternative way relevant to a future nuclear fusion reactor.

Clearing the Clouds: A Study of Emerging Workloads on Modern Hardware. The emergence of global-scale online services has galvanized scale-out software, characterized by splitting vast datasets and massive computation across many independent servers. In a paper appearing in ASPLOS 2012, Profs.

Genetics - Variable Outcome of Mutations. Why do some mutations produce a particular trait or disease, whereas others only increase the likelihood of such an outcome? One explanation is that other variations in the DNA sequence strengthen or weaken the effect of a given mutation, although environmental factors may also have an impact.