news 2014

Several universities have come together to construct Austria's most powerful mainframe computer. Phase VSC-3 (Vienna Scientific Cluster 3) offers not only impressive computing power, but also serious energy efficiency. Austria's scientific community has a new super computer. Comprising more than 32,000 individual processor cores, the VSC-3 cluster is now being put into operation in the Science Center at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien).

Interactions between flowering plants and their pollinators include some of the most elaborate and intriguing relationships known to science. Agnes Dellinger from the Department of Botany and Biodiversity Research of the University of Vienna and her co-authors have studied the pollination biology of a group of small trees or shrubs that occur in mountainous Central and South American rainforests.

Men born in November, December or January are more likely of being left-handed than during the rest of the year. While the genetic bases of handedness are still under debate, scientists at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, obtained indirect evidence of a hormonal mechanism promoting left-handedness among men.

Modern logic unleashed new areas of mathematics. Even when language and intuition fail, conclusive theories can be constructed with the help of logic. When little children share chocolates, they already have to deal with numbers. Even complicated mathematical objects can often be grasped intuitively.

A group of physicists has developed a new technology to transfer magnetic fields to arbitrary long distances, which is comparable to transmitting and routing light in optical fibers. Oriol Romero-Isart and his colleagues have theoretically proposed and already tested this new device experimentally. In today's high-tech world, transferring electromagnetic waves is essential for many technologies.

The calorie free sweetener erythritol is widely used in Asia; it is also gaining popularity in Europe and America.

The great Viennese logician Kurt Gödel studied statements which refer to themselves - and his results shook the foundations of mathematics. "All Cretans are liars", said Epimenides, a Cretan. But this means that his statement must be a lie too. But then it is false that Cretans are liars and the statement must be true.

At the Vienna University of Technology a system of coupled lasers has been created which exhibits truly paradoxical behaviour: An increase in energy supply switches the lasers off, reducing the energy can switch them on. Sound waves fade, water waves ebb, light waves are dissipated by a wall. The absorption of waves is a very common phenomenon.

In a close collaborative effort, Spanish and Austrian physicists have experimentally encoded one quantum bit (qubit) in entangled states distributed over several particles and for the first time carried out simple computations on it. The 7-qubit quantum register could be used as the main building block for a quantum computer that corrects any type of error.

The quantum tunnel effect manifests itself in a multitude of well-known phenomena. Experimental physicists in Innsbruck, Austria, have now directly observed quantum particles transmitting through a whole series of up to five potential barriers under conditions where a single particle could not do the move.

When concrete shells are constructed, they usually have to be supported by elaborate timber structures. A revolutionary technique developed at the Vienna University of Technology now uses inflatable air cushions instead. Large shell structures made of concrete or stone are hardly ever built any more.

Using miniaturized laser technology, a tiny sensor has been built at the Vienna University of Technology which can test the chemical composition of liquids. They are invisible, but perfectly suited for analysing liquids and gases; infrared laser beams are absorbed differently by different molecules.

At TU Vienna, a new method was developed to utilize quantum mechanical vibrations for high precision measurements. The well-known concept of the Ramsey interferometer is applied to a complex multi particle system consisting of hundreds of atoms. Sometimes quantum particles behave like waves. This phenomenon is often used for high precision measurements, for instance in atomic clocks.

Imagine a tower builds itself into the desired structure only by choosing the appropriate bricks. Absurd - and however, in the nano world this is reality: There an unordered crowd of components can initiate the formation of an ordered structure - a process known as self-assembly. The physicists Christos Likos (University of Vienna), Emanuela Bianchi and Gerhard Kahl (both Vienna University of Technology) investigate how they can control the ordering of such self-assembling structures and found out how to switch the assembly process on and off.

The field of artificial intelligence is progressing. TU Vienna is a major center of this line of research. Several conferences on this topic will be held during the "Vienna Summer of Logic". The ball does not fit into the suitcase, because it is too small. What is too small? The ball or the suitcase? For humans the answer is evident, but computers still cannot handle such simple questions.

Imperfections in the regular atomic arrangements in crystals determine many of the properties of a material, and their diffusion is behind many microstructural changes in solids. However, imaging non-repeating atomic arrangements is difficult in conventional materials. Now, researchers at the University of Vienna have directly imaged the diffusion of a butterfly-shaped atomic defect in graphene, the recently discovered two-dimensional wonder material, over long image sequences.

Some years ago, Rudolf Grimm's team of quantum physicists in Innsbruck provided experimental proof of Efimov states - a phenomenon that until then had been known only in theory. Now they have also measured the second Efimov resonance of three particles in an ultracold quantum gas, thus, proving the periodicity of this universal physical phenomenon experimentally.

Researchers at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories (MFPL) of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna made a breakthrough for the Platynereis model system, as they describe the first method for generating specific and inheritable mutations in the species. The method, in combination with other tools, now places this marine bristle worm in an excellent position to advance research at the frontiers of neurobiology, chronobiology, evolutionary developmental biology and marine biology.

Why do we yawn? We tend to yawn before sleep and after waking, when we are bored or under stimulated. We yawn in the anticipation of important events and when we are under stress. What do all of these have in common? Researchers from the University of Vienna, Austria, and the Nova Southeastern University and SUNY College at Oneonta, USA highlight a link with thermoregulation, and in particular, brain cooling.

Scientists of the Max F. Perutz Laboratories of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna, together with colleagues of the ETH Zurich, have now shown how double stranded RNA, such as viral genetic information, is prevented from entering the nucleus of a cell. During the immune response against viral infection, the protein ADAR1 moves from the cell nucleus into the surrounding cytoplasm.