news 2017

TU Graz highlights new features in the Smart City project "STELA". Instead of relying on high tech for the thermal refurbishment of existing multi-storey buildings, social compatibility returns to the centre stage of the project. Anna has now got more room. A wheelchair user, she lives on the ground floor of an 11-storey house in Leoben.

An answer to a quantum-physical question provided by the algorithm Melvin has uncovered a hidden link between quantum experiments and the mathematical field of Graph Theory. Researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna found the deep connection between experimental quantum physics and this mathematical theory in the study of Melvin's unusual solutions, which lies beyond human intuition.

A remarkable discovery was made at TU Wien recently, when particles known as 'Weyl fermions' were discovered in materials with strong interaction between electrons. Just like light particles, they have no mass but nonetheless they move extremely slowly. There was great excitement back in 2015, when it was first possible to measure these 'Weyl fermions' - outlandish, massless particles that had been predicted almost 90 years earlier by German mathematician, physician and philosopher, Hermann Weyl.

A study carried out by an international team of researchers and published in the journal Physical Review X shows that ion-trap technologies available today are suitable for building large-scale quantum computers. The scientists introduce trapped-ion quantum error correction protocols that detect and correct processing errors.

A wildlife crossing over the upcoming Koralm railway is being built, using a new construction technique developed by TU Wien. Traditional support structures are replaced by an air cushion. The shell construction methods which are usually used to build bridges and domes generally rely on expensive support structures.

Sexualized representations, especially the emphasis of secondary sexual characteristics, can change the way we perceive an individual. An international team of researchers led by Giorgia Silani from the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Vienna has shown that empathic feelings and brain responses are reduced when we observe the emotions of sexualized women.

Rowhammer attacks make use of hardware vulnerabilities in order to access computer systems. TU Graz researchers have discovered a new type of attack - and raise questions about protective mechanisms. "When a system is regarded as absolutely safe, our curiosity is awakened," explains Daniel Gruss from the Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communication Technology working group, the researcher is occupied with the security of IT systems and in particular rowhammer attacks.

The first study to compare ancient and living female bones shows the routine manual labour of women during early agricultural eras was more gruelling than the physical demands of rowing in Cambridge University's famously competitive boat clubs. Researchers von der University of Cambridge und der Anthropologe Ron Pinhasi von der Universität Wien say the findings suggest a "hidden history" of women's work stretching across millennia.

The Computer Scientist Matteo Maffei (TU Wien) is awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project "Browsec: Foundations and Tools for Client-Side Web Security" . He is working on a plugin that will make browsers safe - and is logically impossible to fool. We are hardly aware of the dangers we face when we are browsing the web.

Quantum devices allow us to accomplish computing and sensing tasks that go beyond the capabilities of their classical counterparts. However, protecting quantum information from being corrupted by errors is difficult. An international team of researchers from Innsbruck, Harvard, Copenhagen and Waterloo put forward a new method to protect quantum information stored in trapped ions.

Multidrug resistance of microbes poses a serious global threat to human health. Such resistant strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae significantly reduce therapeutic options for the treatment of Klebsiella-induced, potentially fatal pneumonia or sepsis.

The Goffin's cockatoo is not a specialised tool user in the wild but has shown the capacity to invent and use different types of tools in captivity. Now cognitive biologists from the University of Vienna and the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna tested these parrots in a tool use task, requiring the birds to move objects in relation to a surface.

By Birgit Baustädter The research area of molecular electronics focuses on miniaturisation. It's a further development of microelectronics and deals with circuits at the molecular level. Electronic objects of daily life are becoming increasingly smaller - but at the same time more powerful and efficient.

The quantum world is fragile; error correction codes are needed to protect the information stored in a quantum object from the deteriorating effects of noise. Quantum physicists in Innsbruck have developed a protocol to pass quantum information between differently encoded building blocks of a future quantum computer, such as processors and memories.

Quantum physicists in Oriol Romero-Isart's research group in Innsbruck show in two current publications that, despite Earnshaw's theorem, nanomagnets can be stably levitated in an external static magnetic field owing to quantum mechanical principles. The quantum angular momentum of electrons, which also causes magnetism, is accountable for this mechanism.

Transitions occurring in nanoscale systems, such as a chemical reaction or the folding of a protein, are strongly affected by friction and thermal noise. Almost 80 years ago, the Dutch physicist Hendrik Kramers predicted that such transitions occur most frequently at intermediate friction, an effect known as Kramers turnover.

Starting shot for Christian Doppler Laboratory for Model-Based Control of Complex Test Bed Systems. From vehicles to solar energy systems, practically all systems are becoming more and more complex, are being quickly further developed, and have to be comprehensively tested before use. This calls for suitable high-performance and flexible test beds; but developing them is extremely challenging.

Induction heating can completely change the energy budget of an exoplanet and even melt its interior. In a study published by Nature Astronomy an international team led by the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences with participation of the University of Vienna explains how magma oceans can form under the surface of exoplanets as a result of induction heating.

Illnesses such as cancer and multiple sclerosis may also be associated with lipids. Disorders are difficult to assess due to the diversity of lipids. Graz scientists present a new tool for the analysis of lipids in Nature Methods. No lipids, no life. In all organisms, lipids form cell walls, store energy and release it when necessary, and play an important role in cell signalling.

Scientists around Tetyana Milojevic from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Vienna are in search of unique biosignatures, which are left on synthetic extraterrestrial minerals by microbial activity. The biochemist and astrobiologist investigates these signatures at her own miniaturized "Mars farm" where she can observe interactions between the archaeon Metallosphaera sedula and Mars-like rocks.