Aktualitäten 2019

By Werner Schandor Jürgen Hartler hardly has time for swimming, his favourite pastime, because he's busy conducting research into mass spectrometry of lipids at UC San Diego - where the sea is on his doorstop. "I haven't had much time to go to the beach," explains the bioinformatics expert, who began his year-long stay at UC San Diego's Department of Pharmacology in October 2018.

Physicists develop new strategy to separate molecules In our daily lives, the purpose and function of an item is defined by either its material, e.g. a rain jacket is fabricated of water-proof material, or its shape, e.g. a wheel is round to enable a rolling motion. What is the impact of the two factors on the nanoscale? The impact of material, i.e. the chemistry of the building block, has been excessively varied and the impact on polymer properties investigated leading to new functional materials, as for example slush powders.

Raven observers show emotional contagion with raven demonstrators experiencing an unpleasant affect To effectively navigate the social world, we need information about each other's emotions. Emotional contagion has been suggested to facilitate such information transmission, constituting a basic building block of empathy that could also be present in non-human animals.

With a quantum coprocessor in the cloud, physicists from Innsbruck, Austria, open the door to the simulation of previously unsolvable problems in chemistry, materials research or high-energy physics. The research groups led by Rainer Blatt and Peter Zoller report how they simulated particle physics phenomena on 20 quantum bits and how the quantum simulator self-verified the result for the first time.

Researchers discover new factor influencing the spread of Legionella When people fall ill from bacterial infection, the first priority is to treat the disease. But where do these pathogens come from and how do they thrive in the environment before the infection occurs' An international team led by Matthias Horn from the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science at the University of Vienna has tackled this question using an important bacterial pathogen that causes lung disease.

By Birgit Baustädter ZombieLoad and Store-to-Leak Forwarding impact on the security of Intel computer processors. The patches developed last year are ineffective, so new updates and security solutions will be necessary. ZombieLoad and store-to-leak forwarding are the names of the new exploits which have just been announced by TU Graz security researchers Daniel Gruss , Moritz Lipp, Michael Schwarz and an international team.

By Christoph Pelzl TU Graz researchers develop driving-simulator courses for driving schools which can reduce collision risk between motorcycles and cars. Additional at the end of the text There are 4233 accidents involving motorcycles in Austria each year. In more than half the cases other vehicles are involved.

A novel material that consists of a single sheet of carbon atoms could lead to new designs for optical quantum computers. Physicists from the University of Vienna and the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona have shown that tailored graphene structures enable single photons to interact with each other.

By Birgit Baustädter IT-expert Christian Poellabauer conducts research on smart health at his home university Notre Dame du Lac in the US state of Indiana. In the summer semester he is carrying out research at TU Graz. Christian Poellabauer studied at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology). For his doctorate he moved to a different continent and worked at Georgia Institute of Technology in the US state of Georgia.

By Christoph Pelzl Researchers at TU Graz have discovered a means of suppressing singlet oxygen formation in lithium-oxygen batteries in order to extend their useful lives. Additional at the end of the text. Since 2012, Stefan Freunberger of the Institute for Chemistry and Technology of Materials at TU Graz has been working on development of a new generation of batteries with enhanced performance and longer useful lives, and which are also cheaper to produce than current models.

Researchers show young stars rapidly destroy Earth-like Nitrogen dominated atmospheres The discoveries of thousands of planets orbiting stars outside our solar system has made questions about the potential for life to form on these planets fundamentally important in modern science. Fundamentally important for the habitability of a planet is whether or not it can hold onto an atmosphere, which requires that the atmosphere is not completely lost early in the lifetime of the planet.

The human eye is particularly sensitive to green, but less sensitive to blue and red. Chemists led by Hubert Huppertz at the University of Innsbruck have now developed a new red phosphor whose light is well perceived by the eye. This increases the light yield of white LEDs by around one sixth, which can significantly improve the energy efficiency of lighting systems.

By Werner Schandor What does industry-scale cement bag filling have in common with a pit stop in Formula 1? Filling a 25kg paper bag with cement in the factory takes about three seconds, about as long as a pit stop. But packaging and paper manufacturer Mondi reckons this is too long. They asked TU Graz to study the material flow that is at work in this process.

By Christoph Pelzl Researchers at TU Graz describe the effects which occur upon evaporation of vanadium compounds in Chemical Science. Improvements for the development of SCR catalysts may be based on their results. Researchers at the Institute of Experimental Physics at TU Graz have investigated the detailed structure and thermodynamic behaviour of nano-cluster structures since 2012.

Birds-of-paradise are a group of songbird species, and are known for their magnificent male plumage and bewildering sexual display. Now, an international collaborative work involving Dept. of Molecular Evolution and Development of University of Vienna, Zhejiang University of China, and Swedish Museum of Natural History analyzed all together 11 songbird species genomes, including those of five bird-of-paradise species, and reconstructed the evolutionary history of their sex chromosomes.

When a particle is completely isolated from its environment, the laws of quantum physics start to play a crucial role. One important requirement to see quantum effects is to remove all thermal energy from the particle motion, i.e. to cool it as close as possible to absolute zero temperature.

By Christoph Pelzl In Nature Communications, researchers from Graz, Austria present new perspectives to prevent the spread of antibiotic resistances in hospitals. Additional at the end of the text. The number of people who die from antibiotic-resistant germs is increasing worldwide. The World Health Organization WHO considers the spread of antibiotic resistance and appropriate countermeasures as one of the most important global challenges nowadays.

The concept of the laser can be reversed: the perfect light source then becomes the perfect light absorber. Scientists at TU Wien have found a way to build such an anti-laser, based on random scattering. The laser is the perfect light source: As long as it is provided with energy, it generates light of a specific, well-defined colour.

Chemists in Vienna find a method to replace hydrogen with fluorine in organic molecules The development and improvement of pharmaceuticals plays the central role in the ongoing battle against human disease. Organic synthesis is the field that enables these developments as it offers the toolbox to diversify chemical structures.

BeyondC research project with partners from Austria and Germany starts in March The recently granted collaboration project "Quantum Information Systems Beyond Classical Capabilities (BeyondC)" coordinated by the University of Vienna will exploit the unique features of quantum science to go beyond the capabilities of classical technology.