What if, instead of just looking at a seismograph, we could listen to earthquakes in the form of a live flute performance? In other words, can we make music from the oscillation of a specific place on Earth? In a world premiere at the 2023 Internet2 Community Exchange, Dr Domenico Vicinanza, music composer and Senior Research Engagement Officer at GÉANT did just that. He mapped data in real time from the seismographic activity at Yellowstone...
Category - Research
A new Supercomputer that predicts weather patterns and anomalies Can you imagine a supercomputer powerful enough to make accurate predictions of high-impact weather up to two weeks ahead, of large-scale patterns up to four weeks ahead, and even global-scale anomalies up to a year ahead? The new High-Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) is developed to do just that! A very...
How GÉANT and the NRENs support the European COVID-19 research platform Thousands of researchers across the world are focusing their knowledge and resources on understanding the COVID-19 virus, and discovering a vaccine to fight it. Sharing knowledge, results and data is fundamental to this. Open science relies on research data being accessible, interoperable, and re-useable (known as the FAIR data principles). It also involves the close...
The Human Brain Project: navigating brain networks The human brain is a truly amazing and awe-inspiring thing. Performing feats that even the most sophisticated computers are only just starting to tackle, and doing so using a tiny amount of energy. Understanding the brain’s multi-level organisation and behaviours is a challenge so extraordinary that no single research project could claim to provide the full picture. Collaboration on a vast scale...
GÉANT and CLARIN: opening the door to Europe’s digital language library Imagine a library containing every piece of language research ever created in Europe – not just written research, but spoken and multimodal, too. Every recording, every study, every data set, all in one place. Scientists and researchers could share knowledge like never before. They’d have opportunities to mine, reference and visualise massive datasets. It would lead to...
Ever wondered what the planets sound like? As intrepid spacecraft roam the cosmos, the eerie sounds of outer space have long intrigued us. Which is why an innovative new artistic and scientific project is taking data from NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, and turning it into music. Result? A completely new way of studying this fascinating planet—with wider implications for science as a whole. The Mars soundscapes project uses sonification to...
As you read this, the world’s finest scientists and engineers are hard at work planning and building a telescope one hundred times more powerful than any other in existence. The Square Kilometre Array, known as the SKA, will become the world’s biggest radio telescope, surveying the sky ten thousand times faster than ever before. You might be imagining a vast, single telescope. But the reality is more like thousands of antennas. All dotted across...
In 2008, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN began smashing protons together, the world held its breath. As scientists prepared to recreate the big bang in a 17-mile tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border—it was the stuff of science fiction. Yet the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator is a very real attempt to understand the universe. And its home to some of the most important physics experiments of our time. But just...
The world has an energy issue: with demand likely to triple before the end of the century, the race is on for a sustainable and abundant energy supply. Energy generated from nuclear fusion could be one answer and ITER – one of the most ambitious energy research projects ever seen – is at the forefront of fusion research. WHAT IS ITER? 35 nations have joined forces in the ITER project, by far the largest international experimental campaign that...
BELLE II: The particle detector to better understand the universe Theoretical dark matter is one of the most elusive substances in the world and an important puzzle piece to decode the complexities of the universe’s movement and structure. Even the most practiced Standard Model, which is the golden rule for particle behaviour, does not explain all physics mysteries. Enter: Belle II is a new particle detector being developed to help researchers...