University of Manchester

  • Scientists at the University of Manchester in the UK have developed flags that are reckoned to be the first to harvest solar and wind at the same time. Not enough to power a house, or even a gadget such as a smartphone, but could be enough for set it and forget it remote sensors.
  • After 12 years of work, researchers at the University of Manchester in England have completed construction of a "SpiNNaker" (Spiking Neural Network Architecture) supercomputer. It can simulate the internal workings of up to a billion neurons through a whopping one million processing units.
  • ​If you're building a spacecraft that's going to be landing on a planet that has an atmosphere, then you'd better give it a heat shield. Although some approaches to such shields can be heavy or complex, a University of Manchester PhD student has developed one that's simple, cheap and lightweight.
  • Science
    Paleontologists have long wondered about the skeletons of a strange, ancient fish family called heterostracan. But now UK scientists say they’ve cracked it, declaring the 400 million-year-old fossils to be the oldest examples of bone ever found.
  • ​Chronic skin ulcers such as those associated with diabetes are notoriously difficult to treat. As a result, we've seen experimental approaches such as spray-on skin, ultrasound band-aids, and silver-laced dressings. Now, scientists are getting very good results using a high-tech lamp.
  • Science
    ​In the movie "Predator," Arnold Schwarzenegger hid from an alien's night vision system by covering himself in mud. He might have found things much easier, however, if he'd had access to a newly-developed thermal camouflage material.
  • Science
    ​Have you ever said of a person, "You can see it in the way they walk"? Well, if it was their identity that you were referring to, then you were right. To that end, scientists have now created an artificial intelligence-based system that identifies people via their footsteps.
  • ​​Our Sun is too small to explode in a supernova, but new findings suggest that our nearby star is in for a dramatic demise, creating a vast ring of gas and dust called a planetary nebula. Though that was always a leading theory, there’s some small consolation for those that thought differently…
  • Science
    Dinosaurs are famous for their size, but the largest known animal to have ever existed is still with us today: the blue whale. Now a new study reports the discovery of a huge fossilized jawbone belonging to an unknown species of ichthyosaur that may have measured up to 26 m (85 ft) long.​
  • Science
    To help hunt down elusive iron meteorites in Antarctica, the University of Manchester recently tested its new towable metal detectors as part of the first ever British-led meteorite hunting expedition in Antarctica that will be carried out in conjunction with BAS.
  • Scientists have found a surprising global warming culprit – sandwiches. In the first study of its kind, the researchers carried out an in-depth audit of various sandwiches and found that they could be responsible for as much annual carbon as 8.6 million cars in Britain alone.
  • Science
    ​New technologies are continuing to unravel the mysteries of the mummies. Now, next-generation DNA sequencing has helped solve a mystery that has perplexed scientists for decades – whether a pair of mummies known as the "Two Brothers" were in fact full brothers at all.
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