R&D INSIGHT Left to right - Stephen Greenland, Julian Hodgson, Campbell Brown, Jethro Coulson, David Willetts MP , Brianna Stubbs, Patrick Cottam, James Dimmock and Jordan Conway.
Young scientists and engineers awarded Great Exhibition funds to develop world-changing technologies
I
n 1851, the doors of the Crystal Palace in London opened to the public. Inside was what
Great Exhibition”, Now,
is now referred to as “The the first and still
most successful world trade fair ever. still using the profits
from this
original show, the 1851 Royal Commission awards a range of fellowships and grants to support science and engineering research and industrial education across the UK. It has previously funded luminaries such as Prof Peter Higgs, Sir James Chadwick and Paul Dirac.
The Industrial Fellowships provide recent graduates with innovative
technology with
the means to develop commercial
potential, ideally leading to a patent, while completing a PhD or EngD. Each Fellow receives £80,000 worth of funding for their work, to be carried out in collaboration with an academic and a business partner. This year, eight young scientists and engineers have been recognised for
their
ideas, including a sports drink that could significantly improve physical and cognitive performance,
and a 1000m tall fabric
chimney that could greatly reduce the cost of solar power generation. Bernard Taylor, Chairman of
the Royal
Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, said: “Building on our rich history,
the Royal
Commission remains at the cutting edge of science and engineering, through investing in young talent across the depth and breadth of modern
British industry.
This work
continues the legacy of Prince Albert and the Great Exhibition, which brought science, art and industry together, with the aim of driving innovation.”
Slaying the “dragon kings”
Physicists in Brazil, Switzerland and the US have predicted the onset of extreme events in a chaotic electronic circuit and then worked out a way of preventing the events from happening. The team believes that its work could provide important insights into how to prevent “dragon kings”, which are extreme events such as earthquakes and financial crashes that can occur with devastating effect in complex systems. Researchers who study these occurrences use the term “dragon king” to describe an extreme event that is predictable – at least in principle – and not a random “act of God”. The system used to model these events is comprised of two electronic circuits, one “master” and one “slave”, that both undergo chaotic oscillations. The circuits occasionally fall out of synch for brief periods of time and such out-of-synch events are called “bubbles”. Every once in a while a large bubble occurs.
The team identified these large bubbles as dragon kings and then looked carefully at
the conditions from which they emerged. The researchers then looked for ways of averting these extreme events. Their solution was to turn on a second, stronger coupling between the two circuits whenever the master circuit approached the region of instability. While the connection between events such as financial crashes and coupled chaotic
oscillators may not be obvious, the equations used to model markets are similar to those that describe the oscillators used in the experiment. As a result, techniques developed to predict and prevent dragon kings in the lab could someday be used to ensure market stability by intervening only when the conditions suggest a dragon king is about to occur.
www.projectsmagazine.eu.com
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