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‘Fat glass is our baby’

Faidra Oikonomopoulou (left) and Telesilla Bristogianni in front of the Crystal Houses facade in Amsterdam. (Photo: Marcel Krijger)

PhD candidates Faidra Oikonomopoulou and Telesilla Bristogianni received the Innovation Award from the Society of Façade Engineering for the Crystal Houses in Amsterdam.

MRVDV Architects designed the glass façade for a shop in the classy Amsterdam P.C. Hooftstraat. The Crystal Houses façade was commissioned by Ashendene- Leeuwenstein. Glass innovator Professor Rob Nijsse (Faculties of Civil Engineering and Architecture) and associate Professor Dr Fred Veer took care of the structural design. Two Greek PhD candidates made it real and won international recognition for it.

Back to December 1 2016. You were in the Gibson Hall in London with the honourable Society of Façade Engineering. Then you were called to the stage because you had won the Innovation Award. Tell us about that moment.

FO: “We couldn’t really believe it. You know, I’m always optimistic and Telesilla is always a bit pessimistic. So, I was thinking we would win…”
TB: “…and I was keeping her down to earth. We happened to be sitting at the table with the jury and they started talking about how not always the shiniest projects win.”
FO: “It was a bit like the Oscars. You know that there are twelve nominees, including some very big names in façade engineering. There were big projects like government buildings or libraries from all over the world. But at the time they announced the big prize my stomach had left the building. The presenter accidentally had pressed the button and I recognised my own photo from a glass structural test that we had sent. He quickly put it back but I said: ‘Tele, we have won, Tele!'”
Continued…

Posted in Articles, Delta.


‘Data is the new doping’

The use of data in the training of athletes has only just begun. Sensors and statistics are boosting performances.

The Data Science & Sports Seminar brought people together from universities, sports and companies in a series of short updates on how data science is used in sports. The presentations fell roughly into two categories: data for training and predictions of future results based on historical data, also known as ‘Sports Intelligence’.

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Smart photochip for cheaper PET-scans

PET-scans can detect early tumours. A new detector module, co-developed by Dr Veerappan, makes PET-scanners cheaper, better and faster. Future patients will benefit, said Professor Edoardo Charbon.

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Patients with suspected tumours receive an injection of a substance that cancer cells imbibe. The simplest option is glucose for these ever-hungry cells. The injection carries an unstable isotope as a marker. It will emit a positron when it decays. Apositron doesn’t travel far in a wet environment like the human body. It will soon encounter an electron and disappear in a flash, creating two powerful gamma photonsin the process that fly away in opposite directions. Continued…

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Transforming materials

In collaboration with Harvard University, two TU Delft students have built a 3-D material with controllable shape and size.

Metamaterial made from extruded cubes (Photo: Bas Overvelde)

Metamaterial made from extruded cubes (Photo: Bas Overvelde)

Imagine a house that could fit in a backpack or a wall that could become a window with the flick of a switch.

PhD student Bas Overvelde MSc (Harvard University, 3mE graduate TU Delft 2012) and Twan de Jong MSc (Faculty of Aerospace Engineering) have designed a new type of foldable material that is versatile, tunable and self-actuated. It can change size, volume and shape; it can fold flat to withstand the weight of an elephant without breaking, and pop right back up to prepare for the next task. Continued…

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From wet waste to green gas

At 600 degrees and 250 bars, supercritical water rips organic molecules apart, producing gas from wet biomass. PhD candidate Onursal Yakaboylu modelled the process.

Too much manure and dwindling gas production – that sums it up for the Netherlands in 2016. A new technology called ‘supercritical water gasification of wet biomass’ has the potential to restore the equilibrium. The technique converts manure, but also sewage sludge and food industry waste, into biogas (hydrogen and methane). The conversion efficiency is potentially high (up to 95%) but limited by the costs of the equipment. Continued…

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Making water with solar heat

Waterdome at a field test (Photo: Rajat Bhardwaj)

Waterdome at a field test (Photo: Rajat Bhardwaj)

Try making potable water when you have nothing at hand but some plastic, dirty water and lots of sun. That may sound like a challenge from a survival television series, but for some 750 million people, getting access to safe drinking water is life-saving.

Another billion people consume water from contaminated sources. As a consequence, almost 750 thousand children died of diarrhoea in 2010, while another hundred million people were affected by contamination of arsenic and fluoride in drinking water. Clearly, there’s a need for an affordable, low-tech water cleaning device.

Continued…

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Flexible DNA-clamps made visible

Jorine Eeftens and Cees Dekker at the advanced microscopy desk (Photo: Roy Borghouts)

Jorine Eeftens and Cees Dekker at the advanced microscopy desk (Photo: Roy Borghouts)

A protein involved in folding and clamping DNA in every living creature has for the first time been shown in action. Researchers from Delft and Heidelberg demonstrated that the protein condensin is much more dynamic than assumed.

DNA molecules are like extremely long strands of fairy lights: it’s almost impossible to disentangle them and store them neatly. A single human cell contains two metres of DNA molecules but is somehow able to fold them neatly into chromosomes measuring just a few micrometres. The protein condensin is known to play a crucial role, but the details of the process are still largely a mystery. For the first time, researchers from TU Delft’s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg have successfully filmed the behaviour of an individual condensin molecule.

Continued…

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Deceit, betrayal and disappointment

inthelightofwhatweknowIt’s September 2008 when a haunted man rings a doorbell in the well-off residential area Kensington in London. It takes the storyteller a while to recognize his friend Zafar from Oxford in the haggard man at his doorstep. As he lets Zafar in, he becomes the witness of a thrilling tale that ends up as a half-told confession. Both men have a Pakistan background and studied mathematics in Oxford. The story is a typical 21-st century tale in that it uses the banking crisis and the Iraq and Afghan wars as a background. It subtly shows how Pakistani or other ‘foreigners’ are never fully integrated into society, leading to problems with loyalty. It also sheds light on the untold story of the practice of war and subsequent reconstruction by swarms of consultants who are mainly interested in each other and the lavish salaries.

As could be expected from a storyteller who is a mathematician by training, the story is beautifully crafted, well paced and it keeps the half-told confession behind until the final few pages. The language is rich, full of references and eloquent, underlining the Oxford education.

Why should you read this book? Because it offers you a glimpse behind the facades of banks, ministries, non-governmental organizations and armies that determine most of today’s news. Writer Zia Haider Rahman has a rich and varied background in Bangladesh, Oxford, Walls Street and international human rights. In the troubled Zafar, Rahman has created a powerful and vivacious vehicle for his thoughts and observations and doubts about our world in turmoil.

The hidden theme, although it features in the book’s title, is not so much the east-west juxtaposition. Rahman frequently cites Gödel’s theorem about the limits of what we can know – even in mathematics. World visions rest on assumptions of which we can never be sure. Evidently, the visions of neoconservatives and mullahs are worlds apart. However, it’s logically impossible to tell who is right.

–> Zhia Haider Rahaman, In the light of what we know, Picador, UK, 2014, 564 pages.

Posted in Articles, bol.com.


Making graphene affordable

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PhD candidate Shou-En Zhu developed a method that could produce high-quality graphene for a fraction of the current price. What’s more, he demonstrated the quality in working devices.

After the 2010 Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to its discoverers Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, expectations for graphene were high. The properties of this single sheet of carbon atoms were expected to be exceptional: strong, transparent, electronically and thermally conducting and chemical inert. Numerous potential applications were proposed including smartphone screens, solar cells, fuel cell membranes, devices for drug delivery and even condoms. Continued…

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Science in Action: Drones against Poachers

Kitso (right) and friends at the testing range near Schiphol.

Kitso (right) and friends at the testing range near Schiphol.

For the BBC science series Science in Action, I produced an item on Kitso Epema, a master student at aeronautical engineering (TU Delft) who, together with other students, develops a drone to assist park rangers in Africa against the ever more numerous and brutal poachers who target  rhinos in the national parks.

Science in Action / 24 April 2014 / 27 mins 

Content: Scientists decode the genome of the fly that spreads sleeping sickness; Has the environmental impact of a proposed canal across the country been assessed fully?; Was the recent fatal avalanche linked to human activity?; Can drones help catch rhino poachers in South Africa?

 

Listen to the fragment on the BBC website.

Or listen to podcast at Soundcloud.Item with Kitso starts at 19:50.

Posted in BBC-Science in Action, Radio.