Tag - Aston University
Will the lights go out?
Could Birmingham do an industrial-city version of what’s been achieved on the Isle of Eigg; i.e. become energy self-sufficient?
The islanders have achieved much through the demand side. Here in Birmingham, we’re about to do something radical on the supply side.
Aston’s EBRI looks set to be the beginning of a game-changer — and in the first instance for Birmingham.
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#TNOFood: ‘Food’ and the company it keeps
You can put ‘food’ in front of anything actually! (laughs) [...] Yeah that’s what we’ve just proved really isn’t it!
- Hanifa, Helen, Eugenio and David
Far from going ‘in front of anything’ as our speakers above exclaim, there are identifiable recurrent patterns in the way that particular words are used. In order to examine the patterns associated with food, I generated a list of its most frequent collocates (words that co-occur) using WordSmith Tools. The word cloud below shows the words that appear most frequently to the right of food. As the ManyEyes visualisation illustrates, the most prominent theme to emerge in relation to food is education, as demonstrated in the following extracts:
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#TNOfood: Beginnings of a linguistic analysis
I’m Dr Nicci MacLeod, Research Associate at Aston’s Centre for Forensic Linguistics. I’ve been carrying out a variety of linguistic analyses of the audio recording of the first meeting of the New Optimists Forum held on the 2nd November. I’ll be posting my findings here as I go along, so watch this space!
The first stage was to identify the ‘aboutness’ of the exchange. To this end, I identified the most frequent words in the data
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New Optimists Forum: #tnofood in the Scheme of Things
So Food & Cities: Birmingham 2050 is the headline title for the New Optimists Forum in its first year. With its first meeting on 2nd November generating so much interest, I’ve drawn up this diagram to help show where it all fits into a planned Great Scheme of Things:
This may quite well be enough for you, just a sense that what’s happening is part of something that’s been thought about and planned . . . Or you may want to find out a tad more. If so, here goes:
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Helen Griffiths – What we eat and how we age : New Optimists Forum
Helen Griffiths – Professor of Biomedical sciences added her thoughts to the New Optimists Forum’s first conversation on the future of food with these ideas about how we eat now and what sort of a population we’ll be as we age -
Ian Nabney – how can data help us feed ourselves better?
Ian Nabney Professor of Computer science at Aston University
One of the 10 scientists or policymakers in this room at The New Optimists first Forum on Food and Birmingham is Ian Nabney – he’s a specialist in using large datasets to tackle complex problems, including questions like obesity. In his opening thoughts he explains the link between data and finding sustainable ways to feed Birmingham through to 2050 and beyond…
One curious thought of my own – what if we made supermarkets share their data as a form of planning gain?
2nd November: Join the conversation on food scenarios for Birmingham 2050
The first New Optimists Forum event is on 2nd November, beginning around 6pm. Join us on-line!
It’s the first in the series of facilitated events with regional scientists, the start of a conversation about food scenarios for Birmingham 2050.
Nick Booth and the Podnosh team will be blogging live throughout the event at newoptimists.com/blog and/or follow it all on twitter.com/newoptimists.
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Face to Face with the New Optimists: Roslyn Bill talks about healthy ageing
It’s been a busy week for Dr Roslyn Bill. Head of the Aston Research Centre for Healthy Ageing, at Aston University, Ros spoke to us earlier this week to tell us all about what’s happening at ARCHA, including the showcase event they held last week.
Not only that but she’s also joined the ranks of Birmingham Post bloggers, writing a blog about the research centre. You can read more from Ros and the other New Optimists here.
Experts & the public head to Aston University to take on ageing
Experts from around the UK are at Aston University today to exchange ideas as part of a one-day conference tackling ageing. The conference is organised by Aston Research Centre for Healthy Ageing (ARCHA), which is led by New Optimist Dr Roslyn Bill.
She says: “This showcase is about exchanging ideas, as well as looking for practical solutions to a major challenge for all of us. We hope those who attend will go away having been inspired after hearing about the huge amount of cutting edge research carried out here at Aston University.
At ARCHA, we’ve always said that we want our research to have real impact on the lives of older adults. We are keen for the public to come along to see what we are doing, and also so we can find out what matters to them. If we don’t know what affects their lives we can’t help them as well. We are looking for volunteers, and there will be opportunities to take part in our many research studies.”
As well as Roslyn, other New Optimists involved in leading this event include Helen Griffiths, Julia King, Peter Lambert, James Wolffsohn, Brian Tighe and Robert Berry.
You can read more about the event here. Look out for our interview with Roslyn Bill very soon.
Gareth Griffiths on why understanding plant molecules matters
It may seem bizarre that a biochemist interested in plants at a molecular level works closely with engineers. But that’s exactly what Dr Gareth Griffiths does at Aston University.
Plants, Gareth tells me, fix 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide and water into cellulose each year through photosynthesis. Indeed if the sugar generated on planet Earth each year could be made into sugar cubes it would extend to one of the Solar system’s outer bodies, Pluto!
Plants are also ble to synthesis the vast array of complex molecules including DNA, RNA, proteins, lipids and other carbohydrates from the primary products of carbon dioxide fixation.
So it is that Nature already has the answers for synthesising complex molecules —but then it has had several billion years to make the process effective.
By contrast, humans have only been utilising their understanding of organic chemistry for the past few hundred years. We have a lot of catching up to do!
And in understanding the fundamental processes by which plants are able to make such complex molecules, we may, in turn, be able to mimic it, hopefully in a simpler and cost effective way, to generate products of value to society.
For example, plants produce molecules to defend themselves against pathogen attack. At Aston, Gareth and his colleagues have looked at the features of some of these molecules and generated simpler molecular mimics which may have potential use as ‘green’ fungicides