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12 Feb 2018 Engineering and Physical Sciences Photography Competition 2018 Previous slideNext slide1 of 16View AllSkip Ad Second place in the Weird and Wonderful category This picture of Placental ‘Pop Art’ has won Second place in the Weird and Wonderful category of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s annual photography competition. These images show automatically segmented chorionic vascular trees obtained from high resolution photography. Dr Rosalind Aughwane/UCL/EPSRC/PA Back to image.

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A University of Texas at Dallas graduate student, his advisor and industry collaborators believe they have addressed a long-standing problem troubling scientists and engineers for more than 35 years: How to prevent the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope from crashing into the surface of a material during imaging or lithography. Details of the group’s solution appeared in the January issue of the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, which is published by the American Institute of Physics. Scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs) operate in an ultra-high vacuum, bringing a fine-tipped p…

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Fabricated device and band structure. (A) Scanning electron microscope image of the device, which is composed of two regions identified by blue and yellow shading, corresponding to two photonic crystals with different topological properties. The interface between the two photonic crystals supports helical edge states with opposite circular polarization (s+ and s–). Grating couplers at each end of the device scatter light in the out-of-plane direction for collection. (B) Close-up image of the interface. Black dashed lines identify a single unit cell of each photonic crystal. Credit: Science…

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Professor Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist from Lancaster University and Professor Emanuel Bylund, a linguist from Stellenbosch University and Stockholm University, have discovered that people who speak two languages fluently think about time differently depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events.

The finding, published in the ‘Journal of Experimental Psychology: General’, reports the first evidence of cognitive flexibility in people who speak two languages.

Bilinguals go back and forth between their languages rapidly and, often, unconsciously — a phenomenon called code-switching.

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In many ways, the future is unpredictable. A report by the World Economic Forum reveals that almost 65 percent of the jobs elementary school students will be doing in the future do not even exist yet. Combined with technological automation and the disappearance of traditional jobs, this leaves us with a critical question: how can we survive such a world?

The answer may be imagination.

Initially coined by Rita J. King, the imagination age is a theoretical period beyond the information age where creativity and imagination will become the primary creators of economic value. This is driven by technological trends like virtual reality and the rise of digital platforms like YouTube, all of which increase demand for user-generated content and creativity. It is also driven by automation, which will take away a lot of monotonous and routine jobs, leaving more higher-ordered and creative jobs.

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