( Research into three major scientific an...)The brain, traffic and nano-circuits -- e-Science takes on major challenges

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and other funding partners have awarded more than £13m to three, 3-4 year projects covering each of these topics in the third round of the EPSRC's e-Science programme.

e-Science is opening up to scientific scrutiny challenging problems that had seemed out of reach, or even impossible to tackle. By giving researchers access from their own desktops to resources held on widely-dispersed computers, it is enabling research that would have been impossible using one computer alone, even a supercomputer. The projects that will pioneer new research using e-Science are:

Understanding the brain
The £4.5m CARMEN project, led by Professor Colin Ingram at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, will harness e-Science techniques to enable neuroscientists, working on different aspects of brain function at different labs, to share and integrate their data and models.

Neuroscientists use many different techniques to unravel the processes within individual neurons (brain or nerve cells) or the interactions between networks of neurons that lead to thoughts and behaviour. The techniques are time-consuming, difficult and expensive, but researchers rarely record their data or models so that they can be used by other labs or research groups. CARMEN will help maximise the output from investment in brain science by enabling neuroscientists to archive their data so that they can be retrieved and analysed in new ways by others.

Environmental impact of traffic
Traffic makes a significant contribution to air pollution in inner cities. Governments devise policies
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Source:Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council