The brain, traffic and nano-circuits – e-Science takes on major challenges Research into three major scientific and technological challenges – understanding the brain, designing future generation nano-scale electronic circuits and mapping the detailed environmental impact of traffic – is set to take a leap forward thanks to the application of e-Science and grid computing. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, with other funding partners, has awarded more than £13m to three, 3-4 year projects covering each of these topics in the third round of its 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. 1. 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 interactions between networks of neurons that lead to thoughts and behaviour. The techniques are timeconsuming, 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 used in new ways by others. 2. The £5.2m NanoCMOS project, led by Professor Asen Asenov at Glasgow University, will build e-Science tools to allow designers of tiny electronic circuits to meet the very demanding challenges created by future nano-scale electronic components. These components will be so small that their behaviour will be highly variable, governed by individual atoms rather than the average behaviour of large collections of atoms. The NanoCMOS project will build a grid infrastructure and e-Science tools to enable circuit designers to share models that simulate nano-component behaviour and explore the implications for circuit design. It will help UK circuit designers to remain internationally competitive and overcome the disadvantages caused by the lack of an indigenous UK semiconductor industry. 3. Traffic contributes the largest share of air pollution in inner cities. Governments devise policies and traffic management schemes to minimise the impact of air pollution, but they are hampered by a lack of detailed knowledge. Factors such as street and building design, vehicle braking and accelerating patterns, individual traveller decisions and local weather conditions affect the concentration of pollutants that individuals are exposed to as they move around. The £3.5m PMESG (Pervasive Mobile Environmental Sensor Grids) project, led by Professor John Polak at Imperial College London, is jointly funded by the EPSRC and the Department for Transport. It will develop e-Science and grid technologies to enable data from a network of mobile sensors to be gathered and interpreted. The e-Science technologies developed will be generic enough for use in other applications of mobile sensor networks, for example, climate or weather mapping. Contacts Professor Colin Ingram Professor Asen Asenov Professor John Polak