Congratulations to Professor Heaven Crawley who has been conferred the title of Academician of the Academy of Social Science (AcSS) following her nomination by the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).

Heaven was nominated for her significant contribution to the social sciences in terms of understanding the experiences of migrants, her substantial record of publication including monographs, academic papers, policy papers and reports, Government and Parliamentary publications including reports by the Home Affairs Committee (2006) and Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) (2007), her substantial and widely acknowledge contributions to policymaking and her contribution to public and media debates on migration issues.

A Public Engagement Afternoon as part of Alan Turing Centenary at Swansea University takes place on 5th December 2012.  The afternoon consists of three parts: a Distinguished Lecture by Professor Martin Campell-Kelly on "Alan Turing’s Other Universal Machine: The ACE", the display of the Alan Turing Posters based on the Turing Archive at King's College, Cambridge, and a Swansea Science Cafe event staging of Sciptography Productions' play "To Kill A Machine".  The events are funded by the College of Science EPSRC Research Fund and Software Alliance Wales.

Research at Swansea University has shown that fungi can help control the pests that damage forests throughout Europe and could help forest managers with an alternative to chemical pesticides.

Recent research by Dr Minshad Ali Ansari and Professor Tariq Butt from Swansea University’s Biocontrol and Natural Products Group has focussed on the Large Pine Weevil (Hylobius abietis), which feeds on the bark of conifer tree saplings causing significant damage costing an estimated €140 million per year.

As well as pine, species hit by this pest include Sitka spruce which is very important to the UK timber and paper industries. 

Professors Tim Hollowood and Graham Shore have been awarded Third Prize in the Gravity Research Foundation 2012 Essay Competition for a paper entitled "The Unbearable Beingness of Light". They received $1,000 prize money.
 
The Gravity Research Foundation Essay Prize is a prestigious annual competition, inaugurated in 1949, for short papers describing the authors' original research in the fields of general relativity and quantum gravity. Previous top 3 award winners include Roger Penrose, Steven Hawking, Jakob Bekenstein, Frank Wilczek and George Smoot.

Technocamps, a £6million outreach project backed by the European Social Fund and led by Swansea University, took advantage of the peace and quiet on campus during the summer holidays by setting up a series of high-tech bootcamps aimed at young people interested in computing.

The first bootcamp to kick off the summer festivities was the iOS App Development Bootcamp, which enabled the young people to engage with new and emerging technologies including the iPad 2, iPod Touch and Mac Book Pro’s. Getting to grips with the programming language of X-code, the young people saw their two days of hard work pay off in the shape of new and exciting iPhone game which they later submitted to the Apple Store.

Researchers from Swansea University’s Centre for Sustainable Aquatic Research (CSAR) are part of a new €2.4M (approx £1.9M) international collaborative project to develop and enhance the sustainability of the EU’s prawn fishery.

The Nephrops norvegicus species, also known as ‘Dublin Bay prawn’, ‘langoustine’ or ‘scampi’, will be the specific focus of the NEPHROPS project, which brings together expertise from the fishing industry, aquaculture technologists and academia.  The species is one of Europe’s most lucrative shellfish, with 34,000 tonnes – worth £100M – landed last year in the UK alone.

Abrupt climate changes have occurred in the past, heating the planet by up to 16˚C in a few decades causing major environmental impacts on the face of the Earth. To prepare ourselves for the future, a team of scientists led by Professor Siwan Davies from the Department of Geography, Swansea University investigate the evidence of past events that remain buried deep within Arctic ice and mud from the sea-bed.

During July 10-13 over one hundred theoretical particle physicists from around the globe gathered in Swansea to participate in the 10th International Conference on Strong and Electroweak Matter (SEWM 2012).

One of the highlights of the meeting was the keynote lecture by Prof Peter Higgs. By serendipitous timing, this lecture took place exactly one week after the long-awaited announcement of the Higgs boson discovery at CERN.

A Public Engagement Afternoon as part of Alan Turing Centenary at Swansea University takes place on 5th December 2012.  The afternoon consists of three parts: a Distinguished Lecture by Professor Martin Campell-Kelly on "Alan Turing’s Other Universal Machine: The ACE", the display of the Alan Turing Posters based on the Turing Archive at King's College, Cambridge, and a Swansea Science Cafe event staging of Sciptography Productions' play "To Kill A Machine".  The events are funded by the College of Science EPSRC Research Fund and Software Alliance Wales.

A Public Engagement Afternoon as part of Alan Turing Centenary at Swansea University takes place on 5th December 2012.  The afternoon consists of three parts: a Distinguished Lecture by Professor Martin Campell-Kelly on "Alan Turing’s Other Universal Machine: The ACE", the display of the Alan Turing Posters based on the Turing Archive at King's College, Cambridge, and a Swansea Science Cafe event staging of Sciptography Productions' play "To Kill A Machine".  The events are funded by the College of Science EPSRC Research Fund and Software Alliance Wales.