LESS than an hour by plane and 91av finds itself surrounded by the Wicklow mountains and the Georgian architecture of Dublin. Trinity College – Ireland’s most prestigious university – has seen a host of top names in science passing through its corridors. And what greater sign that Irish research is booming than the fact that Irish-born researchers are flooding back from far-flung foreign shores?

Ireland’s aspiration to be a player on the world stage means that technology-based wealth washes both in and out of the country. High-tech manufacturing makes up more than 75 per cent of Ireland’s exports, but more than 75 per cent of economic turnover is by companies that are foreign-held – names like Intel, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard. Fundamental research is burgeoning, too. Technologies of the nano, bio and information varieties lead the pack, and all are receiving serious cash. Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) holds the purse strings and is implementing the Irish government’s eight-year Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation, which has already funded more than €1 billion in R&D.

Dublin has remained a hub for great research, boasting five of the SFI’s Centres for Science, Engineering & Technology. The others are in Limerick, Galway and Cork. Researchers who relocate to Ireland invariably cite the warm nature of its people, from lecturers and locals to cabbies. And that openness goes right to the top: many attribute Ireland’s successes in part to a government that is sympathetic to the needs of research. Most Irish universities also provide business courses for their graduates, so unleashing your inner entrepreneur on the Emerald Isle might just make you a tidy sum.

Scandinavia

THE Nordic countries have long enjoyed a rich funding climate, with Sweden regularly topping lists of investment in R&D. So how can you get your hands on some of that money? Much of it is piped into biotech, the region’s flagship science industry. Medicon Valley, a cluster of biotech companies that stretches from the Danish capital of Copenhagen across the south-western toe of Sweden, boasts 345 ventures at last count and hundreds of job opportunities.

A look at the publication record of the Nordic countries shows vast expertise in medicine, and the cluster of cancer research institutes near Oslo in Norway represents the first of many such groups planned for the future. Research, in fact, makes up an unusually high fraction of employment here. Finland, Iceland and Sweden top an international list of researchers as a proportion of the population.

Cross-border collaboration is ever increasing, with the Nordic Council of Ministers working to combine the strengths of each Nordic country into an impressive whole. “It’s not just five small countries, it’s an area of 25 million people with similar cultures and social, political and welfare systems,” says Gard Titlestad, the council’s head of education, research and labour affairs. The council is working to establish cross-border postgraduate opportunities, and it’s worth noting that in some Nordic countries, postgrads positions are paid staff jobs.

Mention Scandinavia and in the next breath usually comes a comment about the high quality of life. That comes in part from a sensible work ethic and relatively high wages. Highly qualified newcomers get a few years’ amnesty from the high taxes, meaning lots more cash for the enjoyment of the region’s cold weather – or as a consolation for it.

Germany

EUROPE’S most populous nation is arguably its most inventive; its patent applications account for nearly half of the European total. This kind of applied knowledge has created a backbone for Germany’s dominance in industry, with names like Diesel, Geiger and Zeppelin peppering the country’s history of innovation. Ideas still flow strongly from Germany’s renowned research infrastructure and world-class universities.

Recent years have seen vast changes in Germany’s research landscape. Most of that change has been chalked up to the influence of its physicist-cum-chancellor, Angela Merkel, who besides stimulating more fundamental research has been successful in reforming the higher education system to bring it into line with world standards. Alongside this, Germany’s central funding body is in the second year of its Excellence Initiative – using €1.9 billion to establish several graduate schools and research centres.

Benedetta Ciardi, an Italian-born physicist, is sold. “I started with a one-year position in 2001 and I’m still here,” she says. “It seems to me that Germany is investing lots of resources in research and promoting young scientists, which is not the case across all of Europe.”

Renewable energy is one of the rising stars in Germany’s portfolio, outstripping even its huge pharmaceutical industry. One German firm accounts for a third of hydropower installations worldwide, and nearly half of the world’s windmills and a third of all solar cells are of German origin.

Few countries offer so many funding opportunities specifically for foreign researchers: the German Academic Exchange Service and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation are the best places to start.

Switzerland

THESE days you could be forgiven for thinking that Switzerland’s only scientific venture is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle-smashing behemoth whose first experiments will doubtless eclipse any other Swiss scientific output this year.

But it’s not all chalkboards and accelerators. Switzerland has a rich history to match its high-profile present in the hard sciences. Overall, Switzerland’s researchers publish more patents per capita than any other European country, home-grown multinationals like Nestlé and imported giants such as Google and IBM continue to snap up international graduates, and as home to a host of pharmaceutical giants including Roche, Novartis and Serono, Switzerland easily wins the title of Europe’s biotech cash cow.

This year the Swiss National Science Foundation introduced a new fellowship, called Ambizione, which is open to foreign researchers. Marcel Kullin, one of the foundation’s funding heads, says it comes with a “not particularly high salary” of £45,000, but hey, at least they provide cash for research. Those who don’t get money from that pot can apply for funding from the European Union, despite Switzerland’s non-EU status. And don’t worry, it’s not an unusual place to be an expat – nearly a quarter of Switzerland’s population is foreign-born.

Switzerland is home to two federal institutes that have long been research heavyweights: the EPFL in Lausanne and the ETH in Zurich, which has seen Albert Einstein and 20 other Nobel laureates pass through its corridors. Researchers from the federal institutes join together with Swiss universities to form the 20 National Centres of Competence in Research, government-funded collaborations in topics that range from biology to climate change to nanotechnology.

The Swiss transport system is clean and highly efficient so day trips to Mont Blanc, Lausanne and the capital, Bern, are all within easy reach. And if you get fed up of talking to scientists all day, Geneva also offers a wide choice of open events, says Kate McAlpine, who works at CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva that is home to the LHC. “My favourite is the conversation cafe – a bunch of people getting together and speaking the featured language of the night, at any level of fluency, with the option of a family-style dinner.”

And if none of that makes you want to put your passport down and get stuck in, maybe this will: Lindt is hiring.

The studies bring to light several common variations that increase the risk slightly, and rarer ones that raise it significantly, researchers say.

While previous studies have suggested several genes with roles in schizophrenia, small sample sizes gave these findings limited statistical significance.

Most recently, differences in copy number variations (CNVs) – chunks of genetic material that are either repeated or missing from the genome entirely – were identified between healthy and schizophrenic people . But the study was too small to implicate specific CNVs in causing the disease.

Quantity matters

Now, in the biggest study of its kind, the International Schizophrenia Consortium has collected further evidence about the role of CNVs in the condition.

The researchers examined the genomes of 3391 schizophrenics and found that they had around 15% more CNVs on average than the 3181 healthy controls.

This supports the idea that the sheer increase in CNVs alone could be a risk factor for schizophrenia.

Another study, led by of the University of Aberdeen, UK, and deCODE genetics, Iceland, looked at 66 specific CNVs in 1400 schizophrenics and 33,000 healthy participants.

Missing regions

The team was able to identify several CNVs that are linked to a much higher risk of developing schizophrenia, but occur relatively rarely – in as few as one in 1000 schizophrenics.

They found three missing chromosome regions that raised the risk of developing schizophrenia by as much as 15 times. Importantly, two of these regions were also highlighted in the ISC study above, making it likely that these regions are a real risk factor.

Using yet a different approach, of Cardiff University, UK, and colleagues looked for variations of single “letters” (SNPs) of the genetic code that were significantly more common in people with schizophrenia, occurring in as many as one in 10.

Common variant

In a study of more than 360,000 SNPs, they found three convincing associations in specific genes, one of which increases the risk by about 1%. The gene, called ZNF804A, may play a role in regulating the activity of other genes.

“The variation in that gene makes for a very small increase in risk, but it’s also very common,” O’Donovan says. “Together, the new studies show that many of us carry some risk genes for schizophrenia, but the people that have the illness simply carry more of them.”

“This is a provocative and important set of findings,” says , at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. But he adds that the rarity of the genetic variations means that the findings account for less than half a percent of schizophrenia cases.

“We don’t know yet if these results will translate to the other 99.5% of people with a schizophrenia diagnosis,” he says. “We’ll have to further interrogate these regions and see whether common variants within them predict the more common forms of the disorder.”

No simple test

There are likely to be many more genetic variants that are associated with schizophrenia coming to light – maybe as many as thousands, says St Clair. “I wouldn’t have said that even a year ago, but that’s the way it’s looking.”

That means that a simple genetic test is still a long way off. But both St Clair and O’Donovan believe that identifying some of the genes in the pathway – and where they can be found – is already a big step forward.

, a lead author on the deCODE study, likens the situation to that of Alzheimer’s disease.

“The findings of the rare Alzheimer’s mutations contributed hugely to the understanding of how Alzheimer’s works,” he says. “One of the hopes is that as more studies like these come out in the near future, we can also understand the physiology of schizophrenia.”

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Go on, put your feet up. A new household robot that keeps track of the contents of your kitchen and can learn simple tasks could soon be making you dinner while you relax.

The new robot, developed at the Technical University of Munich, exploits the use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags on dishes and utensils in its “” to sidestep some of the object-recognition difficulties that have plagued previous household robots.

“If you want to interpret and understand everyday activities using vision data, it’s very complicated, error-prone, and resource intensive,” says , who led the research. “If you do it with RFID tags, there is very little sensor information, but it’s highly correlated with the activities you are performing.”

As a result, the robot knows where everything is, and it can learn simple tasks simply by observing the movements of the objects.

See videos of the robot and (.avi format).

Surfing for recipes

“Setting the table is very easily recognised from cups and plates disappearing from the cupboard and appearing on the table, and cleaning up later is characterised by the same objects disappearing from the table and appearing in the dishwasher,” Beetz says.

The team is also working to integrate a number of open-source software packages to enable the robots to get instructions from the internet, in the same way that some search for images .

Robots would search how-to websites like , converting natural language into robot-friendly instructions using language software called .

They could then optimise the algorithms based on their particular environment, such as carrying four plates to the table rather than making four trips with one plate.

And while they are online, they can share what they have learned. Beetz plans a repository of information on which robots can share data about specific tasks, recipes, and handy household tips. “The hard step will be to have the first robot doing it. But then they would share everything,” he says.

Intelligent environment

“It’s very interesting and promising work,” says Stanford University roboticist .

“If you have sensors just on the robot, the range of things the robot can perceive is very limited,” he says. “If it is able to use sensors embedded in an intelligent environment, it’s as if the robot has many more eyes and sensors and can immediately act much more intelligently in a new environment.”

For the robot’s core software, Beetz and colleagues chose – an open-source software architecture that is becoming a standard for robotics and sensors. Player was pioneered by Brian Gerkey, a co-author of the study.

The team plans to make all of its findings available and to publish all of the software that it develops, hopefully to bring you robot dinners that much sooner.

Journal reference:

Robots – Learn more about the robotics revolution in our continually updated .

The revolutionary scanner is many times smaller than conventional NMR spectroscopy machines, which require huge magnets to create the powerful magnetic fields necessary to make them work.

Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy works by lining up nuclei in a sample using a powerful magnetic field and then zapping them with radio waves that cause them to wobble, or precess.

This precession induces currents in a nearby coil which can be used to determine the chemical structure of the molecules that contain the nuclei. The same process is used in magnetic resonance imaging machines to make non-invasive images of human bodies. The new device does not produce images, however.

Weaker fields

In conventional NMR spectroscopy machines, powerful fields are necessary to line up individual nuclei.

However, at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, and colleagues have found that magnetic nanoparticles generate a much larger signal than single nuclei, and can thus be detected using the weaker fields from small permanent magnets.

The trick that Weissleder and colleagues have perfected is to coat these nanoparticles with molecules that bind to specific biomolecules, or bacteria and viruses.

This binding process causes the nanoparticles to clump together, producing a measurable change in the signal they produce. In this way, the team says it can identify a large variety of biological targets.

The team has squeezed the electronics that detect and interpret the signals onto a chip (pdf format).

Small and sensitive

What’s more, the researchers have also designed a microfluidics network that shuttles the samples around and concentrates them in volumes of just five millionths of a litre (5 microlitres) – some 60 times less than conventional systems.

“The smaller the system, the better the sensitivity in terms of absolute amount of sample that can be detected,” says Hakho Lee, lead author on the research.

The prototype device has eight tiny coils, each of which can monitor nanoparticles sensitive to different biomolecules. Future devices could employ many more such coils.

The result is a prototype machine that is 800 times more sensitive than standard NMR scanners used in many laboratories, says Weissleder.

The team put the prototype through its paces, showing that it is sensitive enough to detect just 10 bacteria in a given sample. By loading each of the eight microcoils with different nanoparticles, the system could distinguish between simulated blood samples representing healthy individuals, those with cancer, and those with diabetes, by looking for eight different biomarker molecules.

Multiple applications

“The biggest advantage is that we don’t need sample preparation or purification steps,” Lee says. The nanoparticles are simply added to whatever samples are present. “This method could provide an easy and fast way to diagnose almost any kind of disease, such as bacterial infection or cancers in point-of-care settings – right next to the patient or in developing countries.”

The device could also be used to test for water purity or even applied to gaseous samples, to search for airborne pathogens or pollutants.

Other researchers are impressed with the work. “If you came to my lab you would see that our spectrometers occupy whole rooms, and we are always struggling with sensitivity in NMR experiments,” says , an NMR spectroscopist at the University of Edinburgh.

“They have been able to improve the sensitivity such that they can detect just a few bacteria. It’s quite remarkable that they can detect down to that limit,” he says.

Weissleder has filed a patent for the design and started a company called to market the devices.

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The reason you are sitting where you are right now may be because Pangaea, the most recent supercontinent to gather together all the world’s landmasses together, ate itself nearly 300 million years ago.

Convection in the Earth’s mantle shifts the floating continental plates around, eventually driving them together into supercontinents every few hundred million years. We know supercontinents eventually break up again, but it is not clear how they do this.

of the University of Salamanca in Spain and colleagues think they may be able to explain the most recent break up which split Pangaea into today’s continents. They have proposed a mechanism called ““, which would explain several geological mysteries better than prior theories.

In standard subduction, one tectonic plate slips under another. The situation could have been slightly different 300 million years ago because Pangaea was shaped like a pie with one piece missing. This area was occupied by an ocean called Paleo-Tethys.

Who ate all the pies?

The new theory has it that, as Pangaea’s southern coast moved northward, the ocean began to close up. Eventually, the continent’s southern continental shelf was subducted beneath the northern coast.

“It’s like a cat trying to bite its own tail,” says Fernando Corfú, a geologist at the , and one of Gutiérrez-Alonso’s collaborators.

The theory predicts that the land in Pangaea’s centre would have compressed, explaining the Iberian-Armorican Arc, a twisted mountain range that is known to have stretched from modern-day Turkey up to the UK and then down to Spain.

Meanwhile, the rest of the pie would have stretched to breaking point, allowing surrounding oceanic plates to move into the gaps. This explains why a number of ancient rifts, including ones that can be visited today in Norway and Madagascar, were once arranged radially like the spokes of a bicycle.

Journal reference: , DOI: 10.1038/ngeo250

In 2006, a mutation in the gene for the protein filaggrin – which helps keep foreign substances out of the skin – was shown to increase the risk of eczema. About 9% of people of European origin carry this mutation.

To find out whether an environmental trigger might also play a role, a team led by Hans Bisgaard of the Gentofte University Hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark, who was also involved in the 2006 work, tracked 358 Danish and 460 British children from birth.

About 25% of children without the mutation developed eczema, compared with 45% of those with the mutation. However, of the 16 children who both had the mutation and lived with a cat, 14 developed eczema, all between the ages of one and three months.

“It has been very hard to prove that there really are environmental factors that trigger those genes,” Bisgaard says. “This is proof that there is an interaction, even in the first month of life.” However, Bisgaard says that much more data is needed before any prescriptions can be made for parents.

“It’s an interesting and convincing finding,” says Natalija Novak, a dermatologist and epidemiologist at the University of Bonn in Germany. But she says we should now look for other environmental factors that correlate with eczema.

Journal reference: (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0050131)

While many factors contributing to the risk for SIDS have been identified, the mechanism of its cause has remained a mystery. A link to bacterial infections was proposed decades ago, but evidence of the bacteria in SIDS victims has remained scarce.

Now, a team of researchers from the has shown that specific bacteria are more prevalent in SIDS babies.

The team went over the results of autopsies of more than 500 infants who died aged between one week and one year. They then compared the rate of infection by the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli in infants whose cause of death was known, and those in SIDS babies.

What they found was that 26% of the autopsies in the explained cases showed infection by the bacteria, whereas in the SIDS cases, the rate of infection was nearly twice that.

Not a diagnostic

“What’s good about this is it’s a large study at one institution where all the cases were investigated in the same way, so it’s enabled us to really provide harder evidence,” says Marian Malone, one of the study’s co-authors.

The prevalence of the bacteria is certainly indicative of a connection with cause of death, but their presence even in explained deaths means that a test for them cannot be used as a diagnostic – or as evidence for or against other explanations for deaths.

George Haycock, scientific adviser to the UK’s , warns that there isn’t just one answer to the SIDS mystery.

“This is certainly not the cause of SIDS, which is almost certainly multifactorial,” he says. “Even in the cases where no cause can be identified, there may be multiple factors operating.”

Toxin theory

The role of the bacteria in the so-called bacterial toxin theory could tie some of those multiple factors together. The idea is that the bacteria grow in the upper respiratory tract of babies, releasing toxins that are the ultimate cause of death.

“It’s a theory that would fit the facts,” Malone says. “We know that prone sleeping – sleeping on the front – can increase the number of pathogenic organisms in the upper airway. We know that if the mother has been smoking during pregnancy, it can alter the immune response [to toxins].”

Even the genetic differences among SIDS babies are related to immune response. The theory, Malone says, could tie a lot of things together.

“It’s another piece of evidence fitting in with lots of other evidence that has been gathering, pointing to these bacteria,” says , a pathologist at the Royal Infirmary, Lancaster, UK. “None of this is proof positive, but it’s another important step to understanding what’s going on.”

Journal reference: , vol 371, p 1848