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St. Andrews and Fife

Latest News for St. Andrews & Fife

The 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which grades all UK universities on the quality of research, sees Scotland with a 65% increase in numbers of world-class university researchers since 2001. There are now researchers, whose work is considered world-leading in every single Scottish institution and more than 50% of Scotland's assessed research is deemed internationally excellent or world-leading.

In October last year 8,000 Glasgow businesses were warned of the launch of a campaign to stamp out software piracy. Now, Phone repair company, Total Repair Solutions of Inchinnan, Renfrewshire and Grangemouth motor group, John R Weir have paid almost £120,000 and £24,582 in settlement costs for early software piracy, after due investigation by the Business Software Alliance.

EPSRC is to provide £250m fundeding for 44 new centres of doctoral training which will train over 2000 PhD students over the next five years. Out of the 44 Universities, Scottish prospective PhD strengths are seen as optics and photonics, condensed matter physics and wind energy systems, which go to Heriot Watt, St Andrews and Strathclyde Universities respectively. Sadly no industrial centres made it to Scotland and no-one managed to bid for skilling wave and tidal energy experts.

The Medical Futures Innovation Awards were presented in London to innovators for a showcase of potentially revolutionary innovations that could transform patient healthcare in the next decade and beyond. The Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Scottish doctor, Sir James Black OBE, OM, FRS for his exceptional contribution to drug discovery, medicine and patient care, both as a physician and as a scientist.

Fife-based ATM advertising specialist I-design is tapping into the European market as it doubles sales and aims for profit. The firm has recently seen a major Greek bank come on board through a deal with a reseller, adding to the three UK institutions already on i-design's books, including Royal Bank of Scotland.

Rail passengers in Scotland face growing disruption following a sudden rise in the theft of copper cables from railway lines, since soaring global prices for metals, fuelled by growing demand from China, has triggered a surge in metal thefts from Scotland's railway lines. Perhaps the railways should take a leaf out of the Gauteng Soweto development in South Africa, which receives a business boost with a R1bn investment by shared broadband infrastructure company, Dark Fibre Africa (DFA), to lay fibre in the township.

Glen Rothes-based Infoplex may be at the heart of new Scottish voting, but its focus is on providing an innovative business solution to SMEs facing cash tight times with its new OrderBooks software. Suitable for businesses in any sector, and claimed to be the only software able to offer this level of functionality, OrderBooks merges Microsoft Outlook, CRM and TAS BOOKS into one enterprise-wide information system, at a fraction of the cost and complexity - giving big business advantages to smaller firms.

A new visual process mapping technique that can be used to capture and improve hospital systems has been developed as the result of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) between NHS Fife and the University of Stirling. KTPs bring UK business and higher education together and he Fife project saw a computing graduate, Mike Ghattas, work full time with NHS Fife for three years, supported by senior university and trust staff. Professor John Bowers, one of those involved with the project, said it aimed to take the idea of process mapping, which is often used in a commercial environment, and adapt it to the specific needs of the NHS.

A new research field called transformation optics may usher in a host of radical advances including a cloak of invisibility and ultra-powerful microscopes and computers by harnessing nanotechnology and metamaterials.The field, which applies mathematical principles similar to those in Einstein's theory of general relativity, is described in the journal Science, by Vladimir Shalaev, Purdue's Robert and Anne Burnett Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering who acknowledge the work of Sir John Pendry at Imperial College, London and Ulf Leonhardt at University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Amsterdam, focus of the European media technology world last weekend with vendors, operators, and content providers crowding the 12 halls of exhibitors at IBC 2008. The New Zealand web Scoop's reviewer isolated three trends: T-room delivery option is the PC as a multimedia unit: Ad Splicing, Ad Insertion, Ad Nauseum: and transcoding comes of age.
In this latter section the spotlight fell squarely on Dunfermline based NX Vision

Dr Manfred Buck and his research team at the University of St Andrews has made a crucial step in developing miniscule structures with potential applications in sophisticated sensors, catalysis and nanoelectronics having developed a way of forming an easily modified network of molecules over a large area. The chemical technique provides an advantageous alternative to traditional methods, which become increasingly cumbersome at the ultrasmall length scale

Dynamic-EMS located in a 43,000sq.ft facility in Dunfermline, with 83 staff and a turnover of £8m, enjoys a reputation for product quality, on-time delivery and competitive pricing in the supply of SMT and PTH circuit board assemblies and product box build. It has now achieved OHSAS 18001 and ISO14001 registration from QMS for its health and safety and environmental policies.

Researchers led by Professor James Naismith and Professor Ian Booth from the Universities of St Andrews and and Aberdeen respectively, with help of a£1.5M grant from the Wellcome Trust, have discovered a pressure release valve mechanism. Two other routes are also under development. At Oxford, Prolysis works on inhibiting FtsZ protein, while scientists at Swansea University, Wales, pursue on a new type of antibiotic found in maggot secretions.

The mystery of how young stars can form within the deep gravity of black holes has been solved by a team of astrophysicists at the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh. The team made the discovery after developing computer simulations of giant clouds of gas being sucked into black holes. The simulations, performed on the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA) SGI Altix supercomputer - taking over a year of computer time - followed the evolution of two separate giant gas clouds up to 100,000 times the mass of the sun, as they fell towards the supermassive black hole.

St Andrews University researchers led by Manfred Buck focus on self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) a 'bottom-up' approach and allows the simple and rapid creation of surface assemblies, readily tuned through the choice of molecular building blocks used and stabilised by hydrogen bonding, van der Waals interactions pi–pi bonding or metal coordination between the blocks.
For applications in the field of nanotechnology work explores the potential of SAMs to generate electrode structures. Patterned SAMs are used as templates to laterally confine reactions such as electrochemical metal deposition. The team have now used two strategies combining a non-covalent self-assembly of porous networks and SAMs, with the former providing nanometre-scale precision and the latter allowing versatile functionalisation and have now shown these create integrated network–SAM hybrid systems, sufficiently robust for further processing.

Fife Council has implemented a new VoIP system serving over 12,000 users under budget and bringing business benefits and significant ongoing cost savings. The Council is the third largest local authority in Scotland and eleventh largest in the UK employs 21,500 staff and serving a population of around 360,000 people.

Belgium-based Artilium, the telecoms software developer centred around the Microsoft platform to that create ARTA Mobile Services Platform systems for mobile network operators, is planning to increase its R&D activities and create 30 new jobs at its operations in Dunfermline offices. The Artilium office in Dunfermline holds key intellectual property for its Tri-cell Intelligent Location System technology.

The American hi-tech company rumoured to be taking over the former Hyundai plant in Dunfermline with the potential of creating 1000 new jobs, is revealed as San Jose, California-based, Zoom Diversified Inc (not to be confused with broadband Zoom Technologies Inc) by the Dunfermline Press. It claims to be building a poly-crystalline silicon manufacturing facility and a multi-phased vertically integrated solar energy generation plant that will manufacture the polycrystalline silicon feedstock, silicon solar cells and solar modules. It's choise of location is unusual in that the UK is not the biggest PV market and most PV companies find logistics plays an important role in location.The company, involved in mining, infrastructure, industrial, and real estate is developing the Global Gateway Technology City in the Philippines, a 24.5m sq ft business community.

Level Four Software, based in Dunfermline, has added monitoring software through an OEM deal with Austria's Salzburger Banken Software (SBS) re-branding the latter's KIXOperator product as BRIDGE:control. This enables banks to monitor changes in the amount of cash in the machine, device faults and software issues; the latter factor a key requirement as Microsoft OS have overtaken OS2. Next move for Level Four will be into the actual ATM application software, planned for the next year-to-eighteen months.

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