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Is it time to consign those annoying cables and chargers to the bonfire of technological vanities and embrace a cable-free existence?

As Oxford University Innovation report that's the promise of new technology being developed by Chris Stevens at Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science that enables devices such as mobile phones and cables to charge and transmit data without cables and could one day eliminate power and data cables altogether.

'You could have a truly active, cable-free, battery-less desktop that can power and link your laptop or PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse, phone and camera. For example, by incorporating the technology behind the screen of a computer monitor, digital files, photos and music could be transferred effortlessly to and from a USB stick simply by tapping the flash drive against an on-screen icon,' Chris explains.

'This work comes from research into metamaterials, that is, materials that act as magneto-inductive wave guides and magneto-inductive power surfaces. You can find simple inductive technology in the charging unit of an electric toothbrush but in this case we can transfer data as well, and over a distance.

'The real beauty is that since the technology is in a patterned conductive layer, we can start adding that layer to any surface or indeed into a fabric.'

Weaving power and data capabilities into fabric opens up all kinds of intriguing possibilities such as smart textiles: the Oxford researchers have already built cable-free technology into a carpet to power a lamp and can achieve 3.5 Gigabits per second data transfer rate and hundreds of watts of power but believe there's still plenty of scope to improve the performance of their circuits. These advances suggest that the ability to synch and charge mobile devices could, literally, be woven into the fabric of public spaces.

Another advantage is that without the ports and holes needed to plug in cables it's much easier to make devices robust and waterproof: something that will make metamaterials technology ideal for applications in industries from aerospace to medicine.

But, even more importantly, according to Chris a cable-free existence could help us to recycle our electronic devices as it's the fact that they are wired and soldered together that makes them so hard to reuse:

'If you do away with wires and connect your components by sticking them onto a sealed circuit board, taking them apart becomes easy. No desoldering, no heat treatments, no toxic chemicals, no damage to the components,' he says.

'High spec computers can be sent back to the manufacturer when the next model comes out and the processors can be reused for lower spec home computers. Eventually those same processors can end up in TVs and washing machines – dramatically increasing the lifecycle of electronics.'

Think of it like electronic reincarnation: if your laptop is good to you in this life its reusable components mean it can come back as the home cinema that lights up your living room in the next.

Because of its intriguing properties graphene could be the ideal material for building new kinds of electronic devices such as sensors, screens, or even quantum computers.

One of the keys to exploiting graphene's potential is being able to create atomic-scale defects – where carbon atoms in its flat, honeycomb-like structure are rearranged or 'knocked out' – as these influence its electrical, chemical, magnetic, and mechanical properties.

A team led by Oxford University scientists report in Nature Communications a new approach to a new approach to engineering graphene's atomic structure with unprecedented precision.

'Current approaches for producing defects in graphene are either like a 'shotgun' where the entire sample is sprayed with high energy ions or electrons to cause widespread defects, or a chemistry approach where many regions of the graphene are chemically reacted,' said Jamie Warner from Oxford University's Department of Materials, a member of the team.

'Both methods lack any form of control in terms of spatial precision and also the defect type, but to date are the only reported methods known for defect creation.'

The new method replaces the 'shotgun' with something more like a sniper rifle: a minutely-controlled beam of electrons fired from an electron microscope.

'The shotgun approach is restricted to micron scale precision, which is roughly an area of 10,000,000 square nanometres, we demonstrated a precision to within 100 square nanometres, which is about four orders of magnitude better,' explains Alex Robertson of Oxford University's Department of Materials, another member of the team.

Yet it isn’t just about the accuracy of a single 'shot'; the researchers also show that by controlling the length of time graphene is exposed to their focused beam of electrons they can control the size and type of defect created.

'Our study reveals for the first time that only a few types of defects are actually stable in graphene, with several defects being quenched by surface atoms or relaxing back to pristine by bond rotations,' Jamie tells me.

The ability to create just the right kind of stable defects in graphene's crystal structure is going to be vital if its properties are to be harnessed for applications such as mobile phones and flexible displays.

'Defect sites in graphene are much more chemically reactive, so we can use defects as a site for chemical functionalisation of the graphene. So we can attach certain molecules, such as biomolecules, to the graphene to act as a sensor,' Alex tells me.

'Defects in graphene can also give rise to localized electron spin, an attribute that has important future use in quantum nanotechnology and quantum computers.'

At the moment scaling up the team's technique into a manufacturing process to create graphene-based technologies is still a way off. Currently electron microscopes are the only systems that can achieve the necessary exquisite control of an electron beam.

But, Alex says, it is always possible that a scalable electron beam lithography type technique may be developed in the future that could allow for defect patterning in graphene.

And it's worth remembering that it wasn't so long ago that the technology needed to etch millions of transistors onto a tiny slice of silicon seemed like an impossible dream.

Humans don't have a monopoly on being smart: many other animals, including birds, can solve problems and even make and use tools.

But does it always pay for animals to be brainy or are there hidden costs?

A recent study of great tits, published in Current Biology, gives an insight into  the trade-offs between problem-solving abilities and other traits. The work was conducted by Ella Cole of Oxford University's Department of Zoology and Julie Morand-Ferron and led by John Quinn. I asked Ella about birds, brains, and strategies…

OxSciBlog: What makes great tits good for studying problem-solving?
Ella Cole: Great tits are well-known for their ability to problem-solve in order to find food, ranking among the top 20 most innovative avian species. This ability to solve novel problems or find new food sources may be one reason why great tits are able to survive in such a variety of different habitats.

In our work with the tits, we try to establish whether good and poor problem solvers differ in how they forage in the wild and how successful they are at reproducing. Our problem solving trials are carried out in captivity under standardised conditions. We therefore need to test large numbers of individuals as we cannot be certain how many birds we will be able to find again once they are released back into the wild.

Great tits are an excellent study species because they can be caught in large numbers, easily adapt to captive conditions and  take to nest boxes allowing us to monitor their foraging behaviour and breeding success in the wild.

OSB: What links did you find between problem-solving and successfully raising offspring?
EC: We found that females that could problem-solve in captivity laid more eggs than their non-solving counterparts when released back into the wild. If their nests did not fail, these solvers also fledged more chicks than non-solvers.

Even though the quality of food fed to chicks did not differ between solvers and non-solvers, solvers had much smaller foraging ranges and foraged for less time each day than non-solvers, suggesting they may be generally more efficient at finding food.

Interestingly though, female problem-solvers were more likely to desert their chicks than non-solving females, leading to no overall fitness difference between solvers and non-solvers. These findings provide the first convincing evidence that problem-solving abilities may influence reproductive success in wild populations.

OSB: What do your results tell us about the costs of being smart?
EC: Our finders suggest there may be costs as well as benefits to being smart. We find that problem solvers are more likely to desert their nests, which is a common adaptive behaviour amongst birds in response to unfavourable conditions.

Although their offspring will die, deserters can preserve their resources for themselves and therefore breed again when conditions may be more favourable. We show that desertion in our population may be a direct response to trapping by field workers – a procedure that is carried out in order to establish the identities of breeding birds (via reading their unique leg bands).

It is likely therefore that solvers may be more sensitive to human interference at the nest (which they are likely to perceive as a predation attempt), indicating that they are generally more cautious or anxious than non-solvers.

Why might 'being smart' not always be the best strategy?
EC: Being smart is costly. In humans, for example, the brain only accounts for 2% of an adult’s body weight, but it consumes about 20% of the resting metabolic rate [Clarke and L. Sokoloff 1999].

As resources are limited in nature, energy spent on the brain must be diverted from something else such as maximising body size and strength. Therefore although in some environments it will pay to be brainy, in others animals may benefit instead by investing resources in being good at competing or fleeing predators.

Whether being smart is favoured by selection is therefore likely to depend on the specific selective pressures acting in a given environment.  In a previous study we showed that problem solver great tits are poorer at competing for limited food resources than non-solvers, and in the current study we find that solvers may also be more timid. These correlations provide support for the idea that trade-offs may exist between problem-solving ability and other traits linked to fitness, and therefore that being smart may not always be the best strategy.

What further studies are needed to explore the link between 'smarts' and 'success' in great tits?
EC: Our paper provides an important first step to understanding how selection may act on individual variation in cognitive performance in animal populations. However, more work is needed to understand exactly how being a good problem solver helps animals do well in the wild: for example, are they better at finding novel food sources when most needed, or are they quicker generally at learning to cope with challenges in their environment?

Another useful area of research will be to further explore the costs of being smart. In our paper we show that solvers are more sensitive to disturbance at the nest than non-solvers, leading to high nest failure, but whether they also show a stronger response to natural predation attempts remains to be tested.

Finally, it will also be very interesting and informative to explore how different types of cognitive traits (such as learning ability) relate to fitness, and to test the prediction that the costs of being smart will lead to high cognitive performance only being favoured in environments that are especially cognitively demanding.

At ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile they are about to fit a new instrument that can record the light from 24 galaxies simultaneously.

KMOS has 24 robotic arms tipped with gold-plated mirrors that can be trained on a different galaxy – each arm has almost 200 facets making them rather like an insect's compound eye. Light from these mirrors is channelled into 3 spectrographs and 'multiplexed' – combined into a single signal.

The 3 spectrographs were designed, manufactured, and assembled at Oxford University before being shipped out to Chile via STFC's UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh.

Working at infrared wavelengths, KMOS will probe a crucial time in the evolution of galaxies: around 10 billion years ago when star formation was at its height and the black holes believed to nestle in the centres of most galaxies were also highly active.

'Not only will KMOS accelerate the study of high redshift galaxies through the multiplex advantage, it will also provide a much more detailed view, allowing us to study gas flows and star forming regions in each individual galaxy,' Roger Davies, who led work at Oxford on the KMOS spectrographs, explains. 'We expect that these will reveal the connection between the evolution of the stars in galaxies and central black hole.'

The Oxford team are particularly interested in looking at galaxies in rich clusters: swarms of galaxies that occupy a compact volume and so live in a dense environment at a common distance.

In the nearby Universe these cosmic laboratories host large populations of structureless galaxies that appear to have completed almost all their star formation. 'KMOS will help us to identify the physical processes that give rise to this particular population of galaxies in clusters,' Roger tells me.

Over the last decade the spectrometers for KMOS were designed and constructed in Oxford University's Department of Physics. An experienced team of Ian Lewis, Matthias Tecza and Niranjan Thatte, as well as Davies, have established a strong track record for Oxford in instruments of this kind having built instruments for the the Mt Palomar 5m and the Japanese Subaru 8m telescope in recent years.

Building KMOS was a huge technical challenge: 'The whole interior of the instrument is cryogenic – cooled to 100 Kelvin [-173 Celsius] – so the spectrographs have to work at these extreme temperatures,' Ian Lewis tells me. The Oxford team worked closely with colleagues at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory on the optical design of KMOS, whilst the Thin Film Facility gave it its golden glow – gold-plating all the mirrors for the device.

KMOS can detect emissions from gas at very early times in the history of the Universe that is normally invisible in images of the sky. The light from gas at high redshift can be concentrated in emission at a single wavelength, when an image is recorded over a broad range of wavelengths this light can be swamped and not detectable above the background glow. Because KMOS spreads the light out in wavelength over an area of sky, it can potentially detect the sharp emission lines from the most distant gas known, 'This could be one of the most exciting results from KMOS,' Roger adds.

The instrument is a collaboration of six institutions in Germany and the UK, including STFC's UK Astronomy Technology Centre, Durham University, Oxford University and RAL Space at STFC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Studying land-based birds is tough enough, but studying seabirds that spend much of their time over, on, or under water presents a new set of challenges.

In this week’s Journal of the Royal Society: Interface, a team led by Oxford University scientists describes how new technologies and techniques made it possible to follow an important British seabird, the Manx Shearwater.

I asked lead author Ben Dean of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology about the study and how the team’s findings might help in efforts to conserve shearwaters and other seabirds…

OxSciBlog: What are the challenges of studying shearwaters?
Ben Dean: Manx Shearwaters are elusive seabirds. They visit their breeding colonies only at night and nest underground in burrows where they rear single large chicks. The rest of the time they spend foraging at sea, often travelling hundreds of kilometres in search of food.

Studies at the colony have taught us much about their breeding and parental behaviour, while ship-based surveys have given us an understanding of the overall at-sea distribution of the species, yet we still know relatively little about patterns of behaviour at sea.

Understanding the at-sea behaviour of seabirds such as shearwaters is important because of their vulnerability to changes in the marine environment and their status as indicators of ocean health. But because of their elusive life-style and relatively small size, following individual birds from known colonies and recording detailed behavioural data is difficult.

OSB: What technologies did you use to investigate their behaviour?
BD: Advances in miniature data logging technology have revolutionised the remote observation of long-distance movements in seabirds. We deployed three types of miniature bio-logger simultaneously, each collecting different types of behavioural data:

Global Positioning System (GPS) loggers recorded the routes and movement speeds of foraging birds, saltwater immersion loggers recorded the proportion of time spent on and off the sea, and time-depth recorders logged each dive made in pursuit of prey.

Handling the increasingly complex datasets generated by these technologies is in itself challenging and so we employed a machine learning method to build a detailed picture of the at-sea behaviour and then applied what we had learnt to a large dataset in which we had tracked the movements of shearwaters from different colonies over three years.

OSB: How do your results add to what we already knew?
BD: First, we were able to show where and when shearwaters from different colonies engaged in three principal activities at sea: resting on the surface, commuting flight between colonies and foraging areas, and foraging behaviour. This type of information is of high value in conservation planning, particularly with respect to interactions between particular threats and those behaviours that increase risk: for example roosting and surface pollution, commuting flight and wind turbines, or foraging and fisheries.

Second we were able to reveal details of the foraging behaviour of this species, which primarily involves tortuous searching flights over relatively restricted search areas interspersed with frequent landings and take offs and diving in pursuit of prey.

Third we showed that birds from two different colonies in the Irish Sea foraged in local waters that were exclusive, but that birds from both colonies overlapped in one key area: the western Irish Sea and the Irish Sea Front.

Birds breeding at the colony furthest from the front spent more of their time at sea engaged in commuting flight and less time engaged in foraging activity than birds breeding close to the front. This suggests that birds breeding far from this important foraging area must work harder to locate prey, presumably at a greater cost to their own body condition.

OSB: What further research is needed to discover more about the lifestyle of Shearwaters/other seabirds?
BD: Further studies combining detailed data from multiple loggers will allow us to investigate how shearwaters respond to oceanographic features such as fronts, or prey distributions and to understand the kinds of decisions they make when searching for food.

Given that these birds cover such large distances during foraging trips, the analysis of GPS tracks to investigate the mechanisms of navigation and the learning of locations and routes is also likely to uncover interesting facets of seabird behaviour.

The future of seabird research almost certainly lies in multidisciplinary approaches that combine classical field biology with bio-logging, computational biology, molecular and chemical techniques. Such approaches will increasingly reveal ever more fascinating aspects of the elusive lifestyles of seabirds.