Civil Engineering and Geosciences

19.6.08
Newcastle University's reputation as a great place to be a student has been given a boost with the news that Newcastle upon Tyne has been named as the top university town in Britain in a survey carried out by the UK's foremost student accommodation website, accommodationforstudents.com

Newcastle tops the accommodationforstudents.com table with an overall score of 64 per cent, based on over 36,000 student reviews from 56 university towns around the UK.

In their reviews, students rated (out of 10) their university location across five criteria: going out (restaurants, pubs, clubs), shops (supermarkets, corner shops, book shops, video shops), transport links (buses, trams, train, underground), community (safety, student population, surroundings) and facilities (gyms, libraries, parks).

At the same time, the University climbed three places to joint 20th position in The Times Good University Guide 2009 league table.

more...

CeG to host more Google Earth training for teachers

Tom Bramald

17.6.08
Earlier this academic year, CEG hosted one of ten free-of-charge Google Earth training courses for teachers. The courses were organised by the Royal Geographical Society. Google, along with the Royal Geographical Society's Chartered Geography (Teacher) scheme, have announced sponsorship for a suite of introductory and advanced courses for the 2008-2009 academic year and CEG has been asked to act as a host again.

The first course attracted significant interest from teachers in the north east of England and so CEG has been asked to host two days of training in November/December 2008.

The School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences undertakes large amount of work with schools including running enrichment sessions for students and CPD courses for teachers. For more information, contact Tom Bramald. There are also a wide variety of STEM based resources available to schools from the university on the Teachers Toolkit (http://toolkit.ncl.ac.uk).

CeG emeritus professor awarded medal

Pavel Novak

17.6.08
Emeritus Professor Pavel Novak (Civil engineering and Geosciences) has been awarded the medal "De scientia et humanitate optime meritis" by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic - the highest honour to be awarded by the Academy.

best paper at the FIG (International Federation of Surveyors) workshop

Henny Mills

16.6.08
Henny Mills has won the award for Best Paper at the FIG (International Federation of Surveyors) workshop 2008: Sharing Good Practices, E-learning in Surveying, Geo-information Sciences and Land Administration e-learning strategies. The workshop was organised within the FIG commission 2 and took place at ITC Enschede from the 11-13 June 2008. Henny presented a paper on a virtual interactive traverse learning tool (VITLT). The tool was developed at CeG as an html website and allows students to observe a complete traverse as well as calculating it. The VITLT was developed to support the learning experience of students regarding traversing. Henny's was presented with the Best Paper Award during the conference dinner.

SWERVE project awarded £470,000 EPSRC grant

Hayley Fowler

10.6.08
SWERVE – Severe Weather Events Risk and Vulnerability Estimator

This new project, part of the £2 million EPSRC-funded CREW (Community Resilience to Extreme Weather) consortium, was launched on 1st May 2008. The project is led by Hayley Fowler, together with colleagues from the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Stuart Barr, Jim Hall and Chris Kilsby, and colleagues from Exeter University, the University of Manchester, Wolverhampton University, University College London, Birmingham University and Cranfield University. Together the CREW consortium spans 18 Universities across the UK and is made up of a range of engineering, physical and social science disciplines.

further information

new project to explore potential for seasonal forecasting in Pakistan

Hayley Fowler

10.6.08
New project to explore potential for seasonal forecasting in the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalaya, Pakistan, and the impacts of climate change on the region.

Hayley Fowler, from the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, and David Archer, an honorary fellow in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, have been awarded £40,000 in a British Council PMI 2 Connect – Research Co-operation Award together with colleagues at the Centre of Excellence in Water Resources Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan to enable the instigation of research links between the two institutes. The funding in the project will allow two senior researchers from each institute to visit the other institute for 2 weeks each year for the next two years. It will also enable a two-way PhD-student exchange for 9 months between the two institutes.

Snow and glacier melt from the mountainous region of the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalaya (HKH) provides the main source of runoff for the Upper Indus and Jhelum river systems. Management of flow from these rivers is critical for irrigated agriculture in the Indus Basin Irrigation System and hence for the well-being of the predominantly agricultural population of Pakistan. Previous research at Newcastle University and the Centre of Excellence in Water Resources Engineering over the last 5 years has established preliminary links between climatological (precipitation and temperature) and hydrological (river flow) datasets in the HKH.

further information

CeG PhD student wins prestigous award

Elizabeth Petrie

30.5.08
A CEG PhD student has been awarded a "Young Scientist Outstanding Poster (YSOPP) Award 2008" at the recent European Geosciences Union (EGU) Meeting in Vienna. Elizabeth Petrie (Ocean Sciences) received the award for the quality of her presented PhD work together with her discussion of the poster presentation "Sea Level Change using Vertical Land Motion from GNSS: Higher-Order Ionospheric Effects". These are highly competitive awards, open to all MSc and PhD students at the meeting which is attended by more than 5000 leading geoscientists from around the world. Elizabeth will receive a conference fee waiver for the next EGU General Assembly in April 2009, where she will receive a certificate of the award and will be invited to submit a scientific paper to one of the EGU journals, termed the YSOPP paper, free of any service charges.

Newcastle scientists to measure Antarctica's bounce

Matt King, Philip Moore and Peter Clarke

30.5.08
Newcastle University scientists have been awarded funding to study the "bounce-back" of Antarctica, giving insights into past and present changes in Antarctica's ice sheet.

At the last glacial maximum (LGM), some 12,000 years ago, Antarctica's ice sheet was substantially thicker and more extensive than it is now. The weight of ice causes the Earth's crust to subside and, when that ice melted, the Earth's crust began to rebound - a process which is still going on.

The study will examine how the crust in West Antarctica is rebounding and involves deploying 7 Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers in Antarctica to measure the expected 1-2 cm/yr rebound signal. A Newcastle scientist will travel to Antarctica to install the GPS with their solar and wind power systems in 2009. Whilst GPS receivers used in SatNav devices only provide positions with precisions of tens-of-metres, more sophisticated GPS receivers combined with careful analysis allows mm-level positioning. Over the course of the measurement period (2009-2012) the crust in the southern Antarctic Peninsula may move up to tens of millimetres due to the rebound effect. The findings will give information on the ice volume present in Antarctica at the LGM and also help the Newcastle group determine more accurate estimates of present-day Antarctic ice mass changes.

The project, led by Dr Matt King, has been given £633,000 funding by the Natural Environment Research Council and includes research colleagues at Durham University, British Antarctic Survey and University of Ottawa (Canada) and Delft University of Technology.

microbes could boost world energy supply

Ian Head and Martin Jones

8.5.08
A new spin out company will shortly begin trials to find out whether microbes can unlock the vast amount of energy trapped in the world's unrecovered heavy oil deposits.

An estimated six trillion barrels of oil remain underground because the oil has become either solid or too thick to be brought to the surface at economic cost by conventional means.

However, scientists at Newcastle University and the University of Calgary, Canada, have set up a company, Profero Energy Inc, to build on their recent research, which demonstrated how naturally-occurring microbes convert oil to natural gas (methane) over tens of millions of years.

The company is preparing to move on-site to begin pumping a special mixture of nutrients, dissolved in water, down an oil well above exhausted oil deposits in western Canada. If the scientists' calculations are correct, natural gas should flow back out, as the microbes thrive on the nutrients, multiply, and digest the tar-like oil at a greatly increased rate.

A major advance in the understanding of the way that petroleum is degraded by microbes underground was made by a research team, led by Professor Ian Head and Dr Martin Jones of Newcastle University and Professor Steve Larter, who works at both Newcastle University and the University of Calgary, which published a ground-breaking paper in January this year in the international academic journal, Nature.

The research provided the answers to a long-standing geological puzzle by revealing that two types of microbe found in environments containing crude oil were responsible for converting it into methane. First, bacteria called Syntrophus digest the oil and produce hydrogen gas and acetic acid (the pungent ingredient of vinegar). Secondly, methanogens, a type of organism known as archaea, combine the hydrogen with carbon dioxide to produce methane.

The research team also discovered that the geological timescale of this process could be shortened to a few hundred days in the laboratory by feeding the oil-based microbes with special nutrients. They reasoned that similar results could be obtained in an oilfield in a timescale of a year to tens of years.

Professor Head, an environmental microbiologist in the Institute for Research on Environment and Sustainability at Newcastle University, said: 'The discovery of how this process works could have major implications for the oil and gas industry because we think we will be able to extend the 20-30 year operating lifespan of a typical oil reservoir.'

Both Newcastle and Calgary universities have financial stakes in Profero Energy, which is being financed with an initial £500,000, and a further £4 million earmarked for the future, by Novotech Investments Ltd, a Newcastle-based venture capital company which was established to provide backing for very high value new technologies.

Profero Energy was established in a remarkably short space of time following consultation between the scientists, the commercial development teams at Newcastle and Calgary universities, and Novotech.

Newcastle University's Business Development Directorate handled the intellectual property issues and brokered the financing deal with Novotech.

Robin Lockwood, Head of Commercial Development at Newcastle University, said: 'This groundbreaking research clearly had commercial potential and we knew that we had to act quickly and decisively to take full advantage.

'The days when universities did the research and left the private sector to develop the commercial potential are long gone. These days, governments expect universities to play a major role in economic development and that means being much more savvy about commercial opportunity,' he said.

CeG researcher awarded European Science Foundation grant to attend international conference

Pauline Miller

7.5.08
Dr Pauline Miller, a research associate in Geomatics, has been awarded funding from the European Science Foundation (ESF) to attend the XXI Congress of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS). The Congress will be held in Beijing, China, from the 3 – 11 July 2008.

The award, which is designed to support young researchers working in Europe, was made following review of scientific papers submitted for the congress. Pauline’s paper, entitled, ‘A robust surface matching technique for DEM integration in the context of coastal geohazard monitoring’, reports on research carried out as part of her recently completed PhD (also in CeG). The ISPRS Congress covers a range of research areas, including image data acquisition, photogrammetric computer vision, close range measurement techniques, and aspects of remote sensing, GIS and digital mapping. Other members of the Geomatics group will also be travelling to Beijing to present their research.

www.isprs2008-beijing.org/
www.esf.org/lesc

CeG hosts BOGS 2008 meeting

Helen Talbot

7.5.08
The 19th meeting of the British Organic Geochemical Society will be hosted by the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences on 1-2 July 2008. See BOGS 2008 website for further details - register by 9 June.

international students rate Newcastle university seventh in the world

24.4.08
Newcastle University has been ranked seventh in the world for the quality of its international student experience.

The University came out on top of a survey of students' satisfaction with the services provided by its Graduate Schools, fourth overall for its welcome events, fifth for careers support and eighth for learning in the latest International Student Barometer survey.

Independent market research company, i-graduate, canvassed more than 67,000 students from 221 countries and 84 different institutions worldwide for their views on living and studying in the UK. Eighty-six per cent of the University's overseas students who took part in the survey said they would recommend studying at Newcastle.

The survey cited reputation and quality of teaching and research as the top three reasons for students choosing Newcastle.

Newcastle's performance was consistently ranked as being above average for both students' learning experience and quality of life. The University was placed in the top 10 worldwide for library facilities, learning support and environment, and language support.

Margaret Fay, Chairman of Regional Development Agency, One NorthEast, said: 'The survey results are an excellent recommendation for Newcastle University, the city and the wider region.

'The economic impact of overseas students is significant to our region and by gaining such credible results, Newcastle University has ensured that other international students will follow.'

Newcastle university press release

ASK-IT final conference

24.4.08
Nuremberg, Germany, 26-27 June, 2008 - register now

Mobility for All – The Use of Ambient Intelligence in Addressing the Mobility Needs of People with Impairments: The Case of ASK-IT

The second ASK-IT International conference marks the end of this EU research funded project. The conference will provide the opportunity to see and test the ASK-IT service and products that have been developed. It will also provide a unique occasion for different stakeholders, whether it be telecom providers, industry, user representatives, research institutes or local authorities, to gather together to discuss the role of Information Communication Technology in aiding and improving the everyday lives of mobility impaired people. The conference will welcome high level speakers and experts from around the world that will look at various issues, such as making content accessible, accessible tools and Ambient Intelligence, and will provide state-of-the-art information on accessibility initiatives in Europe and beyond.

For more information, please contact icre@polis-online

recent geomatics graduate profile

Kwasi Appeaning Addo

21.4.08
My interest in research using modelling techniques to analyse long-term shoreline change resulted in frantic search over the Internet for the best University. One institution that came up prominently and highly recommended was the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences in the Newcastle University. A look at the various research activities in the school informed my decision to pursue my PhD programme here.

The prevailing serene academic setting provided the environment I needed for my studies. The well-equipped lab that is accessible 24 hours a day 7 days a week, a personal computer with all the software needed for my research work and a well-resourced library facilitated exciting period of my research work. The swiftness with which the school provided equipment needed for my studies ensured uninterrupted research period, while the Annual Postgraduate Research Conference organised in the school provided a friendly platform to discuss my work with the school’s academic community. I enjoyed maximum cooperation from my supervisors who were always available for discussions and great help from the friendly members of staff. The school has a well-structured research-training programme that has enhanced my outlook as a researcher. Participating in mentorship training scheme designed to make new postgraduate students integrate into the academic environment has developed my mentoring skills. Various opportunities for teaching assistantship/demonstration and invigilation during end of semester examination enabled me to make extra money during the period of my studies.

Newcastle is a beautiful city with lots of tourist attraction, exciting nightlife, warm and friendly people who made my family to feel at home. The knowledge and research skills acquired have placed me in a better position to contribute significantly to the development of my country Ghana. My quest for further research work has been enhanced tremendously. The mentorship training will make me relate better with my students as a lecturer, while the experience gained in supervising examinations will influence conducting examinations in my institution in Ghana.

geomatics students return from fieldcourse

Henny Mills

18.4.08
The Stage 1 Geomatics students have returned from their annual
fieldcourse. For several years the fieldcourse has been held in the Lake District and both staff and students enjoyed another successful trip this year.

The students established a large primary network in Seathwaite Valley
using angle and distance measurements. The valley was then mapped at a
scale of 1:1000 following the establishment of smaller, secondary
traverse networks. The best traverse closed to 1:362000 and the quickest
time for setting up a total station was 2:45 minutes. See more about our geomatics fieldcourse.

surface meltwater causes speedup of the Greenland ice sheet

Matt King

18.4.08
Scientists have shown that melting ice in Greenland can drain to the base of the ice, increasing ice flow into the oceans and changing sea level. Greenland is now well known to be losing ice to the oceans and sea level is increasing as a result. Some of the ice melts due to atmospheric temperature, but by far the fastest way to move more ice into the oceans is to speed it up. New field measurements from a team of scientists, including Dr Matt King in the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, has shown that ice melted in the summer when air temperatures are warmer and then stored in surface lakes can drain through nearly 1000m of ice in a matter of 2 hours. These new findings suggest that as many of these lakes drain over the summer they act to lubricate the base of the ice where it is in contact with rock. This increased lubrication acts just like a slipperly floor - sliding becomes easier - and large areas of ice speed up by 25-50%. The lakes are commonly equivalent in area to those in the Lake District and are up to 10m deep, although increasing temperatures may lead to more melting and hence larger lakes and, perhaps, more water draining to the ice/rock interface leading to faster ice flow into the oceans.

The good news came toward the coast, where the ice speeds up as the flow narrows into a few outlet glaciers that deliver the ice to the sea. Those glaciers moved only 9% faster than normal in August of 2006. While meltwater causes a large speedup on the main ice sheet, the fast flowing glaciers are affected by relatively smaller amounts. That may be because the beds on which outlet glaciers slide are already smooth and well lubricated year-round. All in all, meltwater lubrication likely will have a substantive but not catastrophic effect on the Greenland Ice Sheet's future evolution.

The movement of the ice was measured by placing Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers on the ice and running them over the winter. Dr King analysed these data to produce estimates of how they move over time. Lake depth and seismic data (similar to equipment used to monitor earthquakes) were also measured by Dr Ian Jouhgin and Dr Sarah Das, who led the study from University of Washington and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, respectively. Together with the GPS data, these data helped reveal very rapid events, such as when a nearby lake drained, and slower events, such as speedup of the ice in early summer and slow down over winter. They suggest an inter-connection of lake drainage and large scale ice speedup.

In the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, where scientists attempted to describe recent climate change and predict future changes, lack of understanding of the "speed-up" of the ice was highlighted as a key uncertainty. The two papers, published online on 17 April in the journal Science (Express), go some way to aiding our understanding of how Greenland will respond to future climate.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/1153288.pdf
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/1153360.pdf

Guardian news
Science

feeling the pressure: CeG researchers involved in science and poetry book

Richard Dawson, Hayley Fowler and Stephen Blenkinsopp

16.4.08
The British Council Switzerland have recently published Feeling the Pressure, an anthology of poems and scientific texts about climate change. The book features contributions on the science of climate change from Dr Richard Dawson, Dr Hayley Fowler and Dr Stephen Blenkinsopp who are researchers in the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at Newcastle University.

It includes new work by many of Britain's leading poets, such as Roger McGough, Simon Armitage and Andrew Motion, as well as illustrations by the Swiss cartoonist Magi Wechsler. It is, as the editor Paul Munden puts it '… a weather report, a British snapshot of intellectual and emotional reaction to things as they stand at the end of 2007'. Featuring both literary and scientific texts, the anthology joins the worlds of art and science and thus offers a fresh outlook on the topic.

The book can be downloaded free for educational use, or purchased in hard copy for £7.95, from the British Council website. Richard Dawson has a limited number of copies of the book available. richard.dawson@newcastle.ac.uk

a drop in the ocean

Matt King, Jon Mills and Peter Clarke

15.4.08
Newcastle University scientists are working to improve our understanding of the contribution of melting glaciers to sea level over the last century.

Based within the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences (CeG), Dr Matt King, Prof Jon Mills and Prof Peter Clarke are part of the SLICES team investigating sea level contributions from the Arctic island archipeligo of Svalbard. The project is working to unlock historic archives of valley glacier heights through a combination of aerial photograpy from the 1930s with heights derived from airborne laser measurements. The position of the laser is determined through precise Global Positioning System (GPS) data analysis, a particular specialty of CEG. These data have been used to show, for the first time, that Svalbard valley glacier melting has accelerated over the past century and they have made important contributions to sea level change over that period.

More information on the SLICES project can be found in the Natural Environmental Research Council's Planet Earth magazine.

sea level change project awarded £280,000 NERC grant

Peter Clarke and Phil Moore

8.4.08
Peter Clarke and Phil Moore, with colleagues at the NERC Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool, the Technical University of Delft, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and the Institut Geographique National / Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, have been awarded a Natural Environment Research Council grant of £280,830 for a project entitled "Consistent multi-technique geodetic estimates of present-day contributions to regional sea level change". The work is funded by the Strategic Oceans Funding Initiative (SOFI), part of NERC's flagship "Oceans2025" marine science programme.

Changes in sea level will not be the same world-wide, because the ocean must respond gravitationally to the changes in water mass situated on the continents, as ice sheets thicken or melt and other stores of wate accumulate or drain into the oceans (the total water mass must remain fixed). We will use these patterns of change in sea level to identify the contributing factors to sea level rise: in principle, each locality of varying continental water storage will produce a different "fingerprint" of sea level variation, although in practice we can only resolve changes over areas spanning several hundreds of kilometres.

At decadal timescales, globally-averaged sea level will change either (1) because there is a change in the mass of water in the ocean, or (2) because the ocean has expanded in volume due to changes in its temperature and/or salinity. Here, we aim to evaluate the extent of these two effects. In dealing with sea level, we must recognise that there are two ways of measuring it: geocentric (also known as "global" or "absolute") sea level, measured with respect to the centre of mass of the whole Earth-ocean-atmosphere system, and relative sea level, measured with respect to the nearby land. Relative sea level is what is important to coastal communities, but it varies from place to place because the land itself may be moving vertically due to plate tectonics, glacio-isostatic adjustment (or "post-glacial rebound"), present-day changes in the pattern of mass weighing on the Earth's surface, and local effects. These variations make it important to calibrate relative sea level observations, to avoid bias in their global average; conversely, the impact of geocentric sea level change can only be understood if we know the expected vertical movement of the land.

In this project, we will bring together a wide range of geodetic measurements. Direct observations of the changing gravity field of the Earth, from the GRACE twin-satellite mission and from laser and microwave ranging to other satellites, will constrain the changes in oceanic and continental water mass distribution. Measurements of the changes in Earth's shape, again from laser and microwave ranging to satellites, will also constrain the loading effects of this mass redistribution on the solid Earth. In contrast, satellite radar altimetry will measure the sea surface height (including both mass change and thermal expansion) with respect to the Earth system's centre of mass; tide gauges will measure sea surface height with respect to the local land surface, but many of them can have their vertical land movements calibrated with GPS. The differences between these various sea surface and ocean mass estimates will constrain the oceanic heat and salinity content, which can be compared with the sparse data and models that exist. We will then be able to identify the recent and likely future contributions of different locations of continental water storage, and oceanic heat/salinity content, to sea level rise. Many of these geodetic datasets have only just reached maturity, or are benefiting from recent step changes in the accuracy of their analysis. In addition to helping climate modellers and communities world-wide to understand sea level change, our results will be of particular interest to oceanographers trying to analyse the changing patterns of the oceans' physical properties and circulation.

waste concrete could help to lock up carbon

David Manning

3.4.08
Katharine Sanderson, Nature news

Old building sites could help to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Derelict land could offer an unforeseen environmental benefit: plant the right type of plants in old concrete-littered sites, and they could turn carbon dioxide from the air into chalk in the soil.

David Manning, a soil scientist at the University of Newcastle, UK, and his colleagues, say that broken lumps of concrete and mortar make soils rich in calcium, and this could help to turn the carbon produced by plants during photosynthesis into minerals for long-term storage.

In photosynthesis, plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and eventually secrete substances known as 'root exudates' into the soil. These are typically organic acids, such as citric acid, which can react with water in the soil to make carbonate. In calcium-rich soils, this can in turn form calcium carbonate (otherwise known as chalk), an unreactive mineral that precipitates out onto pebbles or other particles in the soil and stays there.

So theoretically, plants that ooze lots of exudates, like lupins or brassicas, when combined with calcium-rich soil, as found at sites of derelict buildings, could capture carbon and remove it from the atmosphere permanently.

Limestone has been posited before as a good place to lock up excess carbon dioxide from the air: some researchers have suggested industrially reacting natural calcium with carbon dioxide to lock it up in chalk, but this takes a lot of energy.

Manning first stumbled on this process when doing an unrelated experiment in a quarry in Newcastle. He had blended some scrap quarried rock with compost in 2002, and when he returned to the site last year he found a higher-than-expected concentration of calcium carbonate. Upon investigation, the isotopic values of the carbonate showed that the carbon came from plants, not the rock.

To test his theory, a few weeks ago Manning went to a derelict site in Newcastle, which is littered with mortar and overgrown with weeds, and looked at the soil there. It too contained lots of calcium carbonate. “We’re picking up calcium carbonate in soils where we weren’t expecting to find it,” says Manning.

Manning will now use carbon-isotope analysis to confirm that the carbon comes from the atmosphere via photosynthesis.

Manning says that with proper management, this carbon locking-in process could be encouraged, helping to offset the UK’s carbon emissions. If properly managed, Manning estimates that this process could lock up 4 million tonnes of carbon a year in the UK. That compares to annual emissions of more than 150 million tonnes of carbon in the form of CO2.

Big development sites, such as the Olympic or Commonwealth Games sites, contain some areas of derelict land that is landscaped after construction ends, he notes. Carefully choosing plants that encourage the creation of carbonate could help to promote the formation of chalk in the soil and extraction of carbon dioxide from the air, he says. “It’s possible to build in a carbon-capture element to the soil,” says Manning.

Simple projects like these might be appreciated by building companies and concrete manufacturers wishing to 'green' their image. Globally the cement industry is currently responsible for about 5% of anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emissions.

And Manning’s proposal, if proven, has a major advantage in that it uses waste material says Steve McGrath, an expert in soils from Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, UK. “Any technology to trap carbon and sequester it must be low cost,” says McGrath. Waste building materials are cheap and we have to do something with them anyway, he says. “I think it’s something that’s got to be tried.”

Newcastle university press release

CeG hosts IWA conference

Sharon Velásquez Orta

2.4.08
The International Water Association's network of young professionals organises an annual conference where young researchers can gather to discuss their work and meet with senior representatives of the water industry. Following the 2007 conference held at the University of Surrey; this year, the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at the University of Newcastle is hosting the conference from 2 – 4 April 2008.

This Conference aims to provide a range of activities, services and initiatives to young professionals and students in the water and wastewater sector and also connects with employers, academic institutions and other professional associations to ensure that the future needs of the sector are understood and addressed. It also generates a space were inter-generational professionals can share their interests and experiences.

http://www.ceg.ncl.ac.uk/iwaconference/

ACME conference a success

Mohamed Rouainia

2.4.08
This year, the annual ACME (Association for Computational Mechanics in Engineering – UK) meeting was hosted by the School of Civil Engineering & Geosciences at Newcastle University (1-2 April 2008).

The proceedings of this year's meeting include over 50 contributions in computational mechanics by researchers from a wide range of institutions. It is also honoured to have two invited speakers, Professor Ken Morgan from Swansea University and Manuel Pastor from Cedex, Spain.

Further details on the conference can be found on-line at: http://www.ceg.ncl.ac.uk/acme/

CeG football fundraiser for Tanzania

2.4.08

The CeG Staff and Postgrad Friendly 5-a-side Football Tournament 2008 was held on Tuesday 1 April at the University Sports Centre.

A total of ten teams entered, including lecturers, laboratory technicians, researchers, PhD students, and MSc students from across the School. A big thanks to everyone who played. Congratulations to the winners of the Winners Cup, Pink House Farm.

Commiserations to the ‘winners’ of the Losers Medal, the Cassie Crusaders. A grand total of £228 was raised, to be donated via CeG PhD student James Shorter, for the installation of a sustainable water treatment unit to prevent skeletal fluorosis of school children in Tindigani, Northern Tanzania.