The Onassis Seminar Lecture Series of 2013 in Physics and Chemistry is devoted to: “Nanoscience and Nanotechnology” with emphasis on graphene and related applications.

Kostas Tokatlidis, Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Technology at the University of Crete and an affiliated Researcher at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas (IMBB-FORTH) has been elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO).

Turn down the volume! Noise in everyday life is a significant and growing problem that, according to the World Health Organisation, is responsible for many healthy years of life lost [1]. And it is not just traffic,mobile devices or so-called personal music equipment that is responsible, but speech itself. Anyone unfortunate enough to spend much time at a public transport interchange or airport is assailed by loud, distorted and repetitive announcements. Keeping the volume high is the easy way to ensure that anyone listening gets the message, especially in noisy environments, but is it the smartest solution?

The paper entitled "AmI-RIA: Real-Time Teacher Assistance Tool for an Ambient Intelligence Classroom", presented by Asterios Leonidis, PhD Candidate at the University of Crete and member of the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory of ICS-FORTH, received the Best Paper Award at the 5th International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning (eLmL 2013, Nice, France, 24 February – 1 March 2013).

The paper entitled "Programming Smart Object Federations for Simulating and Implementing Ambient Intelligence Scenarios", presented by Ioannis Georgalis, PhD Candidate at the University of Crete and member of the HCI Laboratory of ICS-FORTH, received the Best Student Paper Award at the 3rd International Conference on Pervasive and Embedded Computing and Communications Systems (PECCS 2013, Barcelona, Spain 19-21 February 2013).

A USA-Greece collaboration of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory & Iowa State University and at the University of Crete & the Foundation for Research & Technology - Hellas (FORTH) in Greece have found a new way to create small magnets by using short laser light pulses. In this way, they were able to switch magnetism at least 1000 times faster than in current magnetic devices. Magnetic switching is used to encode information in hard drives, magnetic memories, and other computing devices. The discovery reported in the April 4 issue of Nature opens the door to terahertz (1012 hertz) memory speeds and moves magnetic switching to the fast lane.