Equilume – Lighting up the world of horse breeding
The Thoroughbred breeding industry operates within confines of very tight breeding and racing calendar. Breeders try to produce foals as close to January 1st as possible and currently, they artificially advance the mares’ breeding cycle by keeping them indoors under lights for 12 weeks from December. Aoibhinn meets Barbara Murphy, head of UCD spinout Equilume who has developed a light mask with tiny blue LED lights set into one of the eye cups of a pair of conventional blinkers routinely worn by horses. The light limits the level of the hormone melatonin which is usually produced in darkness and inhibits the mare’s reproductive activity during winter months. The technology is already proving a success around the world and Aoibhinn meets Stud Farm owner Dermot Cantwell to find about the impact of the research at the coal face. She also meets UCD Optoelectronic Engineer John Sheridan, who worked on the design the light mask, and talks about some of the challenges involved.
Weird Weather
The weather is never far from the public consciousness; from what to wear when we leave the house each morning, to planning holidays abroad. But how has our weather changed over the last hundred years, and how will it change in the next? From floods to droughts, and from local transition towns to global strategies to combat climate change, weather is of greater concern than ever. Kathriona meets Paul Nolan from the Irish Centre for High End Computing (ICHEC) who is working with the EPA and Met Éireann to improve regional climate modelling, and meteorologist and weather presenter Gerald Fleming from Met Éireann who explains how this data can help with both short and long term weather forecasting.
Cold Wars and Copper Wires
What would happen if the world’s communications networks suddenly stopped working??? We travel back to the 1960s, to a world before satellites and on the brink of the Cold War…
Is YouTube killing the internet??!
When YouTube was launched in 2005 surely nobody could have predicted its meteoric rise in popularity, influence and usage. In less than a decade, viewings of videos on the site have gone from 8 million views a day to a staggering 2 billion views, and the internet may well be reaching the capacity of being able to cope with its own success! The semiconductor industry is crucial to the evolution and success of computer technology and internet development and Jonathan meets Brian Corbett at Tyndall National Institute who is investigating the use of lasers as a light source for fibre connections in computers. Brian is working with Seagate in Derry and his research aims to improve the speed and energy efficiency of data transfer and storage, and crucially, offer potential solutions to the management of the exponentially increasing amount of data on the web.