Melting mountain glaciers in South America are making sea levels rise faster now than at any time in the last 350 years, says BBC science news. Yet melting is less of a problem than warming.

TU Delft alumnus and Nobel laureate Simon van der Meer died early this month in Geneva, where he had been residing since 1956. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1984 for his cunning design of particle accelerators at Cern.

Architect Antoni Folkers believes there is something oddly homogonous about African architecture. He defended his thesis on modern architecture in Africa earlier this month.

Sandia Labs (US) is about to test a novel system of converting heat into power generation. The system is based on supercritical carbon dioxide and efficiencies of up to 50 percent are expected, offering a huge boost to power generation from both nuclear and solar heat.

Name: Elizabeth Rendon Velez (33)
Nationality: Colombian
Supervisors: Professor Imre Horvath (Phd supervisor); Wilfred van der Vegte (daily supervisor), both from the Industrial Design Engineering faculty
Subject: Identifying drivers who are in a hurry
Thesis defense: In two years

 “I found the photo on iStockphoto.com,” says Dr Michel Meulpolder. He was looking for scales, as the topic of his PhD research at faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science was on balancing supply and demand in peer-to-peer networks in which people exchange content, like music and films, over the Internet.

Delta and Delft Integraal/Outlook often write about innovative ideas that offer big promises for the future. But what has happened to such ideas years later? What for instance has happened to Roger Ball’s ‘Size China’ project?

Many of the compounds in cannabis have medicinal properties. Hélène
Perrotin-Brunel developed a technique to extract these chemicals in their purest forms.