The Scottish Funding Council recently awarded strategic funds to a joint initiative involving the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA), Scottish Universities Life Science Alliance (SULSA) and Scottish Imaging Network (SINAPSE) to develop and expand academic, clinical and industrial collaborations in Scotland around optical imaging.

Outstanding academics and celebrated professionals join Scotland’s National Academy

Scotland's National Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), has announced the names of 62 people becoming Fellows of the RSE this year. Hailing from sectors that range from the arts, business, science and technology and academia, they join the current RSE Fellowship whose varied expertise supports the advancement of learning and useful knowledge in Scottish public life.

SUPA is particularly pleased to note a number of its members being recognised:

Weds 29 May, Technology & Innovation Centre, Strathclyde

Scottish innovation and collaboration have been highlighted in a new video produced for the APS March Meeting in Boston. Featuring interviews with our academics, researchers and the Chief Scientific Advisor for Scotland, the video highlights our strengths across our seven research themes, and our Graduate School, providing advanced training for our doctoral students.

The APS March meeting is held each year in Boston, USA, for more than 11,000 attendees from academia, industry and major labs.

CERN Update: LHCb discovers new baryon with two charm quarks 

Paul Soler, Professor in Experimental Particle Physics at the University of Glasgow, said in a statement: “This is the first time that a baryon has been conclusively observed containing two heavy charm quarks and is a new frontier in understanding the strong force that binds quarks together.” [Newsweek]

 On the 4th January 2017 a third gravitational wave signal (GW170104) was detected by both of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors further establishing the era of gravitational wave astronomy .

This week, the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of five new resonances (very short-lived particles), known as excited Ωc (Omega_c) baryons. Baryons are composed of three fundamental particles called quarks. Well-known examples of baryons are the protons and neutrons that are found in atomic nuclei. A proton is made of two “up” quarks and one “down” quark, bound together via the strong nuclear force.