Supermassive black holes, notorious for ripping apart and swallowing stars, might also help seed interstellar space with the elements necessary for life, such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and iron, scientists say.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite, scientists at Penn State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found evidence of high-speed winds blowing away copious amounts of gas from the cores of two quasar galaxies, which are

Intelligent environment learns and is technically interactive

VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland, has developed technology which operates through people’s gestures. The new concept is currently being introduced for research purposes at Italdesign-Giugiaro S. p.a. the Italian car design firm. The same technology is used in wireless terminal equipment user interface research in the Netherlands at the Philips research centre HomeLab.
This VTT technology known as gesture inter

Eye diseases and circulation problems can now be observed in full colour thanks to the development of a scanning laser ophthalmoscope (SLO) that operates simultaneously with low-power red, green and blue lasers. Dr Ayyakkannu Manivannan will report the latest test results on the SLO at the Institute of Physics Congress at Heriot-Watt University on Tuesday 25 March. He will demonstrate how the SLO system can reveal early retinal damage in diabetic patients and inflammatory macular disease in the elde

Scrap tyres could provide an inexpensive source of raw materials for the chemical industry, according to Professor Paul Williams of the University of Leeds who will speak on Tuesday 25 March at the Waste Management conference, part of the Institute of Physics Congress at Heriot-Watt University.

Approximately 150 million scrap tyres are generated throughout Europe each year, about a fifth of those in the UK alone. Most of these are simply buried in landfills or accumulate in enormous scrap-ty

ESA’s Integral satellite is detecting gamma-ray bursts at a rate of nearly one per day, establishing itself as a key player in the hunt for these enigmatic explosions.

Launched in October 2002, Integral has just captured four bursts in the last four months right in the middle of its field of view. Such precision observations are providing scientists with a remarkable view of gamma-ray bursts, which occur randomly, fade within seconds, and yet shine with the intensity of millions

A procedure known as lung-volume reduction surgery (LVRS) appears to improve overall health and quality of life for individuals with end-stage emphysema, and these effects last as long as five years in more than half of this population, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The findings appear in the March issue of the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. The procedure was developed at the School of Medicine in 1993 by the study’s