One of the youngest supernova remnants known, a glowing red ball of dust created by the explosion 1,000 years ago of a supermassive star in a nearby galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud, exhibits the same problem as exploding stars in our own galaxy: too little dust.

Recent measurements by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers using infrared cameras aboard NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope show, at most, one-hundredth the amount of dust predicted by current theories

Ältere Menschen können ein Hilfsmittel zum Versenden von Video-E-Mails bei der persönlichen Kommunikation einsetzen. Häufig haben ältere Menschen schlechten Zugang zur sich rasch verändernden digitalen Gesellschaft. Deshalb bestand ein Hauptziel des SAID-Projekts (Social Aid Interactive Developments) in der Entwicklung einer Infrastruktur zur sozialen Sicherung für diese Altersgruppe. Dies bedeutet eine bessere soziale Sicherung der älteren Leute, bessere Dienste und den Zugang zur I

Planetary-Mass Objects Found to be Surrounded by Discs

Two new studies, based on observations made with ESO’s telescopes, show that objects only a few times more massive than Jupiter are born with discs of dust and gas, the raw material for planet making. This suggests that miniature versions of the solar system may circle objects that are some 100 times less massive than our Sun.

These findings are to be presented Monday, 5 June at the American Astronomical Socie

Two new images from the Gemini Observatory released yesterday (Monday June 5th 2006) at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Calgary, Canada, show a pair of beautiful nebulae that were created by two very different types of stars at what may be similar points in their evolutionary timelines.

One is a rare type of very massive spectral-type “O” star surrounded by material it ejected in an explosive event earlier in its life that continues to lose mass in a steady “stell

Finding could offer clues to origins of Milky Way

Spiral galaxies are the glitter of the universe. These systems of stars, dust, gas and plasma are held together by gravity but seem to pinwheel across the darkness of space. They have fascinated nighthawks for hundreds of years and dazzled scientists who use increasingly sophisticated tools to study them.

Now, for the first time, astronomers from the University of Georgia have discovered a startling absence of hot gas

If citizens are to access the wealth of cultural knowledge, tucked away in books, films, photographs and historical artefacts spread across museums, libraries and archives and if cultural organisations are to make the most out of their resources innovative digital solutions such as those currently being built are needed.

The BRICKS project is creating the building blocks for integrated cultural knowledge services and laying the technological foundations for applications that will

Simulations forecast favorable conditions for verifying Einstein predictions

A wispy collection of atoms and molecules fuels the vast cosmic maelstroms produced by colliding galaxies and merging supermassive black holes, according to some of the most advanced supercomputer simulations ever conducted on this topic.

“We found that gas is essential in driving the co-evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes,” said Stelios Kazantzidis, a Fellow in the University o

Hayabusa mission offers an intimate portrait of asteroid Itokawa
This news release is also available in Japanese.

True to its name, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa, which means “falcon” in Japanese, hovered over the near-Earth asteroid Itokawa last fall, taking up-close measurements and photographs. Then it swooped down for a brief landing and the first-ever sample attempt on an asteroid.

The first peer-reviewed set of scientific results from this mission appears in

The promise of watching the football World Cup with 21st century technology hints at a world where all media are tied together in a complete package that can excite, inform and entertain modern audiences using interactive technologies. We’re not there yet. But we’re getting there with the help of cutting-edge research.

Thanks to an ambitious and highly focused research project, all the existing media channels, internet, TV, phone, could be linked together to offer a wide va

This image, taken by the advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE) on board ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft, shows the central peaks of crater Zucchius.

AMIE obtained this image on 14 January 2006 from a distance of about 753 kilometres from the surface, with a ground resolution of 68 metres per pixel.

The imaged area is centred at a latitude of 61.3º South and longitude 50.8º West. Zucchius is a prominent lunar impact crater located near the southwest limb. It has 66 kilome

In a scrambled Rubik’s cube, colorful squares clash without order. As pieces click into place in the hands of a skilled puzzle solver, the individual characters of squares dissolve as solid faces of uniform color emerge.

In the same way, barium copper silicate-also known as ’’Han Purple,’’ a vivid pigment used in ancient China-transforms from a nonmagnetic, disordered insulator into a magnetic, ordered condensate under conditions of extreme cold and hi

Possible presence of companion star

Nearly 30 years after launch, the two Voyager spacecraft are still operational and returning useful data. In their early years they produced some of the first close up images of the large outer planets. Now as the two vehicles, flying in slightly different directions, near the edge of the solar system, they are providing clues on the shape of heliosphere, and quite possibly, the direction of the solar system through local space.

The

Enceladus, a small icy moon of Saturn, may have dramatically reoriented relative to its axis of rotation, rolling over to put an area of low density at the moon’s south pole. According to a new study, this reorientation process could explain the polar location of a region where NASA’s Cassini spacecraft recently observed icy jets and plumes indicating active geysers of water vapor spewing from the moon’s surface.

“When we saw the Cassini results, we were surprised t

Study suggests retargeting efforts to slow or stop neural cell loss in the neurodegenerative disorder

Researchers at UC Irvine have shown that different forms of amyloid beta lead to neural damage in different ways, leading to an increasingly complex view of amyloid toxicity in the Alzheimer brain. The finding could modify the way therapeutic approaches for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease are designed.

The researchers studied the effects of different forms of the

The invention regards the provision of novel cytostatic compounds with favourable and vali-dated characteristics for use as chemotherapy drugs in the treatment…

The invention regards the use of viral or adenoviral vectors for selective tumour thera-peutic methods of liver cell carcinoma in the form of an immunogene…