The second phase of CERN openlab, a partnership between CERN and leading IT companies, was officially launched at a ceremony at CERN today. The industrial partners in this second phase are HP , Intel and Oracle . The second phase of CERN openlab builds on experience from the last three years, where the partnership produced many excellent technical results in the field of cluster and Grid computing. Activities for the start-up of the second phase of CERN openlab are based around a Platform Competenc

In a recent issue of Science Magazine, the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray ImagingCherenkov (MAGIC) Telescope has reported the discovery of variable very high energy (VHE) gamma-ray emission from a microquasar. Microquasars are binary star systems, composed of a massive ordinary star and a compact object, which can be either a neutron star or a black hole (see Fig. 1). The stars orbit around one another and, when they are close enough, there is a transfer of matter from the massive one toward the comp

The continuing disintegration of Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 has allowed ESA scientists to see into the interior of the comet. Using a revolutionary camera attached to the ESA Optical Ground Station on Tenerife, they have followed the detailed twists and turns of various comet fragments.

The superconducting camera, SCAM, is an ultra fast photon counting camera, developed by ESA. It is cooled to just 300 thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. This enables its sensitiv

If computers could create a society, what kind of world would they make? Thanks to the work of an ambitious project that adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘computer society’, in which millions of software agents will potentially evolve their own culture, we could be about to find out.

With funding from the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative of the IST programme, five European research institutes are collaborating on the NEW TIES project

HARPS Instrument Finds Unusual Planetary System

Using the ultra-precise HARPS spectrograph on ESO’s 3.6-m telescope at La Silla (Chile), a team of European astronomers have discovered that a nearby star is host to three Neptune-mass planets. The innermost planet is most probably rocky, while the outermost is the first known Neptune-mass planet to reside in the habitable zone. This unique system is likely further enriched by an asteroid belt.

“For the first time, we have dis

Nanotechnology has been touted as the next technology revolution, transforming everything from communications to medicine, water decontamination to homeland security. But scientific progress has been accompanied by fears over unknown consequences of nanotechnology, with one pressure group even calling for a moratorium on all research until more is known. More specific concerns have been voiced by various parties – including the UK Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering – about exposure t

One of the attractions at the ILA2006 Space Pavilion is the full-scale ExoMars rover mock-up based on an artist’s impression of Europe’s next mission to Mars and the first robotic mission with the European Space Exploration Programme Aurora.

The large rover and its deployment on the surface of Mars are probably the most challenging elements of the ExoMars mission, currently slated for launch in 2011, which will search for traces of life on and underneath the surface of Mars. T

Experimental results could point the way to fabricating room temperature superconductors and solving a major mystery in physics

A French-German team of experimental scientists, led by Philippe Bourges of the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, France, reports that it has verified the central prediction of a theory on high-temperature superconductivity developed by Chandra Varma, distinguished professor of physics at UC Riverside. The verification ultimately could assist in the f

Mobile Carriers, Operators, Device Companies Present New Standards-based Model for Content Authoring

Today, the World Wide Web Consortium announces the publication of the Device Independence Authoring Language (DIAL), which facilitates authoring for an ever-expanding range of mobile devices. The W3C Device Independence Working Group invites review and discussion with the community of this First Public Working Draft.

“The DIAL suite makes the most of existing, established

Dundee today moved a step closer to becoming Scotland’s city of wireless innovation, with the announcement of a partnership between the University of Abertay Dundee and LastMile Communications, the British company pioneering a wireless delivery platform using WiFi.

Under the agreement, the Abertay campus will become a test bed for LastMile’s state-of-the-art node-based wireless information system. The technology offers end user-focused content to mobile devices on demand, and tailo

Carbon fullerenes now have metallic cousins, ‘hollow golden cages’

Scientists have uncovered a class of gold atom clusters that are the first known metallic hollow equivalents of the famous hollow carbon fullerenes known as buckyballs.
The evidence for what their discoverers call “hollow golden cages” appeared today in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The fullerene is made up of a sphere of 60 carbon (C) atoms; gol

According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the Big Bang represents The Beginning, the grand event at which not only matter but space-time itself was born. While classical theories offer no clues about existence before that moment, a research team at Penn State has used quantum gravitational calculations to find threads that lead to an earlier time. “General relativity can be used to describe the universe back to a point at which matter becomes so dense that its equations don’t hold u

“Lighthouses in the Sky” Yield Biggest-Ever 3-D Map of the Cosmos

A team of astronomers led by Nikhil Padmanabhan and David Schlegel has published the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever constructed, a wedge-shaped slice of the cosmos that spans a tenth of the northern sky, encompasses 600,000 uniquely luminous red galaxies, and extends 5.6 billion light-years deep into space, equivalent to 40 percent of the way back in time to the Big Bang.

Schlegel i

A man gets lost when hiking. He is unable to tell the rescue service his exact position even though his mobile is working. Meanwhile, a pedigree dog, the apple of the owner’s eye, runs off. What to do these people do?

Mobile phone positioning helps locate lost people quickly and reliably. In the future, the volume of positioning services is expected to grow and their quality improve when the US GPS service is complemented by the European Galileo satellite positioning system.

An international team of astronomers released today (15 May) new results on the Cosmos, based on the largest map of the heavens ever produced.

This massive atlas emphatically confirmed recent findings that the Universe is full of ’dark energy’, a mysterious substance that makes up three-quarters of our Universe, together with ’dark matter’ which accounts for most of the remaining quarter. Understanding this composition is now one of the most important problem

From snowflakes to the leaves on a tree, objects in nature are made of irregular molecules called fractals. Scientists now have created and captured an image of the largest man-made fractal molecule at the nanoscale.

The molecule, developed by researchers at the University of Akron, Ohio University and Clemson University, eventually could lead to new types of photoelectric cells, molecular batteries and energy storage, according to the scientists, whose study was published onl