Organic light emitting diodes (OLED) are the technology used in making light emitting fabrics used in cell phones and televisions. The fabrication of flexible OLEDs has up to now been held back by the fragility of the brittle indium tin oxide layer that serves as the transparent electrode. But researchers at the Regroupement Québecois sur les Matériaux de Pointe (RQMP) have found a solution which they published in the May online issue of Applied Physics Letters.

“Organic light emitting

In the past few years, scientists have found ways to make light go both faster and slower than its usual speed limit, but now researchers at the University of Rochester have published a paper today in Science on how they’ve gone one step further: pushing light into reverse. As if to defy common sense, the backward-moving pulse of light travels faster than light.

Confused? You’re not alone.

“I’ve had some of the world’s experts scratching their heads over thi

During a ceremony held in Toulouse on 11 May 2006, ESA officially awarded EADS Astrium the contract to develop and build the Gaia satellite. The goal of this space mission, currently planned for launch in 2011, is to make the largest, most precise map of our own Galaxy to date.

The contract, worth 317 million Euros, has been jointly signed by ESA’s Director of Science, Professor David Southwood, and Antoine Bouvier, Chief Executive Officer for EADS Astrium. The Toulouse branch w

ESO’s Very Large Telescope, equipped with the multi-mode FORS instrument, took an image of NGC 3190, a galaxy so distorted that astronomers gave it two names. And as if to prove them right, in 2002 it fired off, almost simultaneously, two stellar explosions, a very rare event.

This beautiful edge-on spiral galaxy with tightly wound arms and a warped shape that makes it resemble a gigantic potato crisp lies in the constellation Leo (‘the Lion’) [1] and is approximately 70 million

Developing ways to connect homes and businesses to the internet without using wires is the aim of a new project announced today. The research at Imperial College London could help users across Europe to access the internet, by removing the need to lay out connecting phone lines or other cables between the public internet and a user’s building or network.

At present, although it is possible to make use of wireless technology within homes and office buildings, the connection from th

Deep observations of two X-ray bright clusters of galaxies with ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite allowed a group of international astronomers to measure their chemical composition with an unprecedented accuracy. Knowing the chemical composition of galaxy clusters is of crucial importance to understanding the origin of chemical elements in the Universe.

Clusters, or conglomerates, of galaxies are the largest objects in the Universe. By looking at them through optical telescopes it is possible t

A gamma-ray burst (GRB) occurring in our own galaxy could decimate life on Earth, destroying the ozone layer, triggering climate change and drastically altering life’s evolution. However, the good news is that results published online today in the journal Nature show that the likelihood of a natural disaster due to a GRB is much lower than previously thought.

Long-duration GRBs are powerful flashes of high-energy radiation that arise from some of the biggest explosions of extremely

Neptune’s large moon Triton may have abandoned an earlier partner to arrive in its unusual orbit around Neptune. Triton is unique among all the large moons in the solar system because it orbits Neptune in a direction opposite to the planet’s rotation (a “retrograde” orbit). It is unlikely to have formed in this configuration and was probably captured from elsewhere.

In the May 11 issue of the journal Nature, planetary scientists Craig Agnor of the University of California,

Less than one month after insertion into orbit, and after sixteen loops around the planet Venus, ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft has reached its final operational orbit on 7 May 2006.

Already at 21:49 CEST on 6th May, when the spacecraft communicated to Earth through ESA’s ground station at New Norcia (Australia), the Venus Express ground control team at ESA’s European Spacecraft Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt (Germany) received advanced confirmation that final orbit was

The next time someone whispers in your ear, think “cochlea.”

The cochlea is the marvelous structure in the inner ear that is shaped like a snail shell and transforms sounds into the nerve impulses that your brain can process and interpret. You may remember learning about it in elementary school anatomy.

This critical hearing organ consists of a fluid-filled tube about a cubic centimeter (three hundredths of an ounce) in volume. For decades, hearing experts thought that

Genes are the underlying cause of a large number of disorders. But identifying and studying these genes more closely is a major challenge for biotechnologists worldwide. Researchers from ESAT-SCD (Engineering Sciences) and the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) connected to the Catholic University of Leuven have now developed ENDEAVOUR: a computer program that compiles and processes data from a variety of databases and identifies the genes that play a key role in the origin o

These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show the tectonic ’grabens’ in Tempe Terra, a geologically complex region that is part of the old Martian highlands.

The HRSC obtained these images during orbit 1180 on 19 December 2004 with a ground resolution of approximately 16.5 metres per pixel. The data were acquired in the region of Northern Olympus Mons, at approximately 48.5° North and 288.4° East.

A pet dog sits on command, but nobody expects an insect to follow human instructions. So it may come as a surprise to learn that researchers recently succeeded in controlling cockroaches with tiny mobile robots. The results hint at a future where we can interact and communicate with many different kinds of animal.

Little larger than a thumbnail, the cubic insect-like robots or ‘insbots’ are technological marvels. Developed under the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies (

New method can identify what genes do, test drugs’ safety

Utah and Texas researchers combined miniature medical CT scans with high-tech computer methods to produce detailed three-dimensional images of mouse embryos – an efficient new method to test the safety of medicines and learn how mutant genes cause birth defects or cancer.

“Our method provides a fast, high-quality and inexpensive way to visually explore the 3-D internal structure of mouse embryos so scientists

Experts have uncovered a secret Ministry of Defence (MoD) report asserting that UFOs exist, explaining the phenomena and assessing the security threat they may pose to the UK. The report was unearthed by academics at Sheffield Hallam University using the Freedom of Information Act.

The four year study, codenamed Project Condign, says that unexplained UFO sightings are caused by ’plasmas’, which create false memories of alien experiences and burn the skin. The report says these

With ESO’s VLT, astronomers find molecular hydrogen at edge of Universe

Using a quasar located 12.3 billion light-years away as a beacon, a team of astronomers detected the presence of molecular hydrogen in the farthest system ever, an otherwise invisible galaxy that we observe when the Universe was less than 1.5 billion years old, that is, about 10% of its present age. The astronomers find that there is about one hydrogen molecule for 250 hydrogen atoms. A similar set of